Fossils, Bones and Primates: Enriching High School Teaching

I attended the science teachers' workshop at the American Association of Physical Anthropology Annual Meeting, and met educators, graduate students, and other colleagues from around the area and from the Smithsonian (for which I have a special place in my heart). The half-day workshop focused on equipping educators with training modules that incorporated the latest research and discoveries in human evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, primatology, and forensics.

I hope to turn this into a published article, like my article about the presentation on the Brooklyn Public Library's Human Genome Project Community Conversations curriculum at last year's American Library Association conference (to be published soon).

Much of the information was old news to me, and some of it revealed gaps in my knowledge, but the session focused on effective means of communicating scientific nuance to high school students, who can come away from their science classes looking for a neat linear succession of fossils ("This evolved from this, and this evolved from this," etc.) and who could reinforce rather than question their own assumptions about skin color variation and "race," since a person's so-called "race" is so immediately apparent to us.

An important point that can get lost in teaching human evolution is that other primates are not "failed humans," but evolved creatures in their own right. Our cousins have their own place in the ecosystem and evolved alongside us. Your cousin is not "striving" to become you! Evolution is messy, not a straight-line process, and not aiming for us; Homo sapiens got lucky, and we are the one human species left over. We did not "win" anything; if anything, other species of humans lasted longer than we likely will.

The teachers expressed particular concern about their difficulties in getting teenagers in particular to see that race is a social construct, whereas skin color variation is not an accurate indicator of ethnicity. There is greater skin color variation within so-called "races" than between them. Laying down skin color tones in a line visually reinforces the fact that skin color exists on a continuum, even within families. Unlike eye and hair color, skin color is not determined by a simple gene pairing but by an array of genes, and it is not the case that lighter-skinned indigenous people were always found in the higher latitudes, whereas darker-skinned indigenous people were clustered around the equator. Different ethnicities co-evolved with their ability to absorb and retain certain vitamins, with their diet, with their ability or not to tolerate heat or cold, and these factor into skin color.

It was particularly instructive to me that most of the questions in the Q&A focused on practical needs, such as ways for teachers to collaborate, to communicate effectively to their students, to find sources of funding, and to keep up with the latest research. Creationism was brought up only at the very end, and most of the people in the room seemed to have the resources that they needed to deal with classroom disruptions or upset parents. Actually, one educator stated that her time at a science table during a fair in Iowa was boring; farmers especially accept evolution and do not find it to be "controversial."


If anything, I have long suspected that ID has made inroads with youth who are estranged from the land and from animals, who see food as something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the land, who do not get the chance to observe that each animal is a genetic individual, and who cannot imagine how heredity works. I am not inspired by the idea that nature was "manufactured" in the same manner that the Coca-Cola Company manufactures soda pop. The idea of children seeing themselves as commodities of a manufacturer deity strikes me as compatible with the corporate agenda to turn them into consumers, to make them see themselves as people who wear this or that corporate brand, who root for this or that corporate sports team, and who are easily swayed by this or that corporate scare tactic.

Food for thought: creationism/ID remains a concern, but it is not the biggest concern in teaching evolution today; and cultivating media literacy--seeing through the clever tactics of advertisers and anyone else with an agenda--in young people is related to teaching science effectively. Certainly this has become more evident to me as the proponents of ID try to adopt a "hip, now, new generation" style of marketing. (Could little sayings on cans of Faygo be far behind?)

Creationist Fan of VenomFangX Videos Kills Woman, Himself

Do people remember this exchange in the comments of my apparently most anguish-inducing post, "Ken Ham's Petting Zoo Opens to Shut Minds."

Kristine said...
Rene, here's the kind of ugly, smug, ignoramous mentality you and your Creation Museum are turning out: Satan Created Evolution.Proud of yourself?

[The link is now broken - for reasons I'll give below - but it was to a video by VenomFangX entitled "Satan Created Evolution."]

Rene' said...
All, If you had no vitriol in your heart for religion or Christianity in particular, you would have reported only that --in your opinion Mr. ham is wrong -- and not used such harsh terms that make you the intolerant crowd. You know the type, the ones who ridiculed Mr. Darwin for his theory. Apparently, Mr. Ham is in the same boat as Darwin, he has committed sacrilege against your god -- you. There is not and never will be any conclusive proof that would prove evolution it is nothing more than a theory, requiring faith. Conversely, I will never convince you that God is real and He sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins so that we may spend eternity with Him. God would never use categorical proof, for there would be no faith, God, for whatever reason, needs us to be faithful not convinced. I envy you --- in my opinion -- yours is the greater faith. To believe that life sprang from nothing -- without the help of the Creator, that requires more faith than I could ever possess. I know that your god, you, should be very pleased with yourselves. Rene

And blah, blah, blah. Well, good old VenomFangX has apparently yanked some of his videos because a fan of his named Anthony Powell - who also posted his anti-atheist, anti-evolution rants on You Tube, calling atheists "non-human" and such - recently killed a female student and himself. She reportedly was not his girlfriend and rebuffed his repeated sexual advances.

Her name was Asia McGowan and she was an aspiring dancer and actress.

Anthony Powell was a bully who posted videos on You Tube about how "evolution is a lie" and "women should be submissive to their man."

Then there is the Sunday School teacher who killed Sandra Cantu (her grandfather had the nerve to bitch about what the investigation was doing to the "image" of his church, and now she's up for a rape charge, too - yuck!).

The creationist who stabbed to death a man who argued for evolutionary theory, and the plethora of parents lately who either killed their kids through "exorcism" or by praying over them instead of taking them to a doctor.

Rene, anything to say? Michael Ruse, do you have something to add? Being ignorant is romantic - right? Salt of the earth. Kind of like how being poor is "exciting."

Ken Ham is not only wrong, he is dangerous. VenomFangX is not only wrong, he is dangerous. Anthony Powell was not only wrong - he was tragically dangerous, because he didn't have to take an innocent woman along with him - and he is also living proof that a belief in hell doesn't prevent anyone from committing evil.

That's why Jerry Falwell was dangerous. And why Pat Robertson is dangerous. And why Peter Popoff - who James Randi unmasked nearly three decades ago - is back (as Randi resignedly admitted in his speech at the CFI World Conference) on the BET Channel doing fake healings, causing people to avoid medical treatment en masse, and he is still dangerous. Michael Ruse, are you paying attention?

As for "me, my god, me," I simply don't believe in something that does not exist. So I don't believe in "my god, me," but just in me. The way that you should simply believe in yourself. Each person should.

Wherein Michael Ruse Avoids My Questions

Michael Ruse gave a presentation tonight at the CFI World Congress on “Darwinism [sic] and Christianity: Do They Conflict and Does It Matter?” that I mostly could accept. He made some good points that there are some simliarities in the claims of Dawkins and the claims of intelligent design theorists that science and religion are apparently irreconcilable, but then ended with this question:

If Darwinism [sic] implies atheism, does teaching it [evolution] in school become unconstitutional?

In other words, Ruse is saying that if a parent objects to what a child is being taught in science class, even if the teacher does not make a specific religious claim, that scientific claim thus becomes a religious claim and becomes unconstitutional.

I stood up and asked the following:

“If evolution implies atheism, or is being made to imply atheism by Dawkins as you claim, and is therefore unconstitutional to teach in school, 1) what about all the other sciences that underpin evolution, in particular geology, which caused great anguish among people that I knew, 2) isn’t science going to have implications for anyone who pre-emptively makes a cosmic claim without evidence, and 3) hasn’t Dawkins in particular repeatedly made the point that the essential conflict is between evidence versus credulity, or faith, rather than just evolution versus Christianity?”

That is a question. I asked him a question. Michael Ruse waved it off and said, “We’ll put that in the ‘comment’ section.” Then he went on to accuse Eddie Tabash of “lacking integrity” because Tabash pointed out that science in the public schools is not taught to attack anyone’s religion but to present knowledge backed by evidence that people need to have to be educated.

Then, Michael Ruse drew the analogy that a science teacher who taught evolution without mentioning the Bible or God, but nevertheless caused a conflict within a student who was indoctrinated by creationism, was attacking that student’s beliefs (actually that student’s parents’ beliefs) and therefore violating the Constitution!

Using this argument, Michael Ruse then compared the above science teacher to a teacher who taught the students that “some animals with certain genitals are inferior to other animals with different genitals,” and then claimed, “Oh, I said nothing about men and women! I didn’t teach one was inferior to another!” Now, I ask you, is that analogy apt? Considering I was the only woman who asked a question, and it didn’t get answered?

Well, a man asked him if a teacher taught that the value of pi was 3.14 but a parent believes that it is three (as it is in the Bible), if the teacher was, according to Ruse, violating the Constitution. Ruse said yes! (Then he attempted to spin it and accused Tabash again of being dishonest.)

Then he said, “I agree with Eddie Tabash! I don’t want The Flood taught in schools!” ignoring the obvious fact that, by what he claimed above, any teacher teaching geology would, according to Ruse, be attacking theology, rendering the teaching of geology “unconstitutional” and allowing that parent to block the subject or remove the child.

Wha—?

Michael Ruse then went on and on about how “basic Christianity doesn’t require people to literally believe in the Bible.” Hell, I’d like to know who these “basic Christians” are. As a teen-ager I had to explain to someone in my life that the earth was round and orbited the sun. I got into arguments with the other kids about how my agate, which I found when I was nine, was formed. I argued and argued against “creation science” in the 1980s. One coworker, when she learned that I was an atheist (I was nineteen and waitressing in Maplewood), gasped, flung herself across the room away from me, then recovered a bit and asked, “So you believe in evolution?” No DUH!

As we were walking out, Ruse opined, "Well, I suppose there still could be people who use the Bible to justify slavery," and I called out, "Yes, there are!" Geez, hello Ruse! In fact, the ID folks are arguing that Darwin's anti-slavery conscience enslaved people all the more!

How the hell can Michael Ruse compare a teacher teaching evolution in class and not adding “and this is why the Bible is not true” to a teacher teaching that females are inferior to males?

What is wrong with this man? Why does he pick this fight, when in fact the denizens of the Discovery Institute are taking all religious language out of their literature anyway, in their efforts to shoe-horn intelligent design in schools? (“Teach the controversy…” “Strengths and weaknesses…” “Critical analysis…”) Ruse must really be out of touch!

This is a class issue. This is about social class, and how can Ruse understand that? He probably never missed a spring break in Florida or Cancun. (I waitressed, or just stayed home, over my spring breaks.) Education is about providing greater class mobility, whether or not the graduate goes on to make gobs of money. People are not just geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're fundamentalists - they can also be Democrats, union workers, generally liberals, yet geocentrists and flat-earthers because they're uneducated.

Being hampered by unnecessary, superstitious fear, or guilt, or repulsion of certain ideas (such as being related to apes) limits a person’s ability to view evidence. As Orwell said, whoever controls the past controls the future. Creationism is a nice little pastime for those who are well off (and I would add that Ruse’s question is also a nice little elitist paradox for him to enjoy because he never had to waitron his way through college), but it has real consequences for people less fortunate.

Creationism doesn't make people feel "special," it scares them to death.

Yet what I'm hearing (because Ruse's "teaching" has implications too) is that it doesn't matter to him whether or not I was educated at all.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Discovery Institute actually took up his argument, and start using it as well.

Belated Anniversary

Why, how remiss of me. I've missed the anniversary. (Getting an education will do that to you.) Happy "Death of Evolution Day," William Dembski. How the years do fly by.

Seven years to make my own scholarly paper invalid.

Should Dedicated Fishermen Go Jump in the Lake?

High dingbat quotient today. I just can't let this one go: Someone named Tom Frame has written in the Sydney Morning Herald that Darwinists should be "honest" with everyone:

The problem I face is weariness with science-based dialogue partners like Richard Dawkins. It surprises me he is not chided for his innate scientific conservatism and metaphysical complacency. He won't take his depiction of Darwinism to logical conclusions. A dedicated Darwinian would welcome imperialism, genocide, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, eugenics, euthanasia, forced sterilisations and infanticide. Publicly, he advocates none of them.

Okay, I'll give in and also admit that, as a dedicated Newtonian (I even named my cat after him), I also advocate everyone jumping off of a cliff! But Tom Frame first.

Honestly, how stupid can a person be? There is nothing that is not evolution. You can't "violate" evolution with your socio-political views any more than you can "violate" gravity. Does Frame think that airplane pilots are violating gravity by flying planes? (Sadly, he probably does. He's probably that confused.) If you care for the sick and the weak, you create an environment in which they get better and stronger. Duh. For pity's sake, the Neanderthals cared for and fed their elderly and infirm. Evolution tends toward ecological coexistence and equilibrium, not savagery. (Remember the Galapagos.)

Should beavers also embrace genocide, because after thousands of years of building beaver dams they are incapable of surviving without their structures, and have thus become soft and lazy and "unfit"? Should deer own up to the fact that, well, they've become dependent on their antlers, and are letting into the gene pool "unfit" members would could not have survived without those pointed, technologically advanced weapons? Should bees admit that they've become pansies, toiling on a hive all day instead of being wild and free like the badass, biker drones? I mean, how ridiculous!

If I were to own up to the fact that I do consider some people to be "superior" to others, I think creationists would be surprised to find people with autism spectrum and mental retardation - who are also avid library users - at the top of my hierarchy, and "normal" spoiled brats with fast cars, early acne prevention/nose jobs/breast augmentation, princessy attitudes, spray-on tans, nonexistent belly fat, and daily tantrums due to entitlement syndrome decidedly on my "unfit" list.



(Bwahaha! My one and only car was blue! Of course, it was a 1976 Buick station wagon.)

It's my personal belief that social "Darwinism" sprang up to hold back the implications of evolutionary theory, precisely because it suggested that the poor and the nonwhite had better survival skills than the fragile elite of the Victorian Age, and rich throwaways like our little MacKenzie above. But anyway.

More idiot news: Alan Keyes has a blog. Yes, that Alan Keyes.



*Suppresses major nacho urge*

In fact, Jesus Christ wouldn't even create Barack Obama! Because he's the anti-Christ, you know. *groan*

I'm not linking to Keyes's blaahhhg - you can get there via Ed's site. Just be aware - viewing Alan Keyes' literary glossolalia is painful for more reasons than one. The seizure-inducing colors alone might actually make you want to jump off a cliff.

"Someday a Place for Us" - the History of Creationism

Happy Darwin Day! In the interests of inclusiveness, let's give a history of the "controversy," shall we?

The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude. No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth…
If a doctrine is not unintelligible, it has to be vague; and if neither unintelligible nor vague, it has to be unverifiable. One has to get to heaven or the distant future to determine the truth of an effective doctrine. When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer. He seems to use words as if he were ignorant of their true meaning. Hence, too, his taste for quibbling, hair-splitting and scholastic tortuousness.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, pp. 80-81, 1951

The Long History of the Demise of Evolution
1825: We are going to overthrow physical philosophy and the old earth concept. (Granville Penn)
1840: We are going to overthrow physical philosophy and the old earth concept. (John Murray)

22 November 1859: Origin of Species goes on sale and is a best-seller

1860: Charles Darwin’s book will be forgotten in a few years. (Richard Owen)

1866: Gregor Mendel’s seminal paper on heredity, “Experiments on Plant Hybridization,” is published in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. Unfortunately, Darwin never sees this paper and despairs of finding the actual mechanism of heredity and natural selection. Mendel’s work languishes largely unknown, cited only three times in the next 35 years.

1871: We will overthrow astronomy, evolution, and the old earth concept. (Patrick M’Farlane)
1878: We will overthrow evolution once it “whimsically” concludes that man was actually descended from a dog. (Thomas Cooper)

1882: Charles Darwin dies.
1884: Gregor Mendel dies.

1894: Evolution’s influence is “ebbing.” (J. William Dawson)
1895: We will overthrow “flippancy” about the Flood. (F. R. Wegg-Prosser)

1900: Mendel’s work is rediscovered and the ensuing new field of genetics finally yields genotypic insights into natural selection

1903: “[T]he beginning of the end [of evolution] is at hand.” (Prof. Zockler)
1904: We will overthrow evolution. (Eberhard Dennert and Luther Tracy Townsend)
1912: We will overthrow “flippancy” about the Flood. (George Frederick Wright)
1924: We will overthrow evolution, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (George McCready Price)
1929 We will overthrow evolution. (Harold W. Clark)

1935: We will overthrow evolution and all the evidence for it. (Harry Rimmer)
1940: Evolution and all “false science” is in decline. We will overthrow evolution, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (L. Allen Higley)

1936–1947: Formulation of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis of Darwin’s and Mendel’s approaches

1961: “I concede micro-evolution, of course.” (Evan Shute)
1963: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry Morris)

1968: Epperson v. Arkansas – the prohibition against teaching of evolution in Arkansas schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment

1971: Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould present their paper on evolution via Punctuated Equilibrium (P.E.) at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America. Creationists attempt to seize on P.E. as “proof against evolution”

1975: “There are many and varied theories of evolution today, but scientists who reject divine creation are beset with serious problems and these are being increasingly recognized.” (Clifford Wilson)
1976: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Duane T. Gish)

1977: Stephen Jay Gould summarizes P.E. in Natural History magazine

1980: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis. (Scott M. Huse)

1982: McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education – “equal time” for “creation science” is an attempt by a small group to “foist its religious beliefs on others” in violation of the the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

See also Creationism on Trial

1984: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry M. Morris)
1987: “Every major pillar of Evolution has crumbled in the decade of the ‘80’s. (D. James Kennedy)

1987: Unfortunately for Mr. Kennedy, Edward v. Aguillard put the last nail in the coffin of “creation science” in schools – Louisiana’s “Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science in Public School Instruction” violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

1988: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Luther D. Sunderland)
1989: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” the Modern Synthesis, geology (the old earth concept), and this “flippancy” about the Flood! (Henry M. Morris, not to be outdone)

1990: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Mark Looy)
1991: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Duane T. Gish)
1993: Intelligent Design will replace natural selection. But “[t]his not an argument against Darwinian evolution.” (Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon)
1993: “Evolution theory itself has now collapsed under scientific scrutiny!” (T. V. Varughese)
1994: We will overthrow the Modern Synthesis and the old earth concept. (John D. Morris)
1994: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Don Boys)
1995: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, the old earth concept, and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (Henry M. Morris)
1995: We will overthrow “Darwinism.” (Philip E. Johnson (not the architect))
1996: We will scientifically prove God’s ability to transcend science (Hugh Ross)
1996: Behe’s works will overthrow “Darwinism.” (Philip E. Johnson)

December 20, 1996: Carl Sagan dies.

1997: “In the not-so-distant future, when someone of the stature of a Stephen Jay Gould or the late Carl Sagan holds a press conference to announce he has finally reached the conclusion that evolution is scientifically bankrupt, other scientists will quickly follow suit. It’ll resemble rats deserting a sinking ship.” (David Buckna)

1997: We will overthrow the Big Bang Theory, the Modern Synthesis, geology (the old earth concept), and this “flippancy” about the Flood. (poor Henry Morris again)

1998: “Darwin gave us a creation story, one in which God was absent and undirected natural processes did all the work. That creation story has held sway for more than a hundred years. It is now on the way out. When it goes, so will all the edifices that have been built on its foundation.” (William A. Dembski)

1998: Evolution, once “impregnable,” is “sinking.”. (Philip Johnson, apparently unaware that he’s setting a bad precedent by affirming, as no other creationist did (as you can see from the above), the enduring strength of evolutionary theory)

1999: “’Yes,’ their teachers will be obliged to inform them, ‘a lot of people back in those unfortunate days had gotten it into their silly heads that the whole world and everything in it had somehow evolved by accident, you see. It was all rather strange.’” (The silly head of Patrick Henry Reardon)

1999: The Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document is leaked and reveals the DI’s five-year strategy, which includes various publicity campaigns but no scientific research.

2000: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Ray Bohlin)
2001: Shifting the emphasis from the evidence in the fossil record to the evidence in DNA and genetics shows that more and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (the tragic Henry Morris, trying to keep up)
2001: The Discovery Institute initiates its “Scientific Dissent from Darwin” petition to gather signatures of legitimate scientists who oppose evolution
2001: “Intellectual honesty will soon force many scientists to abandon Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species in exchange for intelligent design or outright Biblical creation.” (Gregory J. Brewer)

2002: “Creation scientists may be in the minority so far [emphasis mine], but their number is growing, and most of them (like this writer) were evolutionists at one time, having changed to creationism at least in part because of what they decided was the weight of scientific evidence.” (Henry Morris, conceding a previous acceptance of evolutionary theory which he had heretofore not claimed)
2002: More and more scientists are flocking to “abandon” evolution! (Ralph O. Muncaster)
2002: “Here’s a prediction. Universal CD [common descent] will be gasping for breath in two or three years, if not sooner.” (Paul Nelson, setting a bad precedent in departing from vagueness and unverifiability)

2002: Stephen Jay Gould dies

2003: “In fact, the common presupposition that evolution is right may soon be behind us.” (Ralph O. Muncaster)
2003: I think there is some probability that the entire paradigm may come crashing down at some time in the future [emphasis mine].” (Henry F. Schaefer)
2003: “The only thing holding the tattered theory of evolution together is the powerful desire of millions of people to hold on to the notion of evolution regardless of its scientific weakness, because the alternative is unthinkable to its practitioners.” (Grant R. Jeffrey)

February 16, 2003 - “Project Steve” is launched as a tongue-in-cheek parody of the creationist petition, and gathers more than 700 scientists named “Steve” in support of teaching evolution in science classes

(Newly appointed Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is among these “Steves”)

2004: “In the next five years, molecular Darwinism – the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level – will be dead [emphasis mine].” (William A. Dembski, stupidly making a specific prediction and in the process, contradicting his previous claim that he is not anti-evolution)

2004: Michael Zimmerman initiates the Clergy Letter Project rejecting creationism and intelligent design. As of September 26, 2008, the Clergy Letter Project had collected 11,685 signatures of U.S. Christian clergy.

2004: Tiktaalik roseae discovered

2005: “Darwin’s going down the tube. ... No question about it.” (Richard Thompson)

October 2005: Archaeologist R. Joe Brandon initiates the Scientific Support for Darwinism and nets 7733 signatures in four days

December 21, 2005: In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Board, Judge John E. Jones III rules: “The overwhelming evidence is that Intelligent Design is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory. It is an extension of the Fundamentalists’ view that one must either accept the literal interpretation of Genesis or else believe in the godless system of evolution.”

The court case is hereafter known as “Kitzmass!”

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”

2006: Phyllis Schlafly lambasts Judge Jones for refusing to “hit one for our team.” Jones also receives death threats.
2006: Dembski predicts: “Evolution will be dead in ten years.” His foolhardiness garners a shimmy.
As of July 2007, the Discovery Institute’s list of “Scientific Dissent from Darwin” gathers eight “Steves” and as of August 2008, garners 761 names, many of whom are not active scientists, with some who have never worked as scientists. Also, visiting scholars at prestigious institutions are listed as affiliated with that institution rather than their true affiliation.

2008: Ben Stein makes and promotes the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
Stein redefines intelligent design as “the fact that God made everything” and “Darwinism” as everything from evolution to the Big Bang to galaxy formation to plate tectonics to chaos theory to abiogenesis to a conspiracy by “Darwinists” to stifle dissent. In essence, Stein went even farther than Henry Morris ever did and claimed: We’re going to overthrow evolution, geology, astronomy, paleontology, chemistry, physics, ecology, climate science, the university application process, the scholarly peer-review process, public relations, and who knows, even economics itself. Good luck with that.

The Discovery Institute tries to contain the damage done to intelligent design by Ben Stein.

2009: Creationism, as it was in 1988, is in disarray: Ben Stein won’t join Michael Moore as an Oscar nominee, the ID advocates quarrel on their own blog about their FAQ page (I call it their FAUX or FAUQ page), and try to redefine so-called “intelligent agency” as non-supernatural. Yeah, right. Here’s what I had to say about an Intelligent Designer who is not supernatural. Then I had a change of heart and admitted that animal agency could be supernatural. However, I don't think the Judeo-Christian intelligent design advocates would be too thrilled to have animals as gods.

(By the way, does that appeal to anyone who believes in God? That the Intelligent Designer is not supernatural? Just asking.)

Such is the bizarre, twisted evolution of creationism: from a story of a 6-day creation of a Creator God to an Intelligent Agent who sometimes “acts stupidly” and is not supernatural. Gee, you may as well accept unguided natural selection. At least it doesn't act stupidly.

Stupid design? What’s next? Senior Moment design? Unconscious design by an unconscious agency? Brahman born from the cosmic egg and dreaming our reality? Well, at least that would be more palatable than religious fundamentalism; after all, the Hindus hold many creation myths simultaneously and take none literally.

So why do I pay so much attention to creationists? Well, why does anybody watch any soap opera? ;-) It's fun.

A Lightning Bolt Struck a Housing Bubble...

...and created financial dinosaurs.

Who believed this would happen? Me, for one, and Peter Schiff. (However, if Schiff envisioned a time frame for the collapse, I had no clue about such a steep slide happening so quickly. However, by the time that I received the news that my hours were to be cut, I was not surprised at all.)

Who didn't believe it? Ben Stein, naturally (or supernaturally), and his conservative friends at Faux News. Ben Stein was and is as wrong on the economy as he is on evolution and science. My evidence? This video from August 2006-2007. It's an amazing document:



Ben Stein: "The financials, as I keep saying, are just super-bargains [unintelligible] I predict with Merril Lynch, which is an astonishingly well-run company..." Holy crap, can you believe that he said that?

Also: "Subprime is a tiny, tiny, blip [in the market]." Look at these weasles laugh at Schiff! Who's crying now, Stein?

Did you follow Ben Stein's and Charles Payne's advice and eschewed Canadian for "patriotic" American stocks? Then I'm sorry for you. Maybe you should sue.

But make it fast. It looks like the financial "guru" Ben Stein has lost a significant amount of money since 2006.

If you had $100 million or $100,000 a year ago and now you have a lot less [yeah, it's rough losing $100 million or $100,000 in overvalued stocks, isn't it, my fellow Americans? Most people have investments like that, right?], you are still the same person. You are not a balance sheet, at least not one denominated in money, as was explained to me recently.

Losing and making money are not moral issues so long as you are being honest. [emphasis mine - we'll get to Stein's honesty in a moment] You may have a lot less money as this year ends than you did two years ago. But you are just as good or bad a person as you were then. It is a myth that money determines who you are, and if you have gotten over that myth by now, then 2008 will have been a very good year.

Awww, isn't that sweet, America? Money doesn't determine how good a person you are! Aren't you so glad that a privileged, whiny rich guy told you that?

That's a fine and dandy sentiment, Ben, but whoever your intended audience is, they sure as hell don't bill themselves as financial geniuses/prophets and dispense terrible financial advice just before a crash, and just after accusing the scientific and academic communities of this nation of trying to gas en masse Jewish babies. Yes, I'm sure the average Joe or Jane really appreciates believing your shitty advice above, Stein, and losing his or her life's savings only to see you patronize them that just because you're a fucking failure, they're not bad people!

And as for the rest of this pompous and self-stroking little column in the New York Times, well, I'm sorry, but I don't believe one word of your story, Ben Stein! I think this is a ridiculous tale:

ABOUT two years ago, a little delegation from a major investment bank arrived at my home in Beverly Hills. These nice young people were from the bank’s “wealth management division.” I told them straight away that I didn’t have anywhere near enough wealth to make their trip worth their time, but they smilingly insisted that we could help each other.

They told me that if I invested a certain sum with them, they would make sure that a large chunk of it was managed by a money manager of stupendous acumen. This genius, so they said, never lost money. He did better in up markets than in down markets, but even in down markets he did well. They said he used a strategy of buying stocks and hedging with options.

I protested that a perfect hedge would not allow making any money, because money made on the one side would be lost on the other. They assured me that this genius had found a way to spot market inefficiencies and, indeed, to make money off a perfect hedge.

I thanked them for their time and promptly looked up Bernard Madoff online. Nothing I saw was even a bit convincing that he had made a breakthrough in financial theory. Besides, this large financial firm was going to charge me roughly 2 percent to put my money with Mr. Madoff’s firm. I could invest my few shekels with Warren Buffett for no management fee at all.

I checked with my investment gurus, Phil DeMuth, Raymond J. Lucia and Kevin Hanley. None of us could see how Mr. Madoff could do what his friends said he could do. I politely passed and went on my way, finding my own inventive ways to lose money on a colossal scale during these last 15 months.

My point is not that I was so smart. I am not and I was not. Mistakes are a big part of my life. [No shit.] My point is that, as humans, we seem unable to learn from our mistakes very well.

Speak for yourself about mistakes. (And no, Ben Stein, I don't think your racism* is very cute.) But I call bullshit.

For one thing, no major investment bank - such as Goldman Sachs, which Stein defamed last year - has been touched by the Madoff scandal. This is the first anyone is hearing of that - but Stein's not naming names. Why not name this "investment bank?" (UBS? Nomura? Even they wouldn't make sense.)

Secondly, why would this unnamed "delegation" go to Ben Stein's house - his residence, mind you - and pitch essentially an Amway scam to him when surely they knew Stein is an author of economic books (such as they are), and a celebrity (of sorts)?

Then, even more unbelievably, Stein invites them in, listens to their pitch, and then researches it - the West's Greatest Champion of the Triumph of Puppy Dogs over the Evil Darwinists allegedly takes this crap seriously enough to look online and consult friends about a metaphorical piece of swampland managed for only a 2 percent annual fee. Sure! And I'm the Wizard of Oz.

Why, I didn't even research another blatant plea from Chase to make zero-interest cash withdrawals on my paid-off credit cards before throwing the checks into the fireplace and laughing this weekend - and those deals are much, much more honest than the one Stein recounts! A true financial guru would have slammed the door in the faces of this supposed "delegation from a major investment bank." But I don't think they ever came to his door.

Finally, of course, Stein expects us to believe that he kept his "I-turned-down-Bernie-Madoff" story secret (and stories like his are whipping around Wall Street like pasties on an aging stripper desperate for tips from an indifferent crowd) for two years.

Two years. That drama queen, keeping his mouth shut for two years? Not likely. The man is so desperate for attention, he even wrote an autobiography in which he hinted at an open marriage with his wife** and claimed to spend more time with "a variety of pubescent assistants and his beloved trio of dogs" than with her.*** This is a man who, before he suspiciously "got creationism," bragged about such things.

Incidentally, the reviewer of said autobiography described Ben Stein as "thick in a bout of self-delusion."***

Open the book of Ben Stein's life to almost any page and try not to hate or envy the things that drive him nuts. His catalog of constant complaints includes a Porsche 928, a thing of beauty perpetually in need of repair; the stupidity of pretty teen-age girls whose attention he covets [ick!]; and the illogical business dealings of studio executives, whose favor he finds it impossible to curry and maintain.

More recently, in a vomitingly self-important commentary in Newsweek entitled "Clinton on the Couch" (thanks for that image, BTW), Ben Stein is quoted thus: "He is remedying an early deficit in female attention. Like all childhood deficits, it can never be filled."

I laughed aloud at such a transparent example of Ben Stein's neurotic projection, describing himself while taking an envious jab at diagnosing Clinton (the true problem with William Jefferson Clinton is that the sleek, self-satisfied cat has never been without female companionship, a problem with which Ben Stein cannot and never will empathize) whereas columnist Peter Carlson**** exploded:

Who was this psychological savant? Alter identified him as "Ben Stein, the writer-actor-armchair shrink." Good Lord, I thought, he means Ben Stein, the guy who played the soporific teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," the guy who hosts a game show called "Win Ben Stein's Money," the guy who writes a hideously narcissistic column for the American Spectator. Who died and made him Freud?

Two which I posit: Well, who died and make him God? Because that's what Expelled was really all about. In his nihilistic pretense of bestowing a sense of "purpose" upon the world that he himself does not have, Ben Stein tries on identities the way some dandies try on suits - one day he's a sex god, gallivanting around with young beauties (who, it seems, still rejected him sexually), next he's an outraged father (he claimed that Monica Lewinsky was "barely legal"), then he's a financial wizard tossing out advice like gold coins to the proles, then he's a sad sack, weeping that What Really Matters is how nice we are to each other as we cut back on dinners at Spago's and buy fewer rolodexes. (As I said, I cannot imagine who the hell Ben Stein writes his column for.) But I digress.

I recommend that everyone save whatever he or she can and invest it, not put it into Treasury notes or money market funds as Ben Stein is now doing. Now is the time to buy stocks - August 2007 wasn't, although you should contribute to a 401k/Roth IRA no matter how the economy is doing. Everyone should have some investments to leave alone until the economy improves, as it eventually will, probably years from now. If you have Treasury notes and/or money market funds, fine - just put something into indexes. But don't listen to Ben Stein. Listen to this guy. He's next on my reading list, along with Michael Shermer's The Mind of the Market.

And just remember - much of what I know about finances I learned from evolution. And evolution "is the result of accumulated small change." Ben Stein told America that so-called microevolution cannot lead to speciation - ironically undermining his one valid message that pennies turn into dollars. You're right, Ben: honesty much more than money determines who we are - but too bad you didn't take your own advice.

UPDATED: "On the subject of his personal life, Stein makes the most of his middle-aged Angst. He hangs out with the kids at Birmingham High School in the San Fernando Valley. While he deplores the materialism of students, he can't get enough of their youth and innocence."***

Do the parents of these teen-age girls know that Ben Stein "hangs out" with them? The more I think about it, the more that it creeps me out.
---
*"'Should I be worried about the Crips and the Bloods up here?' These were the first words out of the mouth of Ben Stein as he entered my office at Skeptic magazine, located in the racially mixed neighborhood of Altadena, Calif. I cringed and hoped that the two African-American women in my employ were out of earshot..."
**Stein, Ben. Hollywood Days, Hollywood Nights: The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter. Bantam.
***Russell, Candice. "Screenwriter's Whining Mars Otherwise Insightful Memoir. Sun Sentinel. October 30, 1988: 8.F.
****Carlson, Peter. "Monthly Cure for a Scandal Overdose." The Washington Post. Feb. 3, 1998: B.02.

The Creationist's Nightmare

UPDATED: Ray Comfort blames the California wildfires on gay marriage, and then exhorts his critics to "get out more" because unbelievers "life in a fantasy world."

Great idea. I'd love to get out more and travel the world. Ray, I suggest you check out Albania, which for five centuries has had women pretend to be men:

For centuries, in the closed-off and conservative society of rural northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and MTV invading after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Girls here do not want to be boys anymore. With only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others remaining, the sworn virgin is dying off.

“Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” said Ms. Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of raki. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful. I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than 500 years. Under the Kanun, the role of a woman is severely circumscribed: take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same: 12 oxen.
The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the family patriarch died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.

They dressed like men and spent their lives in the company of other men, even though most kept their female given names. They were not ridiculed, but accepted in public life, even adulated. For some the choice was a way for a woman to assert her autonomy or to avoid an arranged marriage.

"Albania Custom Fades: Woman as Family Man," by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times, June 24, 2008 (requires subscription).

However, this venerable tradition of gender-swapping is now threatened by feminism! I wonder what Ray Comfort would make of that? Which is more evil - transsexuals, or feminists?

A big world, isn't it, Ray? And real confusing too, when you cling to moral simplicities and black-and-white absolutes. So, where are the floods and fires in Albania?
----
Remember Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, and their "atheist's nightmare," the banana?



(Of course you remember. This video is among the Top Ten Belly-Laughs of all time. I was down for the count for a full half-hour after seeing it. I laughed so hard that one side of my body went numb, and I thought I was having a stroke!)

Well, due to the banana having that artificial "tab" (bred via artificial selection), we may see a banana shortage in the coming years, and no only due to higher gas prices:

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish [currenly the only banana found on the market] is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable.

But there’s a difference between a banana and a Big Mac: The banana is a living organism. It can get sick, and since bananas all come from the same gene pool, a virulent enough malady could wipe out the world’s commercial banana crop in a matter of years.

This has happened before. Our great-grandparents grew up eating not the Cavendish but the Gros Michel banana, a variety that everyone agreed was tastier. But starting in the early 1900s, banana plantations were invaded by a fungus called Panama disease and vanished one by one. Forest would be cleared for new banana fields, and healthy fruit would grow there for a while, but eventually succumb.

By 1960, the Gros Michel was essentially extinct and the banana industry nearly bankrupt. It was saved at the last minute by the Cavendish, a Chinese variety that had been considered something close to junk: inferior in taste, easy to bruise (and therefore hard to ship) and too small to appeal to consumers. But it did resist the blight.
Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

Then what am I going to put on my yogurt?

Now, for more serious matters: I have not been able to get this story out of my mind. A 61-year-old grandmother discovers her 16-year-old granddaughter in bed with another girl - normal teen-age experimentation it sounds like to me - and beats her granddaughter with a cane and a belt as punishment. The granddaughter is in a hospital; that bitch grandmother is in jail, where I hope she becomes someone's bitch.

What a rigid lunatic!

I couldn't stop thinking about it, and I needed some cheering up, so I turned to Margaret Cho for some perspective. This is from "Notorious C.H.O.," which I watched on the bus on the way to New York City to protest the Republican Convention with a bunch of other peace activists. (Actually, laughing your ass off at 1 a.m. is not the best way to get to sleep on a long bus ride.) The entire show is up at You Tube in ten parts (and thank you for that!).

Margaret describes how her otherwise conservative mother had an open mind about being gay: "I tell you gay story about Daddy!"



I hope someone shows this video to that poor girl in Pennsylvania, so that she and her friend don't think they're alone in being gay (or being straight and experimenting as normal kids do).

Shimmies to JanieBelle - who I understand is now quite the shimmier herself!

Expelled: Imagine!

FINAL UPDATE: Heddle has a great post on this whole thingie.

I'm entering the countdown to finals, so have fun here.
-----
Well, folks, where do I begin?

Since all the excitement about PZ’s expulsion from a free screening of Expelled, a lot of things have happened. It's almost too much to recount.

The free screenings and RSVP links disappeared from the website – and only certain people (atheists, skeptics, scientists, etc.) who had already RSVPed to see the movie started receiving e-mails saying that their upcoming screening were “cancelled” when they weren’t. The goal was obviously to have only sympathetic audience members at these advance screenings. (In some cases, the screening times were abruptly moved one hour earlier, angering the sympathetic members of the audience who naturally did not get a cancellation e-mail and thus showed up at the original run time.)

A Scientist and skeptic who received these apparently fraudulent e-mail “cancellations” of Expelled was Evolutionary Biologist John Lynch. (This blog post includes “before and after” screengrabs of the official Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed website showing the screenings “disappear”)

A couple of the commenters on his blog managed to attend the screenings anyway:

Commenter Brad on his experience:

Commenter Ken McKnight on his experience:

More on this story from Troy Britain:
"Expelled Promoters Just Can’t Stop Lying"

Mark in Santa Clara on his experience:
"Expelled Has Gone Truant in Santa Clara"

Meanwhile, this is what happens when you are invited to pay $10 to see an advanced screening of Expelled: you don’t get to see Expelled. You have the "privilege" of getting to see film clips already available all over the internet, and to watch Ben Stein win an award. This is what happened to Troy Britain.

"Expelled! The Movie Rip-off and the Event at Biola", again at Troy Britain's blog.

The producers of Expelled plead for a grassroots effort from its sympathetic audience to “adopt-a-theatre” on opening day, April 18, 2008. How pathetic. Do people really want to [I]rent a theatre[/I] in order to see a movie? (Just like Michael Moore, eh?)

This account is at James F. McGrath’s blog: "Freedom Friday"

Blogger Troy Britain contacted me to learn where I got the Expelled RSVP link to forward to PZ Myers. I told him that I got the link from Glen Davidson’s comment at After the Bar Closes, but that the source for Glen was a Christian blog promoting the film Expelled and exhorting the general public to sign up for these advanced screenings! That’s right, folks, we got this “top secret” URL from a Christian blog on blogger, a public site.

Troy’s blog: "The Expelled RSVP Sites: Getting to the Facts"

Of all the media outlets that have reviewed this flick (despite the producers’ Soviet-style blackout on advanced reviews of Expelled, would you have expected Fox News to pan it? Well, they did. In fact, they tore it to shreds!

Fox News (!) pans Expelled: "Ben Stein: Win His Career"

Man, it must suck to be a conservative when even the conservatives think you suck.

But it gets worse:

Those opening and closing scenes of the movie? In which Ben Stein seemingly addresses an audience of Pepperdine University students in a full auditorium? Where they cheer him at the end? Looks like a real bunch of students think NeinStein is hip and that his message was well-received, right?

It turns out that Pepperdine University students accept evolution, so the filmmakers had to rent the auditorium (it was not an event sponsored by the university), and hired actors to play "the students."

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein's antievolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speechwriter for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did [creationism].

Actually they didn't. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein's screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, "the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus" but that "the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein's lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university." And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

The producers/promoters of Expelled, Premise Media, have been served with a cease-and-desist letter, alleging plagiarism of an animation of the inner workings of a cell produced by Harvard University.

ERV’s blog:
"Expelled: Expelled for Plagiarism"

and

"I Love the Smell of Roasted Creationists in the Morning" (ERV again)

Wesley Elsberry’s blog:
"Okay, Expelled, but Plagiarism Will Do That for You"

PZ Myers’ blog:
"Peter Irons Drafts a Letter"

Panda’s Thumb:
"Will the Public See Expelled?"

The producers of this turdfest that is Expelled have also admitted that they never sought permission to use the John Lennon song, “Imagine”, which is played if the film over some archival footage of Josef Stalin, while Ben Stein screams that liberals want to turn our country into what Lennon (or Lenin?) envisioned, from the administrator of John Lennon’s (not Lenin’s) estate – namely his widow, Yoko Ono.

The Wall Street Journal's article.
(requires subscription)

Entire article available here:
Yoko Ono, Filmmakers Caught in 'Expelled' Flap

At this point, the scandal is growing heads like a hydra. Already everything I posted here is old news, because new news is still coming out. Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable!

Excuse me, but it’s normal procedure to expell a student for plagiarism, and this is now plagiarism plus stealing.

To add the cherry on the top of this frosted cherry-picking cupcake, the producers sent me a spam e-mail to my school account exhorting the “friends of Expelled to "help the film" in its hate speech against atheists, skeptics, legitimate scientists, and anyone else who doesn’t pass their moral purity test. I informed them that spam was unprofessional and that the only reason they had my address was that they had required it – first for me to RSVP, and then again in the theatre, where I was told that I had to give it again on an “agreement form” not to illegally videotape and distribute the film.

And, being that I was required to give them this information, that should have ended their use of my e-mail address. (I did not give them my snail mail address, though the form asked for it – and interestingly enough, this “agreement form” had no place for a signature, just for my printed name.)

Very, very unprofessional, I must say. Just astonishingly stupid, clumsy, and unethical. Boy oh boy, what an example to the upcoming class of students entering college. These guys have some nerve to preach to the rest of the nation about the state of our educational system.

All I can do is sincerely thank the makers of Expelled for exposing the methods of creationists to the nation at large. For years, these people have operated in secret, allowing only the most controlled speeches and presentations to the public, so that everyone remains on message. Now in complete disarray, their publicity machine has done more to destroy the concept of intelligent design as “science” in the public mind that anything I could have done or said. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for this high-publicity disaster.

At Rotten Tomatoes, the rating for Expelled is 10% (less than Ishtar and Howard the Duck) and falling.

Now, it is evident to all why intelligent design has no place in science classrooms or in academia at large: it is a cheat, and its advocates are cheaters. And cheaters don’t belong in class – let alone teaching in our nation’s classrooms.

But one thing that you don't do - you don't piss off Yoko Ono.

UPDATED: Well, there I was, about to add a comment that I don’t really need to hear “Imagine” one more time in my life, either, because the song has become banal, kitch, the atheist’s equivalent of “Kum-bay-ya” (another song that I wish I could never hear again) – and then Corrente goes and rewrites John Lennon’s famous anthem especially for Ben Neinstein. And it’s hilarious.


Imagine there’s no science
So many people do
Nothing to study or wonder
The end of seeking truth
Imagine all the country
Dumber than a post…

You may say Ben Stein’s a schemer
But he’s not the only one
Many a fool would destroy us
A new Dark Age will have begun

Imagine no progression
Evolution canned
No need for artful discussions
A devaluing of man
Imagine all the children
Burning all the books…

You may say I’m a boomer
And my time will fade away
I hope someday you’ll stand up
And keep ignorance at bay

SECOND UPDATE: Oh for the love of Darwin, now someone over at John Lynch’s site has written “Bensteinian Rhapsody.” (One of my favorites!)

Anyone? I just filmed a sham,
Put some lies into your head,
Libelled Darwin, coz’ he’s dead,
Honor, you know I once had some,
But now I’ve gone and blown it all away-
Anyone? ooooohhhhh
Was it mean to tell those lies?
You’d learn more science by watching Rocky Horror-
Anyone? Anyone? My reputations now in tatters-

Too late, my crime is done,
Dembski told me I did fine-
Behe’s squirming, (he’ll be fine),
Goodbye science lessons-you’ve got to go
Gonna leave your kids behind and hide the truth
Adolf, oooooh (a shame he wasn’t atheist)
I’ll just have to lie,
I’ll just pretend that he wasn’t Christian at all--

guitar solo -

THIRD UPDATE: Ed Brayton weighs in on Expelled. And I notice that anonymous trolls who come here and criticize me (a woman) for speaking up don't have a complaint about them speaking up.

Don't come here and tell me what to say. If you don't like what you see here, leave.

FOURTH UPDATE: I told you it was a hydra. Premise Media, which produced Expelled, is now countersuing XVIVO (which produced the Harvard animation). In other words, it's a SLAPP. And ERV is totally convinced that the fact that Premise, based in Canada, filed its bogus lawsuit in Texas, not in Canada nor in Connecticut, where XVIVO is based, has nothing at all to do with the fact that Texas has no anti-SLAPP laws. ;-) She has issued a challenge to Premise Media.

This Theory Will Self-Destruct in Eight Years!

Everyone remembers what anniversary we celebrate on April 2, right? A certain interview appearing in a Kentucky newspaper?

I remember.

To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.
By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.
The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.

"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said.

Uh-huh. Sure.

We'll just see about that.

Two "Expelled" Reviews

(Image courtesy of midwifetoad)

Josh Timonen's review is up - he let me see the draft and add my two cents. Thanks, Josh! I pulled out two things that Josh discusses that particularly bothered me in the film:

They interview someone else about evolution, who mentions that science doesn't know how life began. So the film shifts to discussing the origin of life on earth. Philosopher Michael Ruse mentions the theory that organic life piggybacked on crystalline structures (Richard writes more about this in his review). Stein takes the opportunity to ridicule the idea: "Crystals!? On the backs of CRYSTALS!?" The film cuts to B&W video of creepy fortunetellers hunching over crystal balls. Stein's only desire is to oversimplify the theory and make fun of it.

The film mentions the Miller-Urey experiments (I'm pretty sure these were the experiments referred to in the film) done on the mixture of elements likely to have been around at the dawn of life. Stein's voiceover merely states that these experiments were done to replicate the origin of life, and that "Nothing happened" (there is more to this story, of course). Boy, those stupid scientists should have known then and there that they were way off track!

Josh does a masterful job of wading through a film that expels insult upon insult on one's intelligence, and this was more work than I wanted to do on this awful film. I'm not getting paid for this. I've gotten paid for reviewing books/films that I thought were hideous that, as it turns out, were all better than this.

Also, Rev. Barking Nonsequitur also reviews the film. It's interesting that Josh mentions the inferior sound of the film (too much "gain"), because during the screening Rev. Barky, also a sound guy, leaned over to me and said, "The sound is terrible." I couldn't tell.

The film was trying to be a Michael Moore documentary about people being persecuted because they chose to mention the word "ID" but with Ben Stein - who is really not very pleasant to look at. He looks like an emotionless basset hound and his eyes seem to be exuding a viscous fluid much of the time. Of course he comes off very smug all through the film which is interspersed with interviews of supposed victims of the elitist Nazi science academia establishment. Of course when they are interviewing the "evil" people like PZ and Dawkins, there were lots of footage of Nazi and Communist rallies, death camp scenes and retarded people making fools of themselves underscored with malevolent or dopey music to set the mood.

I really enjoyed the point that Richard Dawkins made about the film's technique:

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis' film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals. We get an otherwise pointless cut to Nikita Krushchev hammering the table (to illustrate something like 'emotional outburst'). There are similarly clunking and artless cuts to a guillotine, fist fights, and above all to the Berlin wall and Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.

Now you begin to get an idea of how bad this film is, aside from its message. Ben Stein should go to the privy to expel whatever it is that he ate for dinner that is giving him nightmares about Hitler, and go back to bed. Spare us all his personal hang-ups.

UPDATED: I’ve been asking myself why I have not found much to say about the content of Expelled. I guess it is because I am so flummoxed by this film’s request that I laugh at its incredibly puerile use of stock footage “asides” of people hitting each other, Krushchev pounding a table, things blowing up in a lab, etc. Its humor is on or below the level of the Three Stooges, and I never liked them. As I said, take Michael Moore’s worst moments and string them into a full-length film…

But there’s something else. This film is empty. It is devoid of content – everything is chopped up, including the interviews of the intelligent design theorists. Even they get short (very short) shrift.
When I saw how bad this film was, I was relieved – but I’m still stunned at how incredibly artless this film is. What is there for me to say? Perhaps this was how (since Godwin’s Law has been trashed by now) Hitler’s art teachers felt when they saw the future Fuehrer’s talentless art.

UPDATED: More reviews.

Why It's A Load of Bunk

Science Sunday: Intelligent Design Goes to the Movies

And Julia Sweeney weighs in.

Ben Stein and the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed held a press conference. But hardly any questions were allowed.

Most. Hits. Evah!

UPDATED: Courtesy of BWE over at AtBC.
SECOND UPDATE: You may have noticed that I've added Site Meter to this blog, because while Freestats gives me numbers, it hasn't updated its user profiles yet. So far I'm liking Site Meter better. Plus, now this blog has full syndication.




Welcome, and many thanks to all the visitors here. As a result of Expelledgate, I have had over 7100 hits on this site.* I feel like I've taken part in an important moment in history!

Thanks again, Richard, for directing people here and for quoting me.

And thank you, Wesley, for using your scalpel on the producer's pat-the-lady-on-the-head response to me. (Okay, you're all thinking "Lady?" I hear you.)

If you need to cleanse the palate, Wesley has a nice post about Rosalind Franklin and the invisible line between "scientists" and "technicians" that, along with chauvinism and opportunism, deprived this remarkable woman of a Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of DNA.

There are legitimate controversies within evolutionary theory. There are valid questions about and real problems within the process of peer review. There are many unanswered questions in both evolution and abiogenesis, and as Lawrence Krauss [fixed spelling] lectured to a rapt audience at the American Atheist convention, there are many, many unanswered questions about this universe which, as it turns out, is stranger than we have imagined, and perhaps stranger than we can imagine.

(As soon as the video of Lawrence's lecture is up I'll post it here, and I recommend that everyone watch it. If you're not familiar with the concepts you may have to refer to other sources on the subject, and work your way through the video more than once, and think it through more than once. I bore up quite well during his lecture, and it still blew my mind. You will fall in love with cosmology all over again.)

These questions are so much fun that I want everyone to explore them, debate them, or at least know about them - instead of creating false controversies about conspiracies that don't exist (and creating conspiracies that do exist, like throwing an interviewee out of a theatre where the film he was interviewed for was being screened.) Can we return to the real questions now? Can Americans learn the real questions through real science in our science classes? Thank you!

*As of late Friday, that is. My blogometer has not updated over the weekend. I'm waiting for my blogometer to be resurrected. So, it would appear that my stats are even higher.

Expelled Exposed

Welcome to the blogroll: Expelled Exposed, a response to the "documentary," now tentatively scheduled to come out on April 11 -- nine days after the anniversary of another anti-evolutionist's prediction.

To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.

By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.

The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.

"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said.

This appeared in a Kentucky newspaper on April 2, 2006, one day after National Atheist Day. *Snigger* (Not gullible, are you?)

UPDATED: I needed a laugh. Thank you, Leonard Pierce:

(For pure delusional self-pity, it's hard to beat the Expelled movie blog; their latest entry claims that, since those meddlesome Washington bureaucrats combined Lincoln and Washington's birthdays into President's Day, "Darwin Day has now supplanted Lincoln's birthday in the public imagination"! Yes, who can forget those long Darwin Day weekends, when the family gathers around a copy of Origin of Species and makes a little wooden model of the Galapagos Islands before setting out for a big trip to the mall for one of the many Darwin Day sales?)

Me, I always got a new dress for Darwin Day, and enjoyed the hunt for new mutated eggs!

Heh. I Just Coined A Term

Not-Crime!

Go to the Sandwalk for details. Regular UD commenter Mats shows up!

Also see this discussion, which followed from this one in which Answers in Genesis fans complain that scientists are defining science as science, and won't let creationists publish biblical allusions in science journals. Therefore, scientists are elitist meanies.

Not-crime!

Ben Stein's Greatest Hit(ler)s

a.k.a. "Stalin! Stalin!" Stallin'

UPDATED: I'm not sure if these are trolls, but commenters are congratulating Ben Stein for "leading people back to Christ" with his film. Awkward! Ben Stein is Jewish! Hello!

This is just like what happened during Shabbos, when some lil’ telemarker from Missouri (I didn’t mean to eavesdrop but I could hear her all the way from the living room) called and fell silent when my friend informed her of the Sabbath and said he didn’t want to talk right now. "Oh, she's never heard of it," he informed me with a dismissive wave of his hand. Yeah, we atheists sure are close-minded. *eyeroll*

-----

At dinner with friends over the weekend (my first Shabbos), I told them about Ben Stein’s upcoming “documentary,” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Their jaws dropped. (Yeah, I still can’t get over it, either.)

I have since learned that in the 1990s Ben Stein penned an introduction to one of those lurid “Bill Clinton had people killed in Arkanasa” screeds. My jaw dropped again.

Maybe he penned it as a joke, giving absurd rein to his well-known hatred of Bill Clinton but counting on the fact that it would never be widely read?

I have been searching for that book, without success so far. But while searching I’ve found a lot of other pieces penned by Ben Stein. And my jaw dropped again again.

Ben Stein claimed that Clinton wouldn’t leave office in 2000, in defiance of the Constitution. But maybe he was joking.

Q: The post-election spirit of bipartisanship is vanishing fast. How bad will things get? Do you see President Clinton leaving office under a cloud of scandal?

A: No, I worry about whether he will leave office when he's supposed to. He has shown such extraordinary contempt for the Constitution that I question whether he believes it applies to him. Q: Seriously? How would Clinton extend his term? A: He'd start by convening a task force to study repeal of the 22d Amendment. I don't consider that far-fetched in the slightest, because after Nixon was re-elected in 1972, he convened an informal group to study the issue. Q: Whom might Clinton appoint to tell him, ''Hey, good idea''? A: The President has a lot of friends. Now that he's won, he has even more on CNBC.

Har-de-har, must be a joke.

Ben Stein on the Mark Foley scandal: “Misguided” Republican with thing for boys – who cares? What about Bill Clinton having consentual sex with an adult female? *Gasp*

If there were an Academy Award for Hypocrisy, the surefire favorite for 2006 would be the Democratic Party. Just two recent items make the decision a virtual certainty:

The Representative Foley "scandal" is really worthy of a whole book on hypocrisy. On the one hand, we have a poor misguided Republican man who had a romantic thing for young boys. He sent them suggestive e-mail. I agree, that's not great. On the other hand, we have a Democratic party that worships ( not likes, WORSHIPS ) a man named Bill Clinton who did not send suggestive e-mails as far as we know, but who had a barely legal intern give him oral sex kneeling under his desk in the Oval Office while he talked on the phone to a Congressional Committee Chairman, took great pleasure in putting a cigar in her orifice and then smelling it and tasting it, and having her fellate him when in the sacred seat of power of the world's leading Republic. And the Democrats cheer themselves hoarse for him. His wife has a great shot at being our next President.

Original link here.

Huh? He's got to be joking.

In 1987, Ben Stein said that all Presidental candidates should be asked if they are homosexuals. In 1988, Ben Stein said that any Republican Vice-President chasing tail was no one’s business.

Long before he became a Comedy Central game show host, Ben Stein was a prominent conservative media critic. On CNN's Crossfire in 1987, Stein praised the news media's exposure of extramarital activity involving then-Democratic presidential frontrunner Gary Hart as "one of the highest moments of the press's utility."

CROSSFIRE HOST: "How far would you have the press go? Would you say that a candidate should be asked if he's ever had a homosexual experience?"

BEN STEIN: "Absolutely, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely."

Stein appeared again on Crossfire a year later, as reporters were pursuing an alleged dalliance between vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle and a female lobbyist. With a Republican being probed, Stein remained "absolute" in his convictions, only they'd rotated precisely180 degrees.

CROSSFIRE HOST: Do you think the media was fair in going after Senator Quayle on the subject of Paula Parkinson?

BEN STEIN: Absolutely not. I think that if they started going after all the presidential candidates on the subject of their sex lives, they could really talk about very little else. I think it's a very dangerous subject for the Democrats to open, or for anyone to open, and it's a complete irrelevancy as well.

Well, it’s too late now Ben, because your man Guiliani dropped out. Joke's on you.

Ben Stein gives Arianna Huffington the finger. (But I get damned tired of the "Great role model!" riposte, I must say. Does everything an adult does have to be a role model for children? Lock me up, then!)

Ben Stein thinks Clinton murdered people in Iraq to distract from the impeachment.

BS: Because... Well, I can't just say "most," because there are so many things. He's a liar. He lied repeatedly and set a very bad example for truth-telling for children. It's just become a joke among my son and friends of his generation that when you lie, you can say, "Why? The president does it; why can't we do it?" It's become commonplace for them to do that. I see it and hear it all the time. Second, he has disgraced the office, which is a great and noble office. Third, he has not accomplished anything. Nixon, you might say, did many of the same bad things Clinton did, and I guess that's true. He did. But he also did many great things, and you can't point to any great things that Clinton has done. Also, and this is going to be in my column in The Spectator but I'll let you in on it, I think he's a murderer. I think he murdered those people in Iraq to divert attention from his political problems. I don't think that all those people in Iraq needed to die. At least, certainly not when they did. He just killed them to distract people from the impeachment, and that's murder. If he'd really meant to go in there and take out Saddam Hussein and create a safer Middle East, a peaceful Middle East, that's one thing. But it was all just cosmetics to show off his toughness. Everyone says, "Oh, it's Wag The Dog." It isn't Wag The Dog, because nobody got killed in Wag The Dog. In this sad story, a lot of people got killed. Those Iraqi soldiers who were there, they don't necessarily deserve to die just because they're wearing an Iraqi uniform. They're not wearing it voluntarily.

I guess they are now.

Ben Stein on MSNBC: “Horrible, Stalinesque persecution, not prosecution, of Scooter Libby,” and Patrick Fitzgerald is a “thug.” (With video.) In the words of Dan Quayle, he doesn't look like a happy camper who thinks, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind." He doesn't seem to be joking. In fact, he seems to be losing his mind. (And did he say the word "Stalinesque" again? Let's play that video back.)

Ben Stein plays Freud:

I was reading Newsweek when I hit bottom. Bug-eyed and salivating with unseemly cravings, I was devouring last week's issue. I'd plowed through six major articles and five sidebars on the scandal and then I started reading a 12th piece -- "Clinton on the Couch" by Jonathan Alter. It was the kind of idiotic journalistic psychoanalysis that rational readers instinctively avoid, but I was no longer rational. I got to the third paragraph, where Alter theorized that Clinton's alleged womanizing stems from his childhood pudginess. To buttress this dubious claim, Alter quoted an expert. "He is remedying an early deficit in female attention," the expert said. "Like all childhood deficits, it can never be filled."

Who was this psychological savant? Alter identified him as "Ben Stein, the writer-actor-armchair shrink." Good Lord, I thought, he means Ben Stein, the guy who played the soporific teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," the guy who hosts a game show called "Win Ben Stein's Money," the guy who writes a hideously narcissistic column for the American Spectator. Who died and made him Freud?

Peter Carlson, “Monthly Cure for a Scandal Overdose,” The Washington Post, 2/3/1998.

It seems so innocent now, all that crap about Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Today, Ben Stein thinks he's John the Baptist and that he's found God in Godwin's Law.

Straight propaganda, to be sure. But again, if Michael Moore or Robert Greenwald can do it, why not Ben Stein?

It's a movie that uses animation, archival documentary footage, interviews with outraged people of science who want ID on the table, and "atheists" who see that as a step backward to make its case.

It just isn't particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin's image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it's not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics. Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution by pitching this argument in terms of academic freedom. "Legitimate" learned scientists are being silenced by the Darwinian cabal of thought police. Says Stein.

He uses anecdotes from a few Fox-over-publicized cases of people who claim to have lost tenure/their jobs/their position in the scientific world for daring to suggest the hand of a supernatural being in the creation of life. He hasn't a scintilla of proof of, well, anything. Then he has the audacity to whine, "Where's the data" when questioning cellular biologists and other real scientists who build their lives around doubt, and finding testable, legitimate answers to those doubts. Where's YOUR data, Ben?

Speaking of which, I am trying to independently confirm these another story – a rumor, basically, that when Ben Stein’s sister died, he received a letter of sympathy from Bill Clinton and reacted with venom, calling Clinton a "rapist." Actually, I don't know if this is true, but Stein has called Tom Delay "morally probably the highest level public servant I have ever met."

Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Stalin, Stalin, Stalin. So what's stallin' the release of this film? Anyone?