ERV is probably right. No one reads Uncommon Descent.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
When I see Jonathan Wells’ name on anything, I know I’m in for some furious gnashing of the teeth because of the man’s infuriating tendency to blatantly lie with every sentence. That’s the case with his recent baseless criticisms of the peppered moth story; Mike Dunford takes care of him this time around.
The second part of the DI’s interview with Ruloff, producer of the movie Expelled, is now available. He’s claiming now that there will be no hacking and chopping of the interview footage, which is, of course, complete nonsense. I was interviewed for something close to two hours; we know that that will be extensively cut for the movie, and I fully expect my part will be notably brief. The question is one of what context will be removed to make their point.
But OK, since he promises that the movie will make no distortions, here’s the challenge: send me a copy of the unedited footage. Likewise, send copies of their interviews to Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins. That’s an easy resolution that any confident, reasonable person should consider perfectly fair.
I’ll look forward to receiving the tape in my mail.
Over at the Sandwalk, Larry has a video of Berlinski pompously denouncing the idea that “cows evolved into whales”. As everyone is pointing out, it’s ludicrous because cows didn’t evolve into whales — but what struck me is the supercilious arrogance of this mathematician as he plucked numbers out of his ass.
First he claims that he has a quantitative approach to measuring the magnitude of the nonexistent transition of cow to whale:
We have some crude way of assessing quantitatively, not qualitatively but quantitatively, the scope of the project of transformation
Oh, really? This could be interesting, then. But first Berlinski has to sneer at evolution:
any time a science avoids coming to grips with numbers, it’s somehow immersing itself in a perhaps unavoidable but certainly unattractive miasma
It’s a peculiar way to express it, but OK, I agree. Quantitative approaches are important. What is ironic, though, is that Berlinski is applying this to evolutionary biology: what, there aren’t any measurements in biology? Read some population genetics sometime — it’s all about “coming to grips with numbers”, and making quantitative measurements and estimates of rates and frequencies of genetic changes. It’s an idiotic accusation to make, and reveals his own ignorance of the entire field.
But Berlinski has to up the level of irony. Remember, he’s claiming that we have to quantitatively measure the degree of change, and he, the superior mathematician, has a way of doing this. You will be stunned. His brilliant scheme is to recite a litany of things that must be modified in the transition — skin, breathing, diving, lactation, eyes, hearing, etc. — and count them.
That’s right. His “method” is to sit on his butt, imagine a cow, and count everything he thinks is different from a whale. This he calls “calculating”.
I’ve tried to do some of these calculations. The calculations are certainly, certainly not hard, but they’re interesting. I stopped at 50,000.
Think about that. I want more details of his method. So David Berlinski is sitting. He’s contemplating the cow, and he’s enumerating the changes. Does he just make a hash mark on a sheet of paper when he thinks of one? Does he make a list? He says he came up with 50,000 items, and that it was easy. Let’s see a recitation. Was one of his differences that “cow rhymes with plow, and whale rhymes with tail”? How does he know that any of his litany of changes are actually biologically relevant? And do we really believe that David Berlinski can identify that many significant biological differences between two species of mammals?
I don’t think so. You’d have to be an idiot to believe him.
Which is probably why the DI thought his interview was a worthy contribution.
I wrote to Mark Mathis about his movie, Expelled, which I was told was going to be called Crossroads. Here is the entirety of my message:
Hey, I just learned today that the actual film is now called
“Expelled”, that it features Ben Stein, and that it’s really a gung-
ho pro-creationism/anti-science film. I would have agreed to be
interviewed even if you’d been honest with me about the subject —
I’m not reticent about my opinions — so I don’t understand why you
felt you had to conceal your intent. Care to explain yourself? Was
this the movie you planned from the beginning?
Now I’ve gotten his reply!
Mr. Myers,
Thank you for your recent communication. Please know that I strongly
disagree with the insinuations and characterizations made in your e-mail
to me. Nevertheless, I want to thank you for sharing your viewpoints, and
I wish you the best in all your endeavors.
What a curiously defensive response. There was no insinuation at all in my email: he wasn’t honest with me, and he did conceal his intent. I gave him an opportunity to respond, and all he can say is that he disagrees with me on something in that email? What was it?
I think the underhanded way he obtained interviews with some of his subjects is a sore point that he’d rather not discuss. I guess I can’t blame him — if I’d had to misrepresent myself to get an interview I’d probably be a bit shamefaced, too.
Scott* has uncovered another slick media effort by creationists: the Seventh Day Adventists are putting on a four-part series called Out of Thin Air to trumpet their fundamentalist lunacy.
What I want to know is … where are the slick media people willing to put together lovely dramatic stories of the scientists — the brave minority fighting uncowed against a wealthy and ignorant majority? Come on, there’s a real story here. We do cool stuff! We’re passionate! We are probing reality! Our stage is the entire freaking universe! We don’t have money for PR, and our support organizations are underfunded! Oh … I guess that’s the answer. We aren’t going to be able to pony up as much cash as one of the many religious cults around here, and we aren’t going to be an uncritical, captive audience. That must be why so many of the science documentaries are either a series of talking heads, all science with no heart, or they’re nature vignettes, all pretty pictures and no science.
It’s a shame. The science story is so much more spectacular than the creationist foolishness, but we’re not building the media resources and the strong narratives that we need to compete with the liars for Jesus.
*Stop making excuses for the SDAs, Scott. They’re kooks, plain and simple. Maybe they’re nice people, but they’ve been brainwashed into believing idiocy.
Since I highlighted a new creationist blog yesterday (by the way, the author is now saying it was all a joke), let’s mention a new good guy today: Answers in Genesis BUSTED! The author is trying to expose the deceptions of various creationist claims. Good luck at that: they’re excreting the garbage faster than anyone can shovel it.
Want to see some real science? An article in the NY Times summarizes research in the evolution of glucocorticoid receptors. This is really cool stuff, where the investigators do step-by-step changes in the protein structure to determine the likely sequence of evolutionary changes — it really does describe the path of evolutionary history for a set of proteins at the level of amino acids.
Now, if you want to see some junk science, Michael Behe flounders disgracefully to try and dismiss the work. This is a genuine embarrassment: Behe is a biochemist who has done legitimate work in protein structure, and this kind of research ought to be right up his alley, where he could make an informed analysis. Instead, it’s ugly and sad. A sensible creationist would simply admit that sure, here’s one case of the evolution of a receptor that is solidly made, but hey, look, over there — here are all these other proteins that haven’t been analyzed to the same level of detail. It would be pathetic and avoiding the issue, but Behe has a different and worse strategy: he denies the work shows anything at all. Because the researchers intentionally inserted mutations into the gene, they can’t argue that natural processes of mutation could have done the same thing. But of course we do know — point mutations happen all the time.
Behe continues his long slide into tendentious irrelevance and lunatic obsessions. Jason Rosenhouse digs into this step in Behe’s descent into unreason in much more detail.
And he’s so getting spanked for this. He suggests that perhaps Texas isn’t doomed after all, because a significant majority of the Texas Board of Education has come out saying that they don’t want to remove evolution from the curriculum, and they don’t want to include Intelligent Design.
Oh, gosh … this Expelled movie is going to be ghastly. Check out this interview with Walt Ruloff, the executive producer. Ruloff’s credentials on this issue are that — get ready for it — he was a software engineer. We get a good feel for the tack the movie is going to take: biologists don’t ask interesting and productive questions, they are defined by the Darwinist orthodoxy, and they actively suppress any questioning. It is, of course, a lie from word one.
