Examining Expelled

I couldn't get past "natural selection does not provide new genetic information" — barf out, gag me with a spoon.

Windows is a bad example. Everybody knows that even improvements in Microsoft's code causes crashes.

"oh this is very good!" says ben stein to berlinski's waffle. it's ALMOST as if he was making the whole movie looking for soundbytes and was expressing joy at having found something he thinks confirms them.

The camera work! It's like The Bourne Identity on a bad trip. Harsh.

The main thing wrong is the title: Truth About Genetic Mutations. Or maybe they cut it short, before they could get to anything that was actually true.

the part about where ben stein opens his mouth

I think what we see is exactly how creationism does its work - grab a seat, preferably a nice comfortable one where you can be seated for a while - and start yapping away until eventually, you satisfy the conclusion that over a hundred years worth of research, experimentation and data is flat out wrong.

Then get up, and start writing about it...

Ben should have sticked to doing his visine commercials. His eyes may be clear, but his thinking needs a whole gallon of brain visine.

13, but its just a quick count. Some high points:

x) People have been granted patents on hardware and software found via genetic programming, ie random computer programs.

x) Professor Lenski's bacteria that evolved the ability to metabolise nitrate.

x) Genes and proteins are not computer programs. While it can be a useful analogy, thats all it is. For evolution, a closer analogy is origami. If you change a fold early in the process, you can get a wildly different shape, but if you change on later you can subtle tweaks to the shape. This allows random mutations to search the protein subspace in large jumps or with small optimizing changes.

Expelled: "Darwin assumed the increased information comes from natural selection."

Darwin: "Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound."

And while I'm at it...

Darwin: "He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception; I would almost as soon believe with the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells now living on the sea-shore."

P.S. Grant Duchscherer - "brain visine" = instant classic

Professor Lenski's bacteria that evolved the ability to metabolise nitrate.

Wasn't it citrate?

The very first statement is correct.

Natural selection does not, in fact, produce new genetic information. Natural selection does, in fact, reduce genetic information in a population - by culling the herd, so to speak.

Mutation, which is very much observed, does produce new genetic information. (I would like to hit this population geneticist over the head with DUPLICATIONS. Dur.)

Mutation creates new variants.
Natural selection gets rid of the harmful ones.

Oh, and the difference between a genome and a computer code? Genomes aren't so streamlined. Any single change, with few exceptions, will NOT destroy the functionality of the organism. Almost as if it wasn't designed...

It was indeed citrate, thanks for the correction.

Wouldnt you say natural selection gets rid of the useless variants? Just seems to make more sense to me.