Guess what? He didn’t like it, nosir.

“Expelled” is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word “expelled” may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

That’s timely, since it’s also a theme of Miller’s new book, which argues strongly that creationism has destructive consequences for America’s scientific enterprise.

Yeesh — I don’t think this game is going to take the world by storm. It’s calledCrevoScope, and it’s a “text-based massively multiplayer game”, which somehow is supposed to simulate the evolution-creationism debate, without actually requiring players to learn or know anything. It’s got some weird mechanics which I haven’t puzzled out in any detail at all, but apparently you can acquire “knowledge” by clicking on a “library” link — you don’t actually learn anything, a number for your character goes up — and then you get to go “debate” someone, and somehow the various scores help determine whether you “win” or not. It doesn’t make much sense to me, and I don’t think I’m motivated to put any time into it.

Especially since I took a look at the level of the discussion going on. Would you believe this is an argument someone made in all seriousness to disprove evolution?

Fact 1: History and Science has proven that some native African tribes eat monkeys as a prime source of food. There is bone evidence and filmed and video prof as well. Along with the bones of monkeys are human remains. So the body that science says is prof of evolution is just bones of monkeys that some tribe eat along side there bones.

Fact 2: Evolution teaches all life on earth came from one source. The primordial soup they call it if thats true would we not have DNA of all life on earth even if its a small percentage of it.

Fact 3: Darwin was a man that gave birth to this evolution theory. Were many people in the science community say is fact. Darwin himself have written a science manuscript stating that evolution is not possible just before his death.

I’m always astounded that every time I meet a creationist and hear their argument, they always manage to sink even lower than anything I’d previously heard. That sounds like a logical impossibility, unless perhaps creationist brains are in a universal state of implosion.

Fast political action is needed to stop another anti-science bill in Louisiana. Below is a message from Barbara Forrest, who says it all better than I can.

Friends, fellow educators, and concerned citizens,

First, please accept my thanks to those of you who helped in the effort to stop SB 561, especially those who went to the Capitol to testify. Second, action is needed IMMEDIATELY to ask members of the House Education Committee to kill HB 1168, which is the House twin of SB 561. As far as I know, no newspapers have carried the story of its being filed on Monday, April 21. The bill could be heard in the House Education Committee as early as this week of April 28, so immediate action is crucial.

As you may know, SB 561 was amended to SB 733, the “Louisiana Science Education Act,” in which form it is less pernicious but still bad because it contains code language that creationists can exploit. However, the creationists were unhappy with the amendments, so Rep. Frank Hoffman of West Monroe has introduced HB 1168 in the House of Representatives. HB 1168 is identical to the original SB 561. (Mr. Hoffman was the Asst. Supt. of the Ouachita Parish school system in 2006. He helped persuade the the Ouachita Parish School Board to pass its creationist “science curriculum policy” that is the basis for both SB 561 and HB 1168.)

SB 733 will probably pass the Senate and be sent to the House, where it could be merged with HB 1168, which means that we are back where we started with SB 561. So HB 1168 must be killed in the House Education Committee, which means that we must generate as much opposition to the House Education Committee **NOW.** The bill could come up in the House Education Committee this week, but we are not sure. We need to act immediately to request that House Education Committee members kill HB 1168. And please also contact everyone else you know INSIDE LOUISIANA to do the same. We want opposition from inside the state, not outside. We want the House Education Committee members to hear from people who live here and vote here. We may need to generate outside opposition later, but not at this time.

I have written a revised backgrounder for HB 1168 based on the one I wrote for SB 561. You may download it here:

http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/Backgrounder_HB_1168_4.27.08.pdf

There are talking points, contact information, and some instructions for you at the end of this document.

A shorter set of talking points, also with contact information, is here:

http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/HB_1168_Talking_Points.pdf

The contact information in these is for ten members of the House Education Committee who may be receptive to our contact based on what we have been able to learn. If you personally know another member who is approachable, please also contact that person.

I have talked personally to three committee members and found those three very nice and very interested. Some of the committee members have been teachers and served on their parish school boards. Some are attorneys. The three to whom I talked were aware of the Dover trial, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District (2005), in which I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs, a case that cost the Dover school board one million dollars. This seemed to resonate with them. You may wish to keep that in mind as you contact them. If I may make a suggestion: remember that this is a political problem, not a scientific one. Please try to avoid “science talk.” As Eugenie Scott, our executive director at the National Center for Science Education says, we will not solve this problem by throwing science at it. We must appeal to the legislators as fellow citizens, parents, and educators. No academic-speak! :)

The children and teachers of Louisiana are being used as pawns by the Louisiana Family Forum and, most likely, the Discovery Institute, about which I have written so extensively. These people will assuredly not be around to clean up the wreckage they will leave in their wake if we don’t stop them. We have to stop them.

Florida delivers some good news: their nasty little academic “freedom” bill is dead. Now we just have to worry about similar bills in Michigan, Missouri, Alabama, and Louisiana.

And it’s a classic!

It starts off with a little boy getting a lesson in “evolution” from his mother. This version of evolution has nothing to do with what biologists teach, of course — it’s bizarrely teleological, with everything striving towards becoming human.

After having evolution explained to him, the little boy turns into an “atheist” (one who’s planning to become a god — Chick isn’t quite clear on what the whole atheism thing means), and it all means you get to be as evil as you want.

There’s the usual stereotypical Chick interlude where a cute little girl tells the little boy all about Jesus. These stories go one of two ways: the boy can find Jesus and go to heaven, or he can reject the message and be horribly punished. Guess which way this tract ends?

This is so awfully, horribly bad that I must get my hands on a print copy.

This is actually somewhat interesting, and I’m not going to reject all of it out of hand. The Fair Use Project of Stanford Law School is going to defend the use of Lennon’s song “Imagine” in the movie Expelled.

On the one hand, they are using a very short clip — and I am not a fan of the kind of draconian enforcement of every second of a song that the music industry seems to favor. There are reasonable grounds for fair use of short clips of music … the question is whether this is one of those cases.

On the other hand, I think Premise is horribly dishonest, and this press release is personally obnoxious to me (which is not actionable, of course … it merely diminishes the Fair Use Project’s credibility when they so readily buy into some of the phoniness Premise is pushing.)

The producers of “Expelled” spent two years interviewing scores of scientists, doctors, philosophers, and public leaders, including University of Minnesota biology professor P.Z. Myers, who does not support alternative theories of evolution. The clip of “Imagine,” which is audible for approximately 15 seconds, is used in a segment of the documentary in which the film’s narrator and author Ben Stein comments on statements made by Myers and others about the place of religion. In the documentary Stein says: “Dr. Myers would like you to think that he’s being original but he’s merely lifting a page out of John Lennon’s songbook.” This is followed by an audio clip of Lennon’s song “Imagine,” specifically, the lyrics “Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too.”

“We included the ‘Imagine’ clip not only to illuminate Ben Stein’s commentary but to criticize the ideas expressed in the song,” says Logan Craft, chairman and executive producer of Premise Media.

There’s a lot to object to there.

• It is not true that I do not support alternative theories of evolution. I do. However, I expect alternatives to be backed up by evidence; I reject the fact-free, useless nonsense of Intelligent Design, which is not the same as being close-minded, as this P.R. implies.

• Stein’s commentary is ludicrous. I did not claim originality, so accusing me of doing so is false. Lennon’s song is also not relevant to what I said; I had just said that science erodes religious belief, and that the atheist goal is not the elimination of religion, but a reduction of its impact in secular functions, like government (my infamous comment about ‘knitting’). Imagine says nothing about science, or knitting for that matter. The song actually doesn’t follow from what I was saying.

• The claim that they were commenting on the ideas in the song is false. This movie was not about how artists are excluding creationists from their discipline, but about scientists. The song doesn’t discuss science or creationism or the academy, any of the themes of the movie. It’s just a pretty and extremely recognizable popular melody; they are using it as background music to a series of images that they want to use to generate a negative emotional response to my argument. They could have used any music and still made the same point.

So, really, what I detest is that, as usual, Premise Media is lying. Their rationalizations are completely bogus.

If they’d been more honest, though, and were simply arguing that, hey, a quick 15 second clip of a popular song ought to be acceptable use, I’d be sympathetic (now maybe an artist with a more personal appreciation of the ownership of an artistic creation would differ…), but they just don’t seem to be able to do that. They’ve got a compulsion to lie and try to claim that they were directly addressing John Lennon’s work, which they most clearly were not doing.

Of course, if they were capable of honesty, their movie wouldn’t exist.

Even after sending out a prayer alert to summon down divine favor for the Florida academic “freedom” bills, the effort to reconcile the two versions and pass something has stalled out in the legislature. They’ve only got two days to get it together! It could die!

It is time to pull out the big guns. The Republican sponsors, the Disco Institute lobbyists, and the creationist supporters of this bill need to immediately embark on a two-day prayer retreat. Just go off to some isolated place, and pray and fast non-stop. It’s the right thing to do.

After all the pious nonsense from certain quarters blaming scientists for the Holocaust and other atrocities, it seems appropriate to take note of the Anti-Defamation League’s response:

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

Poor Ben Stein, rebuked. Oh, well, he’ll recover … he’ll just notice that there are a heck of a lot of Jews in academia, and they’re in on the whole ‘Darwinist” conspiracy.

---

In related news, several sites are talking about this one quote from a Stein interview:

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking
about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any
of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling
them to go to the showers to get gassed.

Wait…what? I say something nice about scientists, somewhere in the vault of his cranium wheels are turning and Stein is fantasizing about Nazis poisoning people, and this is my fault? It’s projection taken to an extreme.

I cannot blame Stein, however; he may be a stupid, illogical man with a serious derangement disorder, but I have a confession to make. I do the same thing. Not Nazis, specifically, but there is some evil imagery that does a slow dance in my brain now and then.

When I see those Visine commercials and hear Stein droning about “get the red out,” I picture Ben Stein sliding a cold razor across the eyes of a screaming victim, and then urinating in their face to wash the blood away. I can’t help it. It’s a natural connection to make, obviously.

Then there are those Alaskan sea food commercials. They are especially sinister. When he says, “Grab a fork, and eat all you want. There’s a lot more out there,” I picture the bodies of Stein’s victims sinking in the cold dark, pale and soft and bloated, down to the sea floor swarming with huge crab, their claws upraised and clicking enthusiastically as their meal drifts down towards them. And then I imagine Ben at a table with a plastic bib around his neck, feasting gluttonously on the fatted flesh of the crabs, butter and ichor and flecks of soft white meat drooling down his chin.

Oh, and when I hear the words “Bueller? Bueller?”, I … but no. It’s too appalling to be expressed in public. But I have nightmares about the kittens for days afterwards.

It’s perfectly OK for Stein to make these irrational and unwarranted accusations in response to innocuous, unconnected statements, because, after all, we all do it … don’t we? Isn’t that what the advertisers who hire Mr Stein as a pitchman are hoping for, that viewers will associate their product with the unrelated values that Stein represents, such as boredom, dishonesty, stupidity, water sports, serial murder, and flammable household products and baby animals?

Last December, I mentioned the case of a creationist named Nathaniel Abraham who was fired from his job at Woods Hole — he had the gall to apply for a post-doctoral position in an evolution and development lab, and the PI dismissed him for being incapable of supporting the full range of “evolutionary implications and interpretations” of the work he would have to do. Abraham sued him for a half million dollars in reply.

The judge’s decision has been delivered.

A Massachusetts federal court judge last week (April 22) dismissed the case against a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who allegedly fired a postdoc in his lab because of the postdoc’s creationist beliefs.

The postdoc, Nathaniel Abraham, was dismissed from his position in the lab of molecular toxicologist Mark Hahn in November, 2004, after revealing that he believed in the literal truth of the Bible and considered evolution to be not a fact but a theory. Hahn’s lab studies the evolution of molecular mechanisms of chemical signaling and adaptation to chemical exposure.

Abraham filed a discrimination complaint against Hahn, which was rejected by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. He then filed suit against Mark Hahn and the institute last November, arguing, according to court documents, that he had been hired to work in Hahn’s lab because of his expertise in zebrafish developmental biology, toxicology, and programmed cell death, and that “acceptance of evolution as scientific fact rather than theory (in contravention of his sincerely held religious beliefs) was in no way a bona fide occupational qualification of employment.”

The defendants, however, argued that Abraham did not file the lawsuit within the timeframe specified by law. Furthermore, the court documents stated, research in Hahn’s lab “would have involved application of evolutionary principles without qualifications concerning the acceptance of evolution.”

Good work!

Here’s an interesting review of the movie that gets Carroll’s perspective on it. It mostly gets it right, especially in its argument that this movie is an attempt to swiftboat science.

“If you have a losing hand, you’re going to use every amount of rhetoric you can to distract people from the fact that you don’t have any facts,” Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his lab last week. “And that’s what ‘Expelled’ is all about.”

Carroll is little too generous here…

Carroll had similar advice for today’s biologists: “The biology community will tell you that understanding genetics and evolution is fundamental to being a literate biologist. … Do you want your kids to be taught by people who are living in the 18th century? I don’t think so. They have a right to think these things or believe these things, but they have an obligation to be technically competent.”

18th century? Hah! In my recent debate with Angus Menuge (I keep meaning to write it up, but every time I recall that evening I fall asleep), I pointed out that one of the goals of the ID movement was to redefine science; he agreed, but said that what they wanted to do was restore the true meaning of science, to that of … Aristotle. I had to reply that apparently, then, they wanted to roll back progress by 25 centuries.

I do have to disagree with this bit in the review, though:

The movie also prods several interviewees who happen to be outspoken atheists – such as biologists Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers as well as philosopher Daniel Dennett – to indulge in some metaphysical speculation that goes beyond the biology (thus demonizing them for the movie’s core audience). The perspective from respected scientists who happen to be religious (for example, Francis Collins and Ken Miller) is largely lacking, although physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne is a welcome exception to the rule.

The result is that the film casts the debate largely along the false battle lines of science vs. religion. That rhetorical approach ironically builds up the very wall Ben Stein says he wants to tear down.

We were not indulging in metaphysical speculation — we were actually addressing the stated purpose of our interviews, which we were told were specifically about the intersection of science and religion, not about the scientific validity of intelligent design. We would have given very different interviews if we’d been asked about ID; that’s a subject both of us can discuss at length without mentioning religion at all, as the primary objection to it is that it isn’t science, and good science refutes it. It’s a little annoying to be constantly told that we were straying from the central premise of this movie, when we were actually doing our best to address the subject of the nonexistent movie for which we were told we were being interviewed.

But as for that last bit, the line separating science and religion is not a false one. That is ultimately the actual, central source of the conflict: how are you going to figure out how the world works, from inquiry into natural causes, or from metaphysics, superstition, and evidence-free revelation? That is a significant piece, even the central piece, of this long-running argument in our culture.