creationism
gregladen | March 21, 2008Many more comments and posts on Expelled, the Sequel.
On Richard Dawkins Net
PZ Myers gets Expelled
On Talk Origins.
I think in the end, the movie Expelled will have less written about it than The Day They Expelled PZ.
And, getchyer LOL PZ and Dawkins Pic's here!
Partial Loss of Face Recognition may be Associated with the ID(C) Locus: A Case Study
gregladen | March 21, 2008As you have undoubtedly heard, a group of evolutionary biologists and evolutionary biology supporters attended a showing of the movie Expelled, in the Twin Cities, last night. This group included the very famous Richard Dawkins and the only slightly less famous PZ Myers. PZ and Richard, in fact, were together in line, along with PZ's spouse, a daughter, and a future son in law. Other evolution supporters and at least one local evolutionary-type blogger were also in line.
While waiting in line and minding their own business, PZ was spotted by the Expelled! production staff, and EXPELLED…
laelaps | March 21, 2008I made a bit of a tactical error in my viewing choices the other night. For some reason I thought that I could handle watching Maxed Out (a great documentary about the soul-sucking practices of credit card companies) and Nancy Pelosi's Friends of God in one night, but I ended up a bit depressed at the end of the evening. I would recommend both, but Pelosi's feature is especially good. Here's a clip from one of her stops to see our old pals from AiG, Ken Ham and Buddy Davis;
The documentary Jesus Camp also featuring some disconcerting footage of creationism being peddled to children;…
gregladen | March 21, 2008This is unbelievable!!!! I am outraged yet not surprised. I am incensed yet entertained. I am frightened yet ever determined to cast off the yoke of oppression. And so on.
You MUST GO HERE NOW and READ THIS. You will laugh, you will cry, you will punch a fist through the wall, and you will never look at a police officer, a movie theater, or a creationist in the same way again. Ever.
pharyngula | March 20, 2008People are asking me to tell them more about the movie, Expelled. I can't! I was thrown out!
Let me clarify a few things. This was a private screening with no admission charge, and you had to reserve seats ahead of time; you also had to sign a promise that you wouldn't record the movie while you were there, and they were checking ID. Everyone in my family reserved seats under our own names, myself included. There was no attempt to "sneak in", although apparently the producer, Mark Mathis, accused me of doing so in the Q&A afterwards (Mathis, of course, is a contemptible liar). We followed…
tfk | March 20, 2008Someone at the same screening of Expelled: No Intelligence that PZ Myers was tossed out of has two very contradictory things to say about the movie:
the entire audience, minus Dawkins’ posse, agreed that that the film’s main point was that Intelligent Design should be taught in conjunction with Evolution.
And also:
In fact, Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany.
Teach the outrageous and shoddy attempt to trivialize the Holocaust! As the ADL's Abraham Foxman has said before: "…
tfk | March 20, 2008If you make a movie that falsely claims there's a massive conspiracy to expel dissenting voices, it's probably unwise to then expel dissenting voices.
And if you are going to pass photographs around to security guards and instruct them that certain people are threats to your movie, and must be expelled, you might as well have the guards be on the lookout not only for PZ Myers, an innocuous professor from a small liberal arts college in the backwoods of Minnesota, but also for the biologist, best-selling author of numerous books, and TV star Richard Dawkins. Just on the off chance that…
laelaps | March 20, 2008
This has to be seen to be believed; the creationists behind Expelled are so threatened by PZ that he was threatened with arrest if he attempted to see the film, but Richard Dawkins made it in without a problem. I'm sure the internet will be a-buzz with whatever Dawkins has to say about the film when he eventually posts his thoughts (the news about what happened to PZ is already making the rounds), but I can't imagine why the producer of Expelled singled out PZ. (Also of interest, "Nomad" has posted some thoughts on another recent screening of the film.)
And now for something completely…
evolvingthoughts | March 20, 2008
PZ Mydfgsers tried to see Expelled, Ben Stein's silly film about ID. He was asked to leave by some uniformed guard or policeman, as the producers had him on a Watch List or something. They let his family, and guest in, though. The guest was Richard Dawkins...
pharyngula | March 20, 2008There is a rich, deep kind of irony that must be shared. I'm blogging this from the Apple store in the Mall of America, because I'm too amused to want to wait until I get back to my hotel room.
I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled! It was kind of weird — I was standing in line, hadn't even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2008OK, last post about this bozo, and then I'm done (famous last words...). In the previous post, I dealt with Egnor's claim that the evolution of antibiotic resistance by selection of resistant genotypes is obvious, and not germane (namely, that it wasn't obvious at one point in time). What bothered me with not just Egnor's claim (which I'll get to a minute) and ScienceBlogling Mike's response is that evolutionary biology does have a significant role to play in combating the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance.
First, what Egnor said:
The important medical research on antibiotic…
gregladen | March 19, 2008The fight continues in Texas; Homophobia is a punishable offense, yet legislators march on in opposition to the already underway 21st century; Some guy named Stephen on homeschooling.
Mary Helen Berlanga is the senior member of the Texas Board of Education. She is warning Texas citizens of impending fights on the board regarding a number of issues, including evolution.
She asked her constituents to travel to Austin next week to speak out against proposed amendments outside consultants are pushing for that she says exclude Hispanics and other minorities from classroom instruction.…
mikethemadbiologist | March 19, 2008In the previous post, I described how Egnor, like many creationists, refuses to answer serious rebuttals of his foolishness. But what's truly odd is how Egnor argues about natural selection.
Egnor repeatedly claims that 'Darwinism' is nothing except self-obvious: bacteria that are more likely to survive and reproduce because they are resistant to an antibiotic are more likely to survive and reproduce in the presence of that antibiotic.
It is obvious--today. If I were to give a talk which had as its central thesis the concept that natural selection has given rise to antibiotic resistant…
pharyngula | March 19, 2008This bad propaganda film for creationism is going to come out soon, so I can sympathize with this call to put together an honest science movie in reply. However, I have huge reservations, particularly with the idea that we need to get people who understand science to write the movie. People who understand science might very well be the worst possible people to write it; the first priority ought to be get people who understand movies to write it. Someone like, for instance, John Rogers or Randy Olson — somebody who knows the movie business and also knows the science.
Then you run into another…
mikethemadbiologist | March 18, 2008While criticizing someone who does not understand the difference between artificial and natural selection--something I've successfully communicated to high school students and undergraduates--is like picking on the slow kid, his repeated nitpicking of ScienceBlogling Mike Dunford's post about the topic is illustrative of how creationists, whether they be young earth or intelligent design, operate.
Instead of dealing with Orac's or my response, Egnor quibbles with Mike over exactly what he meant. It's trolling, masquerading as intellectual discussion (and I had the same style of idiocy show…
pharyngula | March 18, 2008Michael Egnor has made a blatant tactical error, and Larry Moran catches him on it. Note what Egnor says about evolution, that it is "obviously true".
Dr. Wells pointed out that research on antibiotic resistance wasn't guided by Darwinian evolutionary theory. That evolution occurred -- that is, that the population of bacteria changed over time -- is obviously true, and obviously was relevant to the antibiotic resistance research. Dr. Wells made the observation that the research owed little to Darwin's theory that all biological complexity arose by natural selection without teleology.
Larry…
evolvingthoughts | March 17, 2008
Ever since Gould's Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, the popular view has been that the Cambrian was an "explosion" of living forms, and for some, usually but not always creationists, this has been touted as contrary to "Darwinism" (whateverthehell that is) or even evolutionary theory. PvM at Panda's Thumb has a nice post about this and recent work. And I'm not just saying that because he links to one of my articles on the web. One point I would make, that he doesn't mention, is that figures derived from "genera" or "classes" in the fossil record are weak signals…
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2008Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, in an excellent post, argues that much of the opposition to evolution stems from opposition to (mis)perceived liberal elites (bold original; italics mine):
What scientists tend to underestimate is the extent to which many people react viscerally against science just because it is science. Or, more generally, because it is seen as part of an effort on the part of elites to force their worldview on folks who are getting along just fine without all these fancy ideas, thank you very much.
In the old-time (1980's) controversies about teaching creationism in…
gregladen | March 17, 2008First, Larry said:
...the right people hate Idiots...Wells makes a virtue out of lying for Jesus...He should be an embarrassment to the intelligent design creationist cult except that the members of that cult are all incapable of separating fact from fiction when it comes to science...When I first saw the Wells article I seriously wondered whether Jonathan Wells was mentally stable...
Then, Michael Egnor said:
Dr. Moran has a low view of people who question his evolutionary views from the perspective of design.
Larry had previously said:
Flunk the IDiots...40% of the freshman class [at UCSD…