It’s quite clear what the purpose of Ben Stein’s Expelled movie is — notice what they’ve been doing with it. They’ve been shopping it around at screenings that are filtered to keep knowledgeable people out; they’re planning to pay students to attend; they’re relying on the Big Lie to promote the movie; and of course, they had to misrepresent themselves to get interviews.

But now they’ve really done it: they are going to give Florida legislators, sponsored by a representative who has filed one of those bogus “academic freedom” bills, a special, private screening of the movie. None of the critics know what is in it, so this amounts to presenting a slick, prepackaged collection of lies to legislators while denying anyone any opportunity to rebut. Ben Stein should be ashamed of himself; can you think of any similar plan to generate public and political action against a group by spreading blatant lies that they were conspiring to commit horrible acts? Protocols of the Elders of Zion, anyone?

If the producers of Expelled are so confident that they can make a strong case of conspiracy against scientists, then before they start showing this to uninformed politicians, they ought to screen it before scientists and historians and philosophers of science, who will be able to judge it on its merits. Let’s see them show it to a group picked by NCSE, for instance, who would then be able to fairly argue against it. As it is, the cowards of Expelled are doing their best to keep critics in the dark about its content.

There’s another revelation in this sordid Florida affair. Who else is sponsoring this screening of the movie? An organization called the Challenger Learning Center of Tallahassee. The place looks wonderful on the web: it’s a hands-on science museum with children’s programs, an IMAX theater, a planetarium, etc., with a focus on engineering and aerospace, and it’s an arm of Florida State University and Florida A&M. Here’s their mission statement:

The Center is the K-12 outreach facility of the Florida A&M University – Florida State University College of Engineering and uses aerospace as a theme to foster long-term interest in math, science and technology; create positive learning experiences; and motivate students to pursue careers in these fields.

Sounds nice…but Mike O’Risal dug deeper. After all, why is an overtly pro-physical science organization like this assisting in an attack on the life sciences? It seems that none of the staff at the Challenger Center actually has any kind of degree in the sciences — the head of the planetarium has a P.E. degree, which brings to mind that common public school tactic of letting the football coach teach the science classes. These are people who are grossly unqualified to assess the merits of the movie, and at the very least they have allowed venal interests to override their mission of providing quality science education to the public.

Mike has a collection of email addresses associated with this debacle, including people at FSU, who are going to get tarred with this mess. Write to them! Let them know that an institution that is supposed to represent the university and is supposed to encourage more citizens to get a science education is being misused to do the opposite.

I’ve sent off email. One compromise I’ve suggested: if the screening goes ahead, they should insist that a group of university faculty be allowed to attend, and that those faculty should then be given equal time in a hearing with those same legislators to discuss any misrepresentations in the movie. They have to understand that Expelled is being used as a dishonest propaganda tool to foist a mislabeled “academic freedom” bill on them, one which will attempt to dictate the allowed views of university faculty on politics and evolution.

Greg Laden has some inspiration for life science teachers. It’s good advice, too, on how to charge forward and do a great job in your chosen career.

This is pretty bad. It’s a school called the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, and the concept is great — bring smart high school students in to college early, where they can get more advanced instruction from professors. It sounds like the faculty are good and competent, near as I can tell, but I got a message from one of the students attending the school: the administration seems determined to destroy the science and math aspects of the program, and as far as I’m concerned, they’ve already damaged its reputation.

They bring in outside seminar speakers — good idea — but the impression I’m getting is that their speakers are there to contradict the science. They’re bringing in people from Probe Ministries, of all places; it’s a gang of god-walloping creationists who rail against homosexuality and abortion. That is not a good sign.

Then, this year, they give out t-shirts with a cute logo to admitted students. This is another fine idea, except that the implementation is truly cringeworthy. Students get to choose one of two t-shirts, and, well, their choices are both revealingly ignorant.

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I despise him.

He’s an ignorant buffoon and a professional liar. I hate what he does in his attempts to corrupt public education, but as a human being, I find him simply contemptible.

I just had to set the record straight. He seems to be taking pride in who hates him, but there really is nothing there that elevates him to the level of hate-worthy; he’s just a sloppy ideologue who faked his way through a degree program.

In the creation wars, we never really win one — we just shuffle the battlegrounds around. That’s the case in Florida, where the committee to write the state science standards recently approved the inclusion of evolution in their standards. We cheered. This is what’s supposed to happen when you get a team of competent people to put together the standards — you get results that reflect, to some approximation, the current understanding of science in our public schools.

But of course that could not stand. A group of conservative politicians are poised to meddle — they asked experts to give them the best answer, they didn’t like the answer, so now they’re going to pull some political strings to work out a way to ignore the answer.

After the vote, John Stemberger, the head of the Florida Family Policy Council, said social conservatives would push for an “academic freedom” measure when the Legislature convenes this month. Such a proposal would protect teachers who teach alternatives to evolution. House Speaker Marco Rubio — who wanted evolution taught as a theory — told the Florida Baptist Witness such a plan might gain traction in the house.

And Friday, State Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Brandon, filed just such a bill that would create an “Academic Freedom Act” and protect the right of teachers to “objectively present scientific information relevant to the full range of scientific views regarding chemical and biological evolution.”

The bill is much like the sample one posted on the website of the Discovery Institute, which advocates for Intelligent Design. And it is controversial because many scientists (and their backers) say there are no other “scientific views” about evolution, only religion-in-disguise beliefs.

Those labels. You just know that the “Florida Family Policy Council” is a far right wing group with a mission to promote ignorance — the word “Family” gives them away every time (and it is such a nice word, ruined by people who translate it to mean “social shackles”). “Academic freedom” is also being misused here. The teachers have a job to do, to present a certain minimal body of scientific information to their students; they have freedom to think and act and speak, but they also have obligations, and those obligations include not misleading their charges. Academic freedom does not equate to irresponsibility. One would think conservatives would be pushing bills to enforce academic competence and academic responsibility, not this dishonest nonsense of calling attempts to ramrod intellectual gobbledygook into our schools “freedom”.

And the wording of the bill doesn’t even make sense. The standards were commissioned to outline the range of scientific views and scientific information, so that’s already there — this bill wouldn’t be an escape clause, it would further reinforce the requirement that the material on the standards be taught. Creationism and it’s inbred cousin with airs, Intelligent Design, are not scientific views.

Oh, and do note the similarity between this act and the Discovery Institute’s recommendation, and further, look here:

On the day the state board voted, Stemberger called adding the phrase “scientific theory” a “meaningless and impotent change.”

A post on the Discovery Institute’s “evolution news and views” blog that same day used the same phrase to criticize the vote, saying it did nothing “to actually inform students about the scientific problems with evolution.”

The Discovery Institute’s grubby little paw prints are all over this one. That’s the mission of the DI: undermining scientific expertise with propaganda and political machinations.

In the races for the two open seats on the Texas board of education, the merely conservative wackjobs beat the freakishily flaming conservative wackjobs, staving off a creationist working majority. This is progress. I probably shouldn’t call it a victory, though — it just means the fight for rationality will be slightly less difficult.

My animus for Jonathan Wells knows no bounds — he’s an appalling fraud who doesn’t understand the science he criticizes. Case in point: he recently smugly asserted that a recent study to characterize the molecular changes involved in the evolution of one kind of antibiotic resistance involved no necessary consideration of evolution at all. Well, yeah…like the modern concept of “door” requires no knowledge of carpentry or locksmithing for Wells to manage to open one, so Wells could blithely suggest we replace all the carpenters with Unification Church theologians and there would be no change in his daily interactions with doors. So sorry, Mr Wells: that you’re too stupid to see how the concept of evolution might guide research into the evolution of antibiotic resistance doesn’t mean the researchers are.

It helps me maintain my equanimity that Ian Musgrave has already ripped Wells a new one over his amazing demonstration of inanity.

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Here’s a wonderful addition: the principal investigator of the paper in question has commented.

As principal investigator of the study under discussion, I’d like to strongly support the view advocated this page. In fact, I was completely amazed to see how our work has been misrepresented by M. Wells.

Actually, we did indeed use darwinian evolution within this work (something unusual in structural biology). In order to obtain an enzyme with increased stability (a critical point for structural studies), we used selective pressure to obtain mutants of the enzyme. We selected for bateria with increased aminiglycoside resistance, by plating them on antibiotic containing medium. It turned out that some bacteria evolved such stabler enzymes variants which made this whole study possible !

Finally, I would not consider myself as a chemist, I got my PhD in molecular microbiology. It seems that M. Wells finds it easier to portray us as non-biologists, and hence implicitly as non-evolutionists

Ow. That has to sting, if anything could ever penetrate the oblivious stupor that fogs Wells’ brain.

There are limits to even my capacity to cope with The Stupid, and this video reaches them. It’s interesting in a historical sense, in that it seems to be an old recording — familiar faces look so young, and the whole thing has the clumsy style of a bad 1970s documentary—but it’s a whole half-hour of badly concatenated mish-mashes of creationist arguments. Who knew that Charles Darwin was responsible for the Big Bang theory, or that evolution was the foundation of astronomy? (Don’t tell Phil, his inferiority complex is bad enough.).

It’s rather weird to see old faces that most of you have forgotten or never knew, like Ian Taylor and Luther Sunderland and John Morris, all sitting there mired in the most awful ignorance and propagating lies about Lucy’s knee joint and Neandertal just being an arthritic old man and so forth, and realize that they or their successors are still spouting the same old lies today. Ignorance builds more ignorance, unfortunately.

The incoherence of the whole production is amazing, too. It starts of with this weird set of New Age rationalizations before wallowing in the reactionary pronouncements of fundamentalist kooks like D. James Kennedy … and then at the end it includes a five minute music video with Kurt Cobain of Nirvana.

There’s a brief discussion of the video here, brought up by a guy who thought it made good points and made him question his acceptance of evolution. Among the issues he had was that the movie claims that “cro-magnon and other pre-humans were determined to be transitional species from as little as a tooth or a rib,” which is actually an excellent example of an outright lie from the movie. Nope, not true. Cro-magnon refers to a variety of Homo sapiens, so calling them transitional is stretching the word. Transitional forms are far better established than as extrapolations from a single tooth — but the creationists sure milk their mangled story of Nebraska Man for all it is worth, and use it to falsely cast doubt on other explanations.

I’m not even going to try to address the details of that mess. It’s the Gish Gallop on video; if anyone has any specific questions, OK, but the shorter summary is that all the creationists in it are lying out of ignorance and all the scientists are taken out of context.

By the way, if the stupidity in that video doesn’t make your cortex disintegrate into slime, try this one — it’s the intellectual equivalent of huffing a hydrofluoric acid/osmium tetroxide cocktail.