The Canadian reviews trickle in

You may have heard that Expelled opened in Canada this week…but it’s not off to a soaring start. The first reviews are coming in, and I am encouraged by the opening line of this one: “I found this film so distasteful I hestitate to dignify it with even a thumbnail review.”

Also noteworthy: the reviewer interviewed the awful Ben Stein about it.

I interviewed Ben Stein for a Newsmaker item in this week’s Maclean’s, and he did acknowledge the debt his film owes to Michael Moore. “We were greatly influenced by him,” he said. “He showed you can make a documentary on a political subject and make money.” But Stein couldn’t really elaborate on how Moore’s influence was applied. After all, he reminded me, unlike Moore he was just the host, not the filmmaker. Besides, he’s never seen more than two minutes of a MIchael Moore film. “It makes me sick just to look at him,” he said. “He’s physically revolting. He so angry. I like to look at people who have sweet, nice faces.” Stein–whose face is familiar from his roles as a teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years–immodestly included himself in that sweet, nice camp.

He did, however, concede with a sigh that Expelled is a whole lot less successful than Moore’s films, “so whatever secret he has, we haven’t learned it.”

No kidding.

Wait—Ben Stein, a guy with the face of a mackerel and the emotional range of a dead one, finds Moore physically revolting? He isn’t one of the beautiful people (and neither am I), so judging his work by how he looks…well, Stein should not go there.

Nice admission at the end, though.

(via Canadian Cynic)

There’s more at Straight.com and The Coast. It’s getting panned all over. Again.

Three dopes sitting around a table

Eric Hovind is continuing his father’s tradition of utterly inane arguments against evolution. In this case, it’s a video of Hovind and two of his bland buddies sitting around talking about…cephalopods. Oh, it is painful to witness.

They show excerpts of some perfectly lovely videos of cuttlefish swimming about, exercising their camouflage, and they talk about its specialized defenses and sophisticated behavior. In classic creationist form, they watch all this beauty and throw up their hands in surrender, and exclaim that they don’t see how this could have evolved, and ask, “How does evolution explain that?”

I would turn that question around: “How does creationism explain that?” And I’m sorry, “God did it” is not an explanation. It says nothing about the processes used to create the cuttlefish’s capabilities, and it does nothing to explain limitations — why can’t the cuttlefish fly? Why doesn’t it have three eyes? Why does it use similar genes to our own? You can’t just posit an omnipotent creator who can create anything without also having an explanation for the constraints on his creations.

At one point, they are talking about the mechanisms the animals use to camouflage themselves, and they express dumbfounded ignorance about how they do that (and babble incorrectly about some of the details — they do not see everything in shades of green). Did Eric Hovind’s two researchers ever think to look up the science? Roger Hanlon has been doing some marvelous work on cephalopod behavior and camouflage; I have no idea what Hanlon’s religious beliefs are, and it doesn’t matter, but he clearly sees these as natural phenomena generated by natural processes.

We do have explanations of cephalopod evolution. I don’t expect Hovind and cronies are at all aware of them. In fact, in this interview Hovind reveals a common and significant misconception about how evolution works. He speculates that an evolutionary explanation would be that “…one of them decided while he was sittin’ there getting munched on, hey, I need to evolve a defense mechanism to overcome this…”.

I hear this all the time. The only way they can imagine evolution working is by an act of will, that every adaptation must be a product of an individual organism doing something special and directed towards acquiring that ability. They miss the key insight Darwin had.

No, one of them getting munched on did not decide anything, and the action was done: it was being eaten. It would not reproduce. The properties of that specific individual would have a diminished influence on the next generation. It was the other cephalopods that were not being eaten who would propagate, and it would be their genes that would continue on.

The idea is right there in their very own scenario, and they lack the intelligence to grasp it. They keep talking about features of the animals that help them survive better, and they are blind to the fact that survival is the key. It’s depressing to see such hopeless ignorance in these three, each reinforcing the other, when the answers to the questions they ask are in books anyone can get.

Lenski gives Conservapædia a lesson

Once again, Richard Lenski has replied to the goons and fools at Conservapædia, and boy, does he ever outclass them. For a quick outline of the saga, read this summary at A Candid World; basically, Andy Schlafly has been demanding every bit of data from Richard Lenski’s work on the evolution of E. coli, despite the fact that Schlafly doesn’t have the background to understand it and doesn’t have any plan for what he would do with it if he got it. Lenski has been polite and helpful in his replies; his first response is a model for how to explain difficult science to a bullying ideologue. Now his second response is available, and while he has clearly lost some patience and is unequivocal in denouncing their bad faith efforts to discredit good science, he still gives an awfully good and instructional discussion.

I’ve put the whole thing below the fold, in case you’d rather not click through to that wretched hive of pretentious villainy at Conservapædia.

[Read more…]

Gordy Slack replies

Yesterday, I ripped into Gordy Slack and the NY Times for bad articles on creationism. Now Slack has responded, and in the interest of fairness, I urge you to look at that comment and browse down to several others he has also made.

He’s still wrong, and I still find his article incredibly bad.

Slack’s article is titled “What neo-creationists get right: an evolutionist shares lessons he’s learned from the Intelligent Design camp“. I chewed him out because nothing in his list is anything that creationists got right — it’s a litany of common scientific arguments and complaints — and all he’s doing is falsely pandering to their self-esteem. He says he didn’t try to claim that the creationists came up with these common questions first; OK, he didn’t. He says he wasn’t trying to give creationists credit for being right; OK, I think he’s on shaky ground with that one, but I’ll concede the point to him. Now we’re left with a problem: what the heck was his article about, then? It’s reduced to a shallow attempt at finding coincidental similarities, with no thought put into them.

For instance, his first point of similarity is that creationists say that we haven’t answered the big questions of abiogenesis, and scientists say the same thing. Gosh, we’re in agreement! But no, we’re actually not. Creationists like to point to places where we don’t have all the answers, because they see that as a flaw, as a way to discredit evolution — they like to pretend that they have absolute, perfect knowledge in their holy book, even if all they do is fill the gaps with an unsatisfying and pathetic “god did it.” Scientists are comfortable with uncertainty and change, and they see those gaps as research opportunities — places where information is admittedly deficient, but where new work can be done. What Slack treats as a similarity is actually a fundamental philosophical difference.

And this is precisely where Slack is most unsatisfying. He claims to be trying to understand the creationist mindset, yet all he offers is credulous tripe in which he demonstrates that he hasn’t thought things through. Here, for example:

It surprises me that PZ is so pissed off by my efforts to understand why so many Americans reject evolution. If you ask them, and I have bothered to ask hundreds or thousands over the past two years, many will tell you that more than anything else, it’s the arrogant zealotry of cocksure ideologues that turns them off to evolution. They see people calling their intuitions and worldviews retarded and corrupt, and they march the other way. That’s one reason why we evolutionists have done such an abysmal promotions job even though we’re armed with the most delightful and seductive and potent theory ever. If we can’t sell evolution, we must be doing something wrong. Right? I’m just saying that we might start by resisting the urge to spit bile in the face of potential buyers.

Slack has chewed out most supporters of evolution as doing so without much depth of understanding — they don’t know about genetic drift, for instance. Yet here he is discussing a group who believe the earth is less than ten thousand years old, who are abysmally ignorant of all of evolutionary theory, including drift, who believe with the utmost certainty that Darwin is burning in hell and that all scientists will be following him, and he accuses the scientists of arrogance, on the word of the creationists.

Here’s a clue: Slack got it backwards. It is simply absurd to claim that they are turned off by “the arrogant zealotry of cocksure ideologues”, since that is a more apt description of their own than of scientists. Creationists love arrogance. Their whole schtick is about obedience to the precepts of meddling, pushy busybodies, either the phantasmal kind of their imaginary deity or the sadly real kind of the ranting big-haired zealots who lead their churches. You have to learn fundie-speak to understand what these informants are actually saying.

To them, “arrogant” means “competing authority with an intimidating amount of real-world evidence”.

And of course they resent that. They believe in irrelevant nonsense that requires them to constantly descend deeper and deeper into lunatic rationalizations to maintain that willful suspension of disbelief. And we come along with that “delightful and seductive and potent theory” that they have to close their eyes to, and which merely demands that they reject the temporal authority of their leaders, who threaten them with hellfire and the loss of their children’s love and morality if they accept the evidence. That really is a serious problem, and I know how difficult many people find it to abandon those beliefs, but to call our side “arrogant” while treating their side as humble is not helping. It is reinforcing falsehoods. It is also not going to resolve the problem, because it is a simple fact of the matter that scientists are a competing authority, and they do have an overwhelming amount of evidence that the creationists are wrong, wrong, wrong. Those are not points that we will surrender.

Slack is also unhappy that he has been vigorously criticized and insulted and shredded up one side and disemboweled down the other, all without regard for his genuine appreciation of good science. That’s all true. Comment threads here are not for the temperamentally delicate, that’s for sure, and everyone gets the rhetorical knife all the time (and that includes me: if Slack is appalled that he is being insulted, he ought to spend some time in my shoes. At least no one has threatened to shoot him over this argument yet.) Complaining about that is pointless. It’s like whining that the crucible is hot; of course it is, that’s what they’re for.

As for the complaint that we’re an angry, hostile bunch here: in a country where the enterprise of science and education are seriously threatened by the activist religiosity of ignorant creationists, where politicians defer to religious lunacy, where the craven media has abandoned the concepts of adversarial and investigative journalism, we’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore*. I propose that there is something wrong with you if you aren’t angry.

*That’s a quote. Look it up, it seems rather appropriate here.

What is wrong with journalists?

We’ve got a couple of appalling examples of awful journalism to scowl at today. The first is this credulous piece by Gordy Slack in The Scientist. I’ve been unhappy with Slack before — he sometimes seems to want to let creationist absurdity slide — and I got yelled at by some readers for my uncharitable interpretation of his review of the Creation “Museum”. Well, I think I’ve been vindicated now.

This article tries to give credit to the Intelligent Design creationists for some discoveries or interpretations. It’s wrong from top to bottom. Here’s his list, with my brief rebuttal; Jeffrey Shallit has a more thorough dissection.

  • ID gets credit for saying there are big, open questions in science. Scientists say this. It is not news. Go ahead, ask us, and we’ll give you long lists of exciting research questions. They won’t be invented or falsified controversies, as the DI is fond of puking up.

  • The cell is more complex than Darwin imagined. Scientists say this. The complexity of the cell was not figured out by creationists of any kind — it is the outcome of hard work by cell biologists and molecular biologists. It’s also not true that Darwin had a poor understanding of cellular complexity: as I’ve said before, the mid- to late 19th century was the period when the light microscope reached its optical limits, and there was all kinds of amazing work being done into developing new staining techniques and identifying new organelles. When do you think Camillo Golgi lived?

  • IDists are correct to say love is not an illusion. Scientists say this. Frankly, this is the most dumb-ass argument in a whole slop-bucket of dumbassery; that cherished, complex phenomena like love have a material basis does not in any way imply that they are not “real”.

  • IDists are right to say that some proponents of evolution are blind followers. Scientists say this. We don’t sit around thinking, “How can I get people to obey me?” The concern about improving public understanding of science is about getting people to be skeptical and ask intelligent questions. And just how can Slack give credit for noticing dogmatism among evolution supporters when ID is all about rationalizing dogmatic beliefs in a creator?

There is nothing in this mess that Gordy Slack credits to creationists that is actually something that they have done first. And then in conclusion he asks an utterly inane rhetorical question: “Should IDers be allowed to pursue their still very eccentric and outlying theory?” Has it ever even been suggested that creationists not be allowed to do research? More often, we’re snarling at ’em to go get some reasonable evidence. Slack’s article was just plain bad, strawmen aplenty and the gullible acceptance of ID propagandists’ appropriation of basic ideas.

Here’s another example of godawful stupid journalism, this time from the New York Times. Academics in Philadelphia have done a wonderful thing: they have organized a Year of Evolution to celebrate the Darwin year; I praised this before, and it really is an excellent, positive way to celebrate and inform about science. (I should also mention that I’ve been invited to come speak in November. This is not necessarily why it is such a good event.) This is a fantastic opportunity for people in that region to learn about the amazing progress science has made in the last century and a half.

How does the NY Times article start? “In the long-running culture war between evolution and creationism, Philadelphia is firing the latest shot.”

What?

I’m wondering…when St Patrick’s Cathedral opens its doors on Sunday morning, will there be journalists there covering the latest assault in the war on reason? Would they even think to phrase it that way? When scientists gather, though, and try to present their work to the community … that’s fighting a war.

Now, since the NY Times is the greatest paper in America, and they have to excel in everything, when they screw up they don’t just make a little boo-boo and then correct their course and try to move back towards something reasonable — that would produce a mediocre article. No, they have to compound the error. They have to make it monumental. Who would be the worst person to consult to add ‘diversity’ to the article, to put it into the standard boring frame with two sides and nothing in between? Can you guess?

Of course you can. Ken “Wackaloon” Ham.

Please. This is insane. I can understand getting multiple sources for a story; I can see how if a doctor has just told you some important medical news, you might want to get a second opinion. But if that second opinion was delivered by an inebriated, unwashed schizophrenic the doctor obligingly dragged out of a dumpster for you, you might be unimpressed with the quality of his search for diverse, informed perspectives. This, however, is pretty much standard operating procedure at the Times.

Jerry Coyne asked an editor publicly about this policy.

I noticed that when the Times reported on the recent discovery of the transitional fossil between fish and amphibians (the “fishapod”), they asked a creationist for comment. As an evolutionary biologist, I was dismayed by this. Creationism is simply a discredited enterprise, and asking a creationist to comment on a new fossil is like asking a faith healer to comment on a medical advance, or an astrologer to comment on a new discovery about human behavior. I respect the newspaper’s desire to be objective and give opposing viewpoints, but don’t see the need to do that when the “opposing viewpoint” is simply a form of quackery.

Here’s her reply. It starts out well enough.

How to cover the politicization of science, intelligent design and other manifestations of what Mr. Fishkin and other readers call the war on science is a question that comes up again and again in the science department. We’re well aware that giving equal time to opposing views of an issue makes no sense when one side has no solid evidence to stand on. The old FCC idea of a fairness doctrine simply shouldn’t apply to science journalism.

Right. Philadelphia is planning a major event around the discoveries and evidence and ideas of evolutionary biology, and that certainly is newsworthy. Ken Ham has no solid evidence to stand on, so it makes no sense to call him up and asks for his opinion…but they did. As she said, this makes no sense.

So why do they bring in anti-intellectual reprobates and promote their ignorance to a kind of equivalence to scientific ideas?

Yet viewpoints that may strike scientifically literate people as absurd, dangerous or even evil have a way of making news that insists on being dealt with. In recent years creationism’s hip cousin, intelligent design, has grown to be a divisive issue at every level of society, from school boards to the White House. So it seems to me that a serious paper is obliged to investigate the phenomenon, beginning with the question ‘What is going on here?’

Wait — so now she’s claiming that bringing aboard an irrational wackaloon is the mark of a “serious paper”? Wow. I guess that makes World Net Daily one of the pinnacles of serious journalism. The NY Times must be trying to catch up with them.

If the newspaper was writing an article on the serious sociological and political issues of creationism, evolution, and education, then sure — bring in many sides, explore them, and weigh them, and try to come to a conclusion. Unfortunately, there are two observations that invalidate the editor’s defense.

One is that even in those instances where the topic warrants the inclusion of these multiple perspectives, journalists tend to just let them lie there, limp and unresolved. We have scientists and we have creationists, they disagree with one another, we can’t resolve this issue, we can’t suggest that maybe one side is the province of insanity and ignorance, we’re just reporters for the NY freaking Times. There is no investigation, only the bland, blinkered recitation of each side’s position.

The other problem is that in both the cases of the Philadelphia Darwin celebration and the discovery of Tiktaalik, the creationist side had nothing of substance to contribute, other than sullen, unfounded disagreement. Denial is not an argument. The newspaper does a disservice to work that has heft to it, that has a solid foundation of serious evidence behind it, when they take any event on the side of reason and reflexively pair it with some cretin who has nothing but a dogmatic denial of science and reason as his credentials.

It seems to me that that is not what a serious paper would do.

In which I have hurt Ken Ham’s feelings

Oh, dear. Earlier, I wrote about Ken Ham’s visit to the Pentagon, a soul-shuddering thought if ever there was one, and it seems Ken has read it. He has replied with a blog entry titled Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”. Ken, Ken, Ken. You act shocked at the thought that one guy publicly stated that you were Mr Flaming Nutbar, but you shouldn’t be. Millions of people, including some of the most knowledgeable biologists in the world, think just about every day that you are an airhead, an ass, a birdbrain, a blockhead, a bonehead, a boob, a bozo, a charlatan, a cheat, a chowderhead, a chump, a clod, a con artist, a crackpot, a crank, a crazy, a cretin, a dimwit, a dingbat, a dingleberry, a dipstick, a ditz, a dolt, a doofus, a dork, a dum-dum, a dumb-ass, a dumbo, a dummy, a dunce, a dunderhead, a fake, a fathead, a fraud, a fruitcake, a gonif, a halfwit, an idiot, an ignoramus, an imbecile, a jackass, a jerk, a jughead, a knucklehead, a kook, a lamebrain, a loon, a loony, a lummox, a meatball, a meathead, a moron, a mountebank, a nincompoop, a ninny, a nitwit, a numbnuts, a numbskull, a nut, a nutcase, a peabrain, a pinhead, a racketeer, a sap, a scam artist, a screwball, a sham, a simpleton, a snake oil salesman, a thickhead, a turkey, a twerp, a twit, a wacko, a woodenhead, and much, much worse.

You’re a clueless schmuck who knows nothing about science and has arrogantly built a big fat fake museum to promote medieval bullshit — you should not be surprised to learn that you are held in very low esteem by the community of scholars and scientists, and by the even larger community of lay people who have made the effort to learn more about science than you have (admittedly, though, you have set the bar very, very low on that, and there are 5 year old children who have a better grasp of the principles of science as well as more mastery of details of evolution than you do.)

Maybe you should write a blog entry calling attention to each insult given to you. I think that’s your calling, and it’s probably god’s intended mission for you in life, to inspire contempt.

(I encourage each and every one of my readers to express their true feelings about Ken Ham in the comment thread here. Then I want Mr Ham to write an indignant post complaining that “So-and-so called me a “disgrace to brain-damaged clowns””, or whatever — that’ll keep him occupied for years, and will distract him from his campaign of abusing the minds of young children. Be creative.)

Now I’m going to have nightmares

Ken Ham, chief wackaloon at Answers in Genesis, was invited to speak…at a Pentagon prayer breakfast.

Just let that sink in.

There are people at the Pentagon who are in charge of planning where your sons and daughter and nephews and nieces and other beloved family members and friends will be sent to put their lives at risk. There are people there who can send missiles and bombers anywhere in the world. There are people there who control nuclear weapons.

And they think Ken Ham is a fine-and-dandy, clever feller.

It’s almost enough to make me wish I could pray. It’s not just Ham, either — it’s that the people with the big guns have prayer breakfasts.

And then, somehow, he segues into babbling about the existence of life on other worlds. He doesn’t think there is any. Look at the logic this kook uses:

The real world is the biblical world–a universe designed by God with the Earth at the spiritual focal point, not an evolutionary universe teeming with life. … Extraterrestrial life is an evolutionary concept; it does not comport with the biblical teachings of the uniqueness of the Earth and the distinct spiritual position of human beings.

Because the bible says we are the focus of the entire universe, there can’t possibly be any competitors. Of course, this means that his god created this vast, empty, uninhabitable space for no reason other than that we’ll have twinkly little stars in the sky at night…but hey, that’s the crazy Christian deity, always doing irrational stuff and encouraging his followers to be equally nuts.

Urgent: Call Louisiana, their science is getting away!

Barbara Forrest is sending this message out everywhere — they need concerted public action to forestall a dreadful legislative disaster that is looming large in the state of Louisiana. You can help!

We in the LA Coalition for Science have reached the point at which the only possible measure we have left is to raise an outcry from around the country that Gov. Jindal has to hear. What is happening in Louisiana has national implications, much to the delight of the Discovery Institute, which is blogging the daylights out of the Louisiana situation.

SB 733, the LA Science Education Act, has passed both houses of the legislature, and the governor has indicated that he intends to sign it. But we don’t have to be quiet about this. There is something that you and everyone else you know who wants to help can do:

The LA Coalition for Science has posted a press release and an open letter to Jindal asking him to veto the bill. The contact information is at the LCFS website.

It is time for a groundswell of contacts to Jindal, and this must be done immediately since we don’t know when he will sign the bill. The vote in the legislature is veto-proof, so any request for Jindal to veto the bill must stress that the governor can make this veto stick if he wants it to stick. Please contact everyone you know and ask them to contact the governor’s office and ask him to veto the bill. Please blog this. If you have friendly contacts in your address book, please ask them to also contact the governor’s office.

We want people all over the country to do this, as many as possible, since Louisiana will be only the beginning. Their states could be next. Here are the talking points:

Point 1: The Louisiana law, SB 733, the LA Science Education Act, has national implications. So far, this legislation has failed in every other state where it was proposed, except in Michigan, where it remains in committee. By passing SB 733, Louisiana has set a dangerous precedent that will benefit the Discovery Institute by helping them to advance their strategy to get intelligent design creationism into public schools. Louisiana is only the beginning. Other states will now be encouraged to pass such legislation, and the Discovery Institute has already said that they will continue their push to get such legislation passed.

Point 2: Since Gov. Jindal’s support for teaching ID clearly helped to get this bill passed in the first place, his decision to veto it will stick if he lets the legislature know that he wants it to stick.

Point 3: Simply allowing the bill to become law without his signature, which is one of the governor’s options, does not absolve him of the responsibility for protecting the public school science classes of Louisiana. He must veto the bill to show that he is serious about improving Louisiana by improving education. Anything less than a veto means that the governor is giving a green light to creationists to undermine the education of Louisiana children.

You can pull additional talking points from the LCFS press release and our online letter if you want them.

Now we have to get the message out to people. People can contact the governor and and also contact their friends, asking them to do the same. We need to create a huge network of e-mails asking people to do this. Where they live does not matter at this point. What is happening in Louisiana has implications for everyone in the nation. The Discovery Institute does not intend to stop with the Pelican State.

You can read the open letter to Jindal; you can call him at 225-342-7015 or 866-366-1121 (Toll Free); fax him at 225-342-7099. Anyone anywhere in the country should hammer the message home. If Jindal has any national political aspirations, this willful destruction of science education in his home state is going to follow him around like stink on a skunk.