Unfortunately, I don't think this movie is going to be
as popular as its producers and authors hope, in spite
of the helpful hysterics emanating from the scientific
community (of humor as well as horror).
The film necessarily engages in critical thinking.
Critical thinking is deeply toxic to any form of
authoritarian religion. No matter how it was purposed,
it will turn against its religious proponents. Freedom
to believe whatever you want includes not only freedom
to believe in the Bible but freedom to believe in the
Great Purple Unicorn or in nothing at all. ID is
religion shooting itself not in the foot but the head.
However, the folk, especially the believing folk, are
unlikely to go for any form of critical thinking.
Thinking is the province of a minority -- the sort of
cranks who write letters to the editor and articles in
blogs and on Usenet. The average person doesn't want
to do the work. If she or he is religious, pure young
earth Creationism is far more to the point: reject
perception, evidence and reason and believe whatever
the Authority tells you, in the case of Fundamentalists
the Bible. No muss, no fuss, no bother. "God said
it, I believe it, that ends it," as a bumper sticker
puts it.
Intelligent Design -- which is philosophical
speculation -- isn't going to do the trick. It's like
substituting herbal tea for white lightning. True
believers will have to be flogged to partake. I don't
think it's going to go over. Too bad.
In article <480DA48A.3040100@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Dan Clore <clore@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> http://tinyurl.com/5pyd7d
> Flunk This Movie!
> Ben Stein's new anti-science movie Expelled is all worldview and no
> evidence.
> by Ronald Bailey
> April 16, 2008
>
> "This is not a religious argument," asserts Discovery Institute
> president Bruce Chapman in conservative Hollywood gadfly Ben Stein's new
> anti-science propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The
> movie opens this Friday in 1,100 theaters, the largest theatrical
> release ever for a do***entary, according to Expelled's producers.
>
> The movie's basic point? To quote a transcript from a Rush Limbaugh show
> posted to the movie's offical website: "Darwinism has taken root, taken
> hold at every major intellectual institution around the world in Western
> Society, from Great Britain to the United States, you name it.
> Darwinism, of course, does not permit for the existence of a supreme
> being, a higher power, or a God."
>
> Yet despite its topic, the film is entirely free of scientific
> content‹no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for
> "intelligent design" (ID) theory is given. Which makes sense because
> biological evolution is amply sup****ted by evidence from the fossil
> record, molecular biology, and morphology. For example, the younger the
> rocks in which fossils are found, the more closely they resemble species
> alive today, and the older the rocks, the less resemblance there is. In
> addition, molecular biology confirms that the more distantly related the
> fossil record suggests species lineages are, the more their genes
differ.
>
> Instead of evaluating this evidence, Stein spends most of the movie
> asking various proponents of evolutionary theory, including Richard
> Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Michael Ruse, and Daniel Dennett, for their
> religious views. Neither the producers nor Stein understand that
> offering critiques of a theory with which they disagree is not the same
> as proving their own theory.
>
> Stein and the film's producers maintain that belief in evolutionary
> biology makes societies more likely to suc***b to totalitarianism. The
> flick is replete with grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies, Nazi
> thugs, Stalin, Hitler, and concentration camps. The filmmakers ****tray
> opposition to teaching ID in universities and public schools as a threat
> to freedom on a par with Communist and Nazi repression. But ID
> proponents in the academy are not being dragged off to concentration
> camps by goose-stepping Darwinist thugs‹the worst thing they suffer is
> the loss of their jobs. That's not fun, but it's not the gas chamber
either.
>
> This silly, duplicitous film features one associate after another of the
> Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" that has been at the
> forefront of campaign to smuggle intelligent design into science
> classrooms and public discourse. This campaign was outlined in the
> Discovery Institute's infamous "Wedge Strategy" do***ent in 1998. That
> do***ent begins with the sentence, "The proposition that human beings
> are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on
> which Western civilization was built." The Wedge do***ent goes on to
> complain: "Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came
> under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of
> modern science."
>
> The Wedge do***ent makes it crystal clear what comes first for
> intelligent designers, and it isn't evidence. Under activities to
> popularize intelligent design, the Wedge do***ent mentions
> "do***entaries and other media productions." Expelled is just part of
> that propaganda strategy.
>
> The film is being bankrolled by Walt Ruloff, a Christian evangelical
> software millionaire. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, Ruloff
> hooked up with another Expelled producer, Logan Craft, when Craft was
> studying with evangelical theologian J.I. Packer at Regent College in
> Vancouver. Ruloff claims that he was shocked when one of the leading
> genomic researchers in the U.S. told him that as much 30 percent of
> research in his field is never published because it points toward
> intelligent design theory. Just how this much research is hidden from
> view goes unexplained.
>
> The film begins with moody shots of Ben Stein backstage before he
> addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of
> scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks
> onstage and declares that freedom is the essence of America. So far, so
> good. Then he muses, What if our freedom was taken away? In fact, Stein
> asserts that this is already happening. We are losing our freedom in one
> of the most im****tant sectors of our society‹science.
>
> As evidence of this loss of freedom, Stein trots out a small parade of
> intelligent design martyrs. Let's look at a few cases. In 2004, Richard
> Sternberg, who was editor of the scientific journal Proceedings of the
> Biological Society of Wa****ngton, published an article by Stephen Meyer
> arguing that the "Cambrian explosion" 570 to 530 million years ago in
> which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for
> intelligent design. Meyer was then a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic
> University where all "trustees, officers, members of the faculty or of
> the staff, must believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, both the
> Old and New Testaments; that man was directly created by God."
>
> Sternberg was serving on the editorial board of the Baraminology Study
> Group, a group of young-earth creationists. Baraminology is the study of
> biblical animal "kinds." Sternberg argued that he was a friendly
> outsider advising them against their young-earth views. Meyer is now the
> head of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture and
> Sternberg is a signatory of the Discovery Institute's A Scientific
> Dissent from Darwinism.
>
> Many of Sternberg's colleagues reacted with dismay and the journal
> retracted Meyer's article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his
> office at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, was pressured to
> resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet, he
> still has office space in the Museum and has been reappointed for three
> more years. To be sure, probably some of his colleagues are unhappy with
> him and don't want to hang out with him anymore. This is far cry from
> the concentration camps, or what Stalin did to proponents of
> evolutionary biology in the name of Lysenkoism.
>
> In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU)
> did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct
> biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to
> teach students to question scientific orthodoxies. "I was only trying to
> teach what the university stands for‹academic freedom," she says in the
> Stein's film. Since GMU let her go, she says that she can no longer find
> work. In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism."
> Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture
> at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a
> "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological
> evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for
> evolution," Crocker said.
>
> Assistant professor of astronomy and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez was
> denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004, Gonzalez was
> coauthor, with theologian and Discovery Institute fellow Jay Richards,
> of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for
> Discovery. The publisher's press release claims that the authors
> "demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to sup****t
> life, but also gives us the best view of the universe, as if Earth‹and
> the universe itself‹were designed both for life and for scientific
> discovery." Gonzalez is arguing that the Earth is precisely positioned
> to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. But is
> this so? An Iowa State colleague, associate professor of religious
> studies Hector Avalos, disagrees and neatly skewers this conceit. To
wit:
>
> This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet
> had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able
> to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much
> closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so
> frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must
> have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.
>
> Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the
> university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of
> The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry
> that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results.
> Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just
> didn't get tenure.
>
> The most egregious part of the film is the attempt to link evolutionary
> biology with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was
> motivated by Darwin is just plain silly. Official Soviet biological
> doctrine was Lysenkoism, which was opposed to the findings of the modern
> synthesis of genetics and evolutionary biology. In fact, evolutionary
> biologists and geneticists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of
> international fascism" and actually thrown into the Gulag for their
> scientific sins.
>
> As for Nazism, the film interviews mathematician and Discovery Institute
> fellow David Berlinski who says, "Darwinism is not a sufficient
> condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary
> one." To visually illustrate the alleged totalitarian temptations of
> evolutionary biology, Stein wanders through the Nazi death camp at
> Dachau. Berlinski and other Discovery Institute denizens are basically
> claiming that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human
> beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren't special,
> goes this line of thinking, then morals don't apply. This is a variation
> of the adage, "If god is dead, then everything is permitted."
>
> [Adolf Hitler endorses Creationism in _Mein Kampf_.--DC]
>
> Of course, this overlooks the fact that people down through the
> millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are
> permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition,
> and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are
> helping us to better understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics
> contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide,
> and warfare. Evolutionary psychology is also offering new ideas about
> how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation,
> love, and tolerance.
>
> Near the end of the film, Stein asks Dawkins, author of The God Delusion
> and arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet,
> if he could think of any cir***stances under which intelligent design
> might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that
> aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia.
> This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel
> back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this a great "gotcha"
> and is the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that
> this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are
> claiming‹that a higher intelligence created life on earth. Only, they
> don't want that higher intelligence to be a race of purple space squids.
> (By the way, Dawkins says that he is not a proponent of directed
> panspermia.)
>
> The film's close returns to Stein's speech in which he declares, "There
> are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it
> can't possibly touch a higher power." Earlier in the film, Warwick
> University "science studies" sociologist Steve Fuller archly poses the
> question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his
> question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. However, as this
> dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more
> relevant to the sup****ters of intelligent design theory.
>
> If ID is all worldview and no evidence, here's something else to ponder.
> At an April 15 press conference for bloggers held at the conservative
> Heritage Foundation in Wa****ngton, D.C., the movie's producers said that
> they plan to use the movie as part of a campaign to roll out legislation
> in states‹so-called "freedom bills"‹that would forbid anyone from
> "puni****ng" teachers and professors who question "Darwinism." Walt
> Ruloff noted that the science standards of about 26 states are currently
> in play and that Florida was likely to pass such a "freedom bill."
>
> Asked if the movie's makers expected any friendly interest from
> scientific journals, Ruloff noted that Scientific American had savaged
> Expelled, adding, "I would expect that any other 'science rag' would do
> exactly the same thing."
>
> "What's happening here is politics," lamented the film's star, Ben
> Stein, at Heritage. "Politics in the halls of science and that needs to
> be stopped."
>
> I couldn't agree more.
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