creationism
gregladen | April 22, 2008Chris Mooney has made an "appeal to authority" (Randy Olson) in asserting that Expelled is a success by Hollywood standards, and this may be correct. PZ Myers and his comet tail may have increased that success as per Mooney's Framing TOE, but the reverse is also true: the science blogging share of the blogosphere has expanded and participation in that community has significantly increased. Oh, and nobody understands me.
What Chris actually does is to cite Olson, who in turn makes the argument. One could ask why Chris did not make the argument himself because the argument should stand on…
pharyngula | April 22, 2008I think I've said just about everything I can about that contemptible, dishonest propaganda movie starring Ben Stein, so I've been fairly quiet about it lately. It will run its short course in the theaters, and the main result will be that we'll get a few more creationists who, in addition to being grossly ignorant, will be grossly disinformed about science. Thanks to the Expelled gang, creationist arguments will be a little bit stupider.
So here are what I think are the best of the responses I've seen so far.
Sahotra Sarkar succinctly guts the main points of the movie. (It's also partly in…
pharyngula | April 21, 2008We have a confession! It was made by Michael Edmondson, and it was produced by the people behind Expelled. He wrote to me, and says, "The intent of the video has been questioned a lot…I suppose the answer is that I tried to make something that was funny to me and It's not really meant to convince anyone of anything." That's how I felt about it: it's amusing, and that's all that matters — it's vague enough that it can be read any way you want.
Edmondson has also made a brief sequel.
Note that Stein is wearing a t-shirt that says "Poe's Law".
laelaps | April 21, 2008It's Monday morning, three days after the opening of the creationist propaganda piece Expelled, and everyone seems to be talking about whether the film can be considered to be a success or not. Wing Nut Daily says that it was a resounding success (despite coming in at #8), while many of my fellow science bloggers don't see it that way at all. I guess it all depends on what your definition of "success" is.
The numbers that have come in so far indicate that Expelled took in about 1.2 million dollars on Friday, which quickly dipped to $990,000 on Saturday on $958,000 on Sunday, making the total…
tfk | April 20, 2008On Saturday night, we celebrated the first night of Passover. It's a day on which Jews have, since time immemorial, celebrated out freedom, and greater freedom to come. The seder is a profound and moving ceremony, and its form connects us through the generations, back to the ancestors who laid the groundwork for modern Jewish religion and culture.
It is especially disturbing, then that Disco. Inst.'s David Klinghoffer emerged from whatever dank cesspool he lives in, and on the day before Passover, announced:
Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp…
razib | April 20, 2008Chris Mooney is claiming Expelled is a box office success. Documentaries don't make a very big splash typically, but whatever you think about the impact of Expelled, the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 will go down as a much bigger success illustrates the contrast between depth and breadth of feeling from their respective audiences. Michael Moore's politics have a smaller potential audience than the half of Americans who are Creationist, and the 3/4 of Americans who are open to the idea of "equal time," but the devotees of Moore's brand of Leftism are far more intense in their sentiment. I am…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith community and start a public relations and political campaign to have the form-substance dichotomy (hylomorphism) taught as chemical science. What would be the outcome?
Well, for most people they would remain as uneducated on the topic as before. They may know, vaguely, there is a dispute of some…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Chris Mooney, who every day seems to transmogrify more and more into a creationist apologist, makes the case that Expelled! is a box office success. He seems almost giddy about it in his post on the topic. I'm sure Chris will be blaming PZ Myers, me, the rest of us people for part of this. But see below.
Elsewhere, and in contrast, we find evidence that Expelled is "on track to be a box-office bomb" (from Laelaps).
There is other evidence of Expelled! lack of success.
Playing in 1,052 theaters, the pic distributed by Rocky Mountain Pictures earned $1.2M Friday for what should be a $3.4M…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Steve Mirsky does a little Darwin Quote Mining reversal exercise in a recent post called "Never You Mine: Ben Stein's Selective Quoting of Darwin:"
One of the many egregious moments in the new Ben Stein anti-evolution film "Expelled" is the truncation of a quote from Charles Darwin so that it makes him appear to give philosophical ammunition to the Nazis. Steve Mirsky reports.
Steve rightly corrects stein, but does not put the quote mining in sufficiently broad context. So I do:
The original text from Darwin that Stein refers to in Expelled! expresses Darwin's ambivalence about the social…
gregladen | April 20, 2008Louisiana State Senate Bill 561 is an "academic freedom" bill intended to push discussion of creationism, global warming denialism, and so on into state public schools. This is the latest in a long series of efforts of right wing fundamentalist christians to indoctrinate public school students in their particular religious (and political) beliefs.
In 1981, a law was placed on the books in Louisiana requiring that creationism receive equal time as evolution in public schools. The ACLU challenged the bill, and by 1987 it was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court because, obviously, it…
mikethemadbiologist | April 20, 2008What? You thought I was serious? I'm Mad, not crazy. But the release of Expelled gives me an opportunity to note one facet of creationist stupidity.
A while ago, in response to Michael Egnor, who features prominently in the movie Expelled, I discussed how creationists party like it's 1859. As the movie Expelled inadvertently demonstrates, they fail to recognize that we biologists have done a little work since Darwin's Origin of Species. Specifically, creationists never discuss either population genetics or phylogenetics because, if they did, they would get their asses handed to them (and…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Biologist and philosopher Sahotra Sarkar is combative, to say the least. When he says what he means, it can hurt physically if you are the target. I almost feel sympathy for Ben Stein...
And knowing one of the principals in this comment, I had to laugh. When Kimbo says he thinks you are full of shit, he uses those words. I once had him say to me during a Q&A after I gave a talk, "'Fuck you,' he explained." To be fair, I had just told him I thought he was wrong.
So anyone who thinks Intelligent Design has been expelled and they are victims, or that bloggers should be treated with…
pharyngula | April 19, 2008A fair number of creationists must be leaving a certain propaganda movie and getting on to the internet to find targets of their ire, because I'm getting a little surge in hate mail — mostly short, petty whines and accusations. For any who find this site in addition to my email address, I have two suggestions for you:
Look up the actual stories of the "expelled". It seems their martyrdom has been grossly exaggerated.
Then compare those stories with more serious case of religious persecution against those who favor evolution.
Creationists, much as I'd love to smack down every one of…
razib | April 19, 2008...as a piece of propaganda. I noticed that the local "art house" theater was screening Expelled, so I decided to check it out. There weren't many people there. It started off very heavy-handed, a montage of archetypical scenes from the Communist and Nazi regimes, but the production values & execution of the first half of the documentary wasn't half bad. I assume the producers were pitching this to a sympathetic autidence, so the intent was glamorize and present the argument effectively, not convert anyone to the message. The interviews with the eminences of the Intelligent Design…
pharyngula | April 19, 2008Bryan Fischer claims that anyone is capable of defeating Darwin in 4 easy steps, all they have to do is remember his four "scientific" arguments. I've got an easier strategy for creationists: be really stupid, lie a lot, and ignore anything a scientist tells you. See? Only three steps, and none of them require any thought whatsoever. Besides, it's really what Fischer has done, too. The only thing new is that he has distilled creationist inanity down to four easily dismissed lies, and they actually are fairly representative of common creationist misconceptions.
So here you go, Bryan Fischer's…
pharyngula | April 18, 2008You can join in, and many of you here are old pros at this exercise:
In promoting the creationist propaganda film Expelled, Ben Stein managed to stick his foot in his mouth over and over again, issuing what seemed to be a ceaseless stream of ignorant, offensive, and just plain daffy claims. Here’s your chance to set Ben straight. Send your favorite claim to setbenstraight@ncseweb.org along with a refutation. We’ll post the best for all the world to see. And five lucky entrants will receive a year’s subscription to Reports of the NCSE along with their choice of a book from NCSE’s shelf -…
gregladen | April 18, 2008Darrow was born this day in 1857. He was a lawyer and a prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
We know him as the defender of John Scopes in the Monkey Trial of 1925. Darrow and Scopes lost that trial, which was the first of many court cases regarding the teaching of creationism vs. evolution in public schools. Virtually all of the subsequent cases were victories for the evolutionists. Indeed, the Monkey Trial was a victory for evolutionists as well, because it is widely recognized that although the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Darrow's arguments were…
laelaps | April 18, 2008
If creationists had their way, today would be the "Waterloo" of evolutionary science. Lab equipment would begin to collect dust, once proud scientists would have to find jobs flipping burgers, and creationism's Trojan horse (intelligent design) would successfully "reclaim America for Christ," all thanks to a little documentary called Expelled. The film has been surrounded by controversy from day one, not only for it's propaganda-like vibe, but also for the dishonest tactics employed by the creators of the film. Popular songs have been lifted without permission/under shady pretenses, computer…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.
pharyngula | April 17, 2008The email below the fold is a fairly typical rant from a creationist who has a teeny tiny bit of information, and therefore thinks he has uncovered an irrefutable disproof of evolution. In this case, he has noted that different species have differing numbers of chromosomes, and therefore, because he believes variation in chromosome number is an absolute barrier to fertilization, evolution could not have occurred.
He's missing a few key pieces of information. One is that, contrary to his belief, variation in chromosome number is not a barrier to reproduction, although it can reduce fertility.…