Who votes for these gomers?

Florida also has an “academic freedom” bill in the works, and they’re using Ben Stein’s sillly movie to promote it … and if you want to find legislators with cobwebs in their cranium, Florida is the place to go.

Neither Hays nor his co-sponsor, Brandon Republican Sen. Ronda Storms, could name any teachers in Florida who have been disciplined for being critical of evolution in the science classroom. Better known for his ”Win Ben Stein’s Money” game show, Stein made the documentary to document how evolution critics have supposedly run afoul of mainstream science in higher academics.

”I want a balanced policy. I want students taught how to think, not what to think,” Hays says. “There are problems with evolution. Have you ever seen a half-monkey, half human?”

No comment.

Expelled gets more bad press

The New York Times has taken notice of the promotional tactics being used for the creationist propaganda flick, Expelled. As you all know, they are trying to filter screenings, allowing only ideologically friendly people to see it, and keeping out the serious critics who might actually evaluate it on its merits, rather than as a media echo of what the viewers want to hear.

There were nondisclosure agreements to sign that day, but Mr. Moore did not, and proceeded to write perhaps the harshest review “Expelled” has received thus far. The film will open April 18, but has been screened several times privately for religious audiences. Mr. Moore deplored what he perceived as “loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts” and accused Mr. Stein of using a “Holocaust denier’s” tactics.

Which, of course, was exactly the reaction the moviemakers were hoping to avoid by keeping mainstream critics out.

Mr. Stein said in a telephone interview that he had not read Mr. Moore’s review, but that “being compared with a Holocaust denier is nonsense,” adding, “This guy is extremely confused.” He said he decided to participate in the project because “there’s just a lot of people who don’t believe that big science and Darwinism should have a stranglehold on academic life, and they have been waiting for a voice.”

Every time Stein opens his mouth, he’s helping us. This is a movie that uses Nazi imagery to accuse science since 1859 of being the primary cause of anti-semitism — it’s not denying the Holocaust, but instead is trivializing it by using it as a tool to dishonestly browbeat a group that was not responsible. In the 1930s, a political group in Germany used centuries of deeply rooted anti-Semitism to create a popular movement that culminated in the murder of six million people for their ethnicity and a war that consumed practically the entire planet; it wasn’t caused by academics arguing over a theory.

And he projects his bizarre misinterpretations again. “Darwinism” doesn’t have a stranglehold on academics; we’ve moved well beyond Darwin to new ideas, and are constantly wrestling with novel suggestions to expand on the old Darwinian core. To name one example, proponents of evo-devo think they’ve got a set of theories that should change the way we think about evolution. There are smart people loudly arguing on both sides, with the pro side bringing up observations and evidence that emphasize the importance of the discipline, and cons poking holes and pointing out major failings, and pushing for more and better evidence. There is no stranglehold, there are only high standards of evidence that are not met by making propaganda films and getting church leaders with no knowledge of biology to denounce one side or the other. There is hard work required to break through into academic credibility, work which is not being done by the IDists.

We also have expectations of honesty that are not being met. The makers of this film had to hide their motivations every step of the way, because they know that they can’t stand the harsh light of criticism. And they just can’t stop lying.

Logan Craft, executive producer of “Expelled” and chief of Premise Media, said he thought Mr. Moore had been wrong to attend the screening after being disinvited, but both he and Mr. Lauer denied any involvement in an online “media alert” that purported to be from a backer of the film. The alert accused Mr. Moore of posing as a minister to gain admission, calling his actions a “security breach.” Mr. Moore said he never represented himself as other than a reporter.

Oh, come on. I’ve got a copy of the “media alert,” and it’s from promotional material put out by Motive Marketing. Look at the official movie site, and right there on the bottom right is the logo for Motive Marketing. They’ve been bragging about using Motive for marketing, since this is also the firm that promoted Gibson’s snuff movie, The Passion of the Christ. This Lauer fellow is the founder of Motive. A reader has sent me more promotional mail from these guys, and they are peddling the movie hard. And now they’re lying to the New York Times and claiming they’ve got nothing to do with it? It seems to be a kind of pathological reflex to deny, deny, deny even when they’re caught red-handed in something relatively inocuous.

Oh, well. It’s a sign of desperation that they are straining so hard to find a narrow audience that will appreciate their movie; they know that they’ve got a klunker that will rely on appeal to a narrow bias to succeed. Randy Olson has ’em pegged: they want to use humor to broaden the appeal to more than just the theocratic sheep, but their movie isn’t funny. A movie that tries to build on clips of goose-stepping Nazis and Hitler salutes is pretty much destined to be depressing, unless you’re Mel Brooks. And Ben Stein is no Mel Brooks.

Fear the philistine

I am reminded of the whole host of intellectual failings of creationists: it’s not just that they reject modern science, but many of them tend to be brain-damaged peckerwoods who are also incapable of viewing literature and art without squawking in horror, unless maybe it’s a tasteless photorealistic airbrushed Aryan Jesus, or perhaps some cookie-cutter landscape from a hack like Kincade. For a truly sickening example, just look at Ray Comfort’s latest blog entry. He’s reacting to a documentary of Gustav Klimt, which describes his work as “sensuous” and “obsessed with women”, which are all marks of Satan in Comfort’s book. He ends his recitation of the description of the eroticism in Klimt’s paintings with this:

If you too enjoy gazing at the naked female form, you don’t have to go to New York to see similar works. You can find them scrawled on the walls of most public rest rooms.

I know there are lots of good artists around, but they generally don’t scribble on restroom walls. Does this look like something you’d find on a bathroom stall?

i-03ac35d9ed395e94272b747521c7a53a-Klimt_the_kiss.jpg

Does this make you think of pornography?

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Here’s a gallery of art by Gustav Klimt. There’s a good reason he’s a famous painter — this is wonderful stuff. Ray Comfort, two-bit rednecked ignoramus that he is, sees none of it, and is so freaking dishonest that he doesn’t dare show his readers any of Klimt’s actual work … so instead he does his own crude rendition of “The Kiss” to illustrate his screed, and just so you don’t miss his point, he crudely slathers wicked words all over it.

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I think you might find Comfort’s work in a seedy, filthy restroom somewhere, but not Klimt’s.

Just so you don’t think this battle is all about nothing but esoteric arguments over details of the interpretation of rarefied biological data, I can’t imagine a clearer example of the broader field of the struggle. This is a war over all of Western culture. What do you want? Klimt or Comfort? Science or lies?

Why do newspapers continue to publish Discovery Institute press releases?

A reader brought to my attention this outrageously dishonest mangling of a quote by that creationist, Casey Luskin. He writes:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,”1 because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter“2 it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

First rule of reading creationist literature: never trust an ellipsis. They always leave something significant out to change the meaning. Second rule of reading creationist literature: if they don’t use an ellipsis, they’re still going to distort a quote. Basically, you can’t trust anything these guys say. Luskin is claiming to be quoting something from the National Academy of Sciences booklet, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. How honest is his scholarship?

The first part of the quote is from page 52, near the end of the book. Here it is in context:

1There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Where do you think we’ll find the second half of his quote? Page 53, maybe? Page 54? No. You’ll have to thumb backwards through the book, to a place near the beginning: page 16.

2Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

So what Casey Luskin has done is to flip through the book and manufacture quotes by splicing together clauses from scattered sentences. Students who tried to pull this kind of unethical crap in a term paper would get an automatic “F” from me…yet Luskin reportedly has a law degree.

Aren’t journalists supposed to have some kind of ethical standards about this sort of thing? Do they simply suspend any regard for reasonable journalistic values when some right-wing think-tank like the Discovery Institute mails in some PR pablum?

It’s a propaganda film!

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.

Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science: only the first word is accurate

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 don’t hate Jonathan Wells

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.

Florida aims to snatch defeat from victory

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.