This is curious: apparently, the DVD of Expelled now comes with a little book of quotes which are supposed to support its thesis. Only they don’t. Somebody ought to scan these in so we could all share the hilarity.

Not me, alas. Not only didn’t I get to see the movie, the makers haven’t even had the courtesy to send me a complimentary copy. Maybe they’re anticipating that I’ll be able to get one in my goody bag at the Oscars.

Feel my pain. Listen to this ignorant young woman lie and lie and lie about evolution: Charles Darwin was a theologian who just guessed and didn’t do any science, there are no transitional fossils, the cell is very complex and therefore could not evolve, yadda yadda yadda. She has been grossly miseducated, and she’s parroting creationist dishonesty with extreme smugness.

There. Now I’ve ruined your morning.

This gets better and better. President Daniel Fogel of the University of Vermont has given several interviews on the Ben Stein affair, and clarified quite a few matters. He explicitly says he did not ask Stein to withdraw from the commencement ceremonies, but when you read these comments, it’s clear that that there was a lack of support from the UVM administration and that he was confronted with some serious objections, and Stein withdrew knowing that if he persisted it was going to get ugly. Here’s one interview with Fogel:

I think the fundamental concern of the people that wrote to me was that, while they are quite open to having a speaker with Mr. Steins views on campus, they felt that he should not be honored at the commencement ceremony when so many of his views seemed to be affronts to the basic premises of the academy, about scientific and scholarly inquiry and collaterally, people were deeply disturbed by his views on the roll of science in the Holocaust.

…

But I have to say, the issue here, and this is important, is not freedom of expression. Ben Stein has come to our campus to speak, and some of the faculty that are colleagues here wrote to me to say that they have no objection to him coming here to speak.

It was the legitimate concern among members of the community regarding the implications of granting an honorary degree to someone whose ideas fundamentally ignore the basics of scientific inquiry.

That’s a smart and important point: this was not about freedom of expression, since Stein clearly has a surfeit of venues in which he opens his tendentious mouth, but a question of a scientific research institution giving a science denier and propagandist a platform to validate his anti-university views. He reiterates this position in another interview:

“This is not, to my mind, an issue about academic freedom or the openness of the campus to all points of view. Ben Stein spoke here last spring to great acclaim,” UVM President Dan Fogel said. “It’s an issue about the appropriateness of awarding an honorary degree to someone whose views in many ways ignore or affront the fundamental values of scientific inquiry and I greatly regret that I was not attuned to those issues.”

Fogel just shot way up in my esteem…and ouch, that has got to sting Stein’s well-padded keester.

Good news, all! Ben Stein has withdrawn from the UVM commencement. I think we can thank Richard Dawkins’ clout for helping with this one.

Here’s the letter from President Fogel. They asked Stein to speak as an authority on economics?

Dear Professor Dawkins,

As one who has been deeply instructed by your work and who applauds your scientific leadership, I was honored to find a personal email from you in my inbox, but very sorry indeed that the occasion was the decision to invite Ben Stein to be a Commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient. Although we have recently learned that Mr. Stein will be unable to receive the honorary degree here or to serve as Commencement speaker, please know that it was our expectation that his remarks would address the global economic crisis and that he would speak from his widely acknowledged area of expertise on the economy. We regret that he will be unable to do so.

With thanks again for writing, with admiration, and with every good wish–Daniel Mark Fogel, President, The University of Vermont

And Dawkins’ reply:

Dear President Fogel

Thank you very much indeed for your extremely gracious letter.

I cannot disguise my gladness that Ben Stein will not be going to Vermont. Thank you very much for letting me know. I wish you, and your great university all good fortune. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.

With my very best wishes, and thanks again for your letter

Yours sincerely

Richard Dawkins

Another victory against creationists!

If you’ve been trying to complain to UVM about their decision to bring in Ben Stein as a commencement speaker, some of your arguments may have fallen on deaf ears. Richard Dawkins reports:

Someone with a real axe to grind had to have been on the committee
that picked this old fraud”. Layla Nasreddin, posting on
RichardDawkins.net, has found the probable answer to the identity of
that ‘someone’. Ben Stein is an old pal of the President of the
University of Vermont, Daniel Fogel. One is bound to wonder, therefore,
whether the letters that many of us have been writing to Fogel will cut
any ice. If you have written to Fogel, therefore, it would be a good
idea to Forward your letter now to the entire Board of Trustees of the
University of Vermont, and the two administrators in charge of the
Trustees. Here’s a handy list of three addresses:

trustees@uvm.edu, Corinne.Thompson@uvm.edu, estjohn@uvm.edu

I think it is highly unlikely that you’ll get UVM to rescind an invitation, but you can make them squirm a little bit so that they’ll think twice before inviting old cronies who happen to be ignorant jerks to this kind of thing.

Guess who UVM is bringing in to deliver their commencement address?

Ben Stein.

I am very sorry, seniors at that otherwise fine university. You’re going to have a hack wingnut with a history of incompetence at economics, politics, and science standing up and giving you advice. I don’t know what the administrators at your school were thinking; this is a man with no qualifications other than a droning monotone and a stint on a game show. It’s an expression of profound disrespect to the students.

And I’m really sorry for the biology department at UVM — it’s a real slap in the face for the university to drag in this disgrace who has been a figurehead for a movement that is trying to replace science with superstition; a demagogue who accuses modern biology of being a destructive force responsible for the Holocaust.

I am really baffled by this decision. It’s not just that they must have been desperate for a speaker, but that someone with a real axe to grind had to have been on the committee that picked this old fraud.

The Humanist Community of Central Ohio sent out a suggestion to various towns to declare 12 February Darwin Day, in honor of the man and his science. Nice gesture, I think; it’s a small token of appreciation that doesn’t cost anyone anything. The city of Whitehall went for it, but then something odd happened — people complained.

So they watered it down to declaring February a month of science, and added Galileo’s name to the list of honorees. OK, that’s a bit craven, and their intent is transparent, but it’s a reasonable compromise. Go for it!

Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for the creationists. Now they want to remove Darwin’s name! What a silly thing to do.

And now “expert” opinion has weighed in: Ray Comfort, professional dipsydoodling dingleberry.

“They’re trying to deitize Darwin,” he said. “This is the atheist Christmas.

“It’s a God-given right to be an atheist, but they need to lighten up and let us talk about creationism, too.”

Ray must have a one talent, the ability to open his mouth and say things so stupid that one can scarcely believe he said them.

Why would atheists want to ‘deitize’ anyone? It’s just not something atheists think about.

This is to be a celebration of an important individual in science: I know Ray believes science to be unchristian, though.

Atheism is a god-given talent? Now my head is spinning.

I have not noticed any impairment of the creationists’ ability to talk, and honoring Charles Darwin’s birthday does not somehow silence them. They have complete liberty to preach their nonsense even on secular holidays. Now, will they lighten up and allow us to talk about science in their churches? I don’t think so.

Pity Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, which published an issue in which the cover was the large, bold declaration that “DARWIN WAS WRONG“. He has been target by a number of big name scientists who have been hammering him in a small typhoon of outraged private correspondence (I’ve been part of it) that his cover was a misdirected and entirely inappropriate piece of sensationalism. We’re already seeing that cover abused by creationists who see it as a tool — a reputable popular science journal has declared Darwin to be wrong, therefore, once again, science must be in retreat! — and I expect we’re going to have to face the headache of many school board meetings where that cover is flaunted as evidence that students ought to be taught about how weak Darwinism is.

I think it was a mistake on New Scientist‘s part. They could have published a cover that announced “DARWIN IS DEAD!”, which would be just as true and just as misleading, and would also bring nothing but joy to the ignorant. I don’t think it would really help sell magazines, even; I suspect that most creationists are going to only use that cover to flog their cause, and never read any deeper than the widely available cover image.

And you should read the inside. It sends a different message. Roger Highfield encouraged me to distribute the editorial that accompanied the article.

“THERE is nothing new to be discovered in physics.” So said Lord Kelvin in 1900, shortly before the intellectual firestorm ignited by relativity and quantum mechanics proved him comprehensively wrong.

If anyone now thinks that biology is sorted, they are going to be proved wrong too. The more that genomics, bioinformatics and many other newer disciplines reveal about life, the more obvious it becomes that our present understanding is not up to the job. We now gaze on a biological world of mind-boggling complexity that exposes the shortcomings of familiar, tidy concepts such as species, gene and organism.

A particularly pertinent example is provided in this week’s cover story – the uprooting of the tree of life which Darwin used as an organising principle and which has been a central tenet of biology ever since (see “Axing Darwin’s tree”). Most biologists now accept that the tree is not a fact of nature – it is something we impose on nature in an attempt to make the task of understanding it more tractable. Other important bits of biology – notably development, ageing and sex – are similarly turning out to be much more involved than we ever imagined. As evolutionary biologist Michael Rose at the University of California, Irvine, told us: “The complexity of biology is comparable to quantum mechanics.”

Biology has been here before. Although Darwin himself, with the help of Alfred Russel Wallace, triggered a revolution in the mid-1800s, there was a second revolution in the 1930s and 1940s when Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Sewall Wright and others incorporated Mendelian genetics and placed evolution on a firm mathematical foundation.

As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, we await a third revolution that will see biology changed and strengthened. None of this should give succour to creationists, whose blinkered universe is doubtless already buzzing with the news that “New Scientist has announced Darwin was wrong”. Expect to find excerpts ripped out of context and presented as evidence that biologists are deserting the theory of evolution en masse. They are not.

Nor will the new work do anything to diminish the standing of Darwin himself. When it came to gravitation and the laws of motion, Isaac Newton didn’t see the whole picture either, but he remains one of science’s giants. In the same way, Darwin’s ideas will prove influential for decades to come.

So here’s to the impending revolution in biology. Come Darwin’s 300th anniversary there will be even more to celebrate.

The cover is going to cause us some headaches, but just be prepared with that bit of text — I think even just the paragraph I’ve highlighted will be sufficient — and when a creationists sticks those 3 words in your face, just ask them to stretch their reading abilities a little bit further and read those 72 words.

It’s going to be hard, though. Most creationists can’t read that many big words strung together all at once without twisting them, either.

If you’ve been following the creationist strategy lately, you know that one of their efforts is to push a new and awful textbook, Explore Evolution, in conjunction with the various political bills to endorse a “strengths & weaknesses” theme in the public school science curriculum. Explore Evolution is the type specimen for that teaching technique; it contains nothing but imaginary problems in biology presented in a dueling opinions format, with creationists writing sloppy distortions of biological ideas coupled with creationists writing laudatory explanations based on Intelligent Design creationism. The book has been reviewed (that is, panned) before, but now we have another review published in Evolution & Development. The reviewer is not impressed.

Even as the Discovery Institute’s Stephen C. Meyer was trying to convince the Texas state board of education of his scientific bona fides, the antievolution textbook he coauthored was receiving a scathing review in a top scientific journal. Reviewing Explore Evolution for Evolution & Development (2009; 11 [1]: 124-125), Brian D. Metscher of the University of Vienna described it as “159 glossy pages of color-illustrated creationist nostalgia,” adding, “All the old favorites are here — fossils saying no, all the Icons, flightless Ubx flies, irreducible flagella, even that irritating homology-is-circular thing. There are no new arguments, no improved understanding of evolution, just a remastered scrapbook of the old ideas patched together in a high-gloss package pre-adapted to survive the post-Dover legal environment. The whole effort would be merely pathetic if it did not actually represent a serious and insidious threat to education.”

Of course, most schoolboards will completely disregard the informed assessment of experts in the field to rely instead on the petrified dogma of their local preacher.