Ben Stein is out and about flogging his upcoming farce of a documentary, Expelled, and he recently repeatedly shot himself in the foot during a recent appearance on Glenn Beck's self-aggrandizing CNN show. If you can stomach it, here's the video;
Hearing what Stein said during this brief interview, he has certainly confirmed what the scientific community has been saying all along, and they have every right to call him a fool. I'm not sure I would call the first slip-up a mistake though, perhaps it's honesty, but it significantly weakens Stein's entire premise. Beck says "Tell me about what you found when it comes to indoctrination when it comes to God in our schools," but Stein doesn't say "No, no, no, it's some obscure intelligence and we don't know what it is," in classic shifty ID advocate fashion. While most of what he says is a critique of "Darwinism" (I'll get to that in a minute) he offers up no real evidence for his own standpoint, instead appealing to "fairness" to get theology into science classrooms.
The second mistake is the supposed laundry list of things that Darwin didn't know or got wrong, therefore presumably discrediting evolution in the world of Beck and Stein. As I wrote this past weekend, evolution is a fact and Darwin (along with Wallace) supplied the theory of natural selection as a primary mechanism to drive evolutionary change, so it's clear that Stein doesn't know his scientific history that well. Secondly, I could add a few more items to the list of things Darwin got wrong, but not every idea espoused by a great scientist has been a winner and they can only work with the data at hand. The reason why we still talk about Darwin is that his theory of natural selection (along with others like sexual selection) have held up incredibly well nearly 150 years later, modern studies confirming what Darwin saw as well as adding to it. In fact, there was a time around the turn of the 20th century when what could then be called "Darwinism" (evolution by natural selection) was challenged by rival schools of thought like Neo-Lamarckism (transmission of acquired characteristics), the marriage of natural selection with genetics during the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis firmly establishing natural selection and kicking out Neo-Lamarckism.
The next mistake is the assumption that if scientists haven't yet figured a biological problem out, then evolution is a myth, especially as it pertains to the origins of life. The problem could very well be solved within my lifetime or it may not, but at least scientists are using available data, running experiments, and floating hypotheses rather than dogmatically saying they "know" life was designed or "calling into being" at a certain point in history. Scientists have not honestly posited "lightning striking a mud puddle" for the origin of life (at best this is a broad caricature of the Miller-Urey experiment ), but apparently Stein feels he's found a good quote and is sticking too it, not being bothered with actually reading the research himself. I'm not even going to comment on the money quote "Evolution struck a mud puddle..."
He next compares "a human cell, or a plant cell, or a frog cell" to the very first life on earth, but all the cells he has in mind are the still-changing result of billions of years of evolution and can be considered incredibly difference from what we would expect the first life to be like. We would not expect the equivalent of a human somatic cell to look just like the very first cell (and it's debatable whether the first cell could be considered the first life), so again Stein shows that he's been giving talking points that he doesn't fully grasp.
Then Beck brings it back to the caricature that anti-American socialist liberals have a stranglehold on academia and are indoctrinating the poor pious conservatives, this being a fairness issue more than a scientific one. This erroneous notion of "equal time" has been covered extensively before, but briefly it would be like demanding that chemistry students also hear about alchemy, astronomy students hear about astrology, and history students hear how some "scholars" doubt that the Holocaust ever happened. Evolution is a fact, and while it might run counter the religious sensibilities of some the natural world provides no evidence whatsoever for the existence of one deity or another, so why even bring that question into the science classroom? Theology has no place there, so there is no "other side" to even discuss (especially since ID advocates have no scientific support for their claims). This section ends up with Stein calling scientists "chicken," arguing that we must have something to hide if we so dead-set against creationism. By this same logic I could say that vacuuming my apartment every week keeps away tigers, and being that no tigers have shown up here I must be right. I think you can see the problem with such arguments, and Stein presented no compelling reasons for anyone to take him seriously.
[Hat-tip to Pharyngula]
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You vacuum every week? Dang, I'm so lazy...(and I have wood floors).
I love this debate. I can't write any more because all I want to do is read Pharyngula all day. And then I get to my blog and I'm like, "eh...it's all been said already."
I like your posts on the subject...they're very to-the-point and not seething with anger. I think it was your post on the Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed trailer that got me really really interested in all this stuff.
Dead on.
However, people will take him seriously, he's going to get more face time and people are actually convinced by this type of argument. It's a tough problem. My view is of course to increase public awareness of the methods and tactics of pseudoscience, but the indoctrination into this type of reasoning is so rampant one wonders if it can ever have an effect. It's an uphill battle that's for sure.
MarkH:
Surely, we can triumph if we only "refine our message"!
. . . right?
Mark; Thanks for the comment, and I too am discouraged by this and other recent creationist activity. Part of the problem is that this is all about faith and defending God, and pockets are deep for people who want to do that. "Judgment Day" gets two hours on PBS, creationist nonsense gets a theatrical release and a big budget; it's difficult to compete with that. People should know about the tactics of sleazy pseudo-scientists, but I also worry about the fact that the U.S. nearly comes in last in terms of science and math and that nothing has been done to change this. We can fight uphill indefinitely, but I think what it most certainly lacking is an improvement in science education and outreach. There are sociological reasons why creationism is so hard to dig out, too, as the U.S. is home to a large group of people who value allegiance to a very conservative religious doctrine over rational thought when it comes to science, and there doesn't seem to be any one answer as to how to "turn the tide" in the public realm.
I regularly discuss abiogenesis and evolution on my blog with creationists. A lot of them just don't realize that the process that created DNA cannot be compared to the processes that require intelligence like building a chair. I think a good way to explain abiogenesis would be to compare the origins of DNA to the process that makes snowflakes (a natural process, one that does not require miracles).
That's why I believe any complete education in science should include a course on logic, the scientific method, philosophy of science, and tactics of pseudoscience. It's not enough to make kids memorize facts, which is what my pre-college biology and other science classes mostly consisted of, and what most people operate with. I didn't learn what science really was until I devoted a fair amount of time to actually doing it.
It's unrealistic to expect every kid to write a scientific paper, or even really to successfully design an experiment and collect data. It should be encouraged, and is by projects like science fairs which tend to be optional (and still inadequate). We can't expect too much from public education, I'm not being fatalist, but curricula need to be designed based on the realistic expectation of what you can drill into hormone driven teenagers. Basic logic, adequate understanding of the philosophy of science - the method, the seminal experiments etc., is possible. And preparation for the kinds of BS arguments that are used to convince people of nonsense will help not only fight pseudoscience, but lots of other things as well. Like believing advertisement.
Anyway, that's my job. Counter-pseudoscientific education of the public.