Ben Stein's 'Expelled' - Evolution, Academia and Conformity 1766
eldavojohn writes "Painting the current scientific community as just as bad as the Spanish Inquisition, an extended trailer of Ben Stein's "Expelled" has a lot of people (at least that I know) talking. It looks like his movie plans to encourage people to speak out if they believe intelligent design or creationism to be correct. In the trailer he even warns you that if you are a scientist you may lose your job by watching 'Expelled.' Backlash to the movie has started popping up and this may force the creationism/evolutionist debate to a whole new level across the big screen and the internet."
adholden points out a site called Expelled Exposed, which asserts that 'Expelled' "is simply an anti-science propaganda film aimed at creating controversy where none exists, while promoting poor science education that can and will severely handicap American students."
skepticality (Score:2, Informative)
It is available at skepticality.com and reposted and richarddawkins.net
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:2, Informative)
Two for two (Score:3, Informative)
To cut short any discussion from those who think that a religious precept should be included in a scientific curriculum, I submit this quote from one of the linked articles so everyone is clear as to why ID is not science:
"Intelligent Design" fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views that can be verified or duplicated by subsequent researchers.
That's all there is to it folks. ID supporters need to submit evidence to back up their claim and it will be considered. So far, the only thing ID supporters have done is a) try to show supposed holes in current Evolutionary theory (all of which have been answered) and b) claim that some unknown, untestable, omnipotent force is behind everything. At no time have they ever presented evidence to support their idea and so, rightly, ID falls under the heading as an idea which attempts to support someone's religious ideas.
Win Ben Stein's Attention (Score:2, Informative)
Stein does not reject Darwinism for the evolution of individual species. He rejects that it is the answer for why life exists and why the universe works that way that it does.
Re:Win Ben Stein's Attention (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly, the reason science teachers teaching ID is not tolerated, is because it is not science. Quite simple - someone teaching ID in a science class is not doing their job.
Stein does reject Darwinism for the evolution species. Evolution has nothing to do with where life comes from - it answers why life is like it is now. The beginnings of life is another question, which has many interesting conjectures and experiments, but nothing to do with evolution.
He also blames Darwin for the holocaust (always a nice move) and is patently and obviously dishonest in word and action (he used sound tracks without permission, copied animations without permission, got interviews based on false premises etc.)
The fact is, ID is complete and utter nonsense. Try reading anything advancing ID. The idea itslef is so fool of logical falicies it would not fool a open minded six year old. Google some of their 'proofs' - either they are extremely lazy, or they provide proofs they know are false. No serious honest person, whether Christian or otherwise takes ID seriously, it is just extremists attempt to muddy the waters because they fear people have too much knowledge and more and more are coming to realise the ludicrousness of religion.
RDS = Re-Direct Script! (Score:5, Informative)
The irony is thick in this one (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Monkey's uncle? (Score:5, Informative)
Now I admit there are a lot of atheists out there who understand science just as badly as some Christian fundamentalists and have turned it into some kind of religion, but that says nothing about the validity of the science itself, just like idiot Christians say nothing about the validity of the Christian faith.
Science. It works, bitches! (Score:5, Informative)
Intelligent Design cannot be falsified, therefore it is not science. ID can explain Pegasuses, dragons unicorns and cyclopses just fine. That makes it useless, since that also means it cannot predict anything. Without predictions, you cannot have new scientific insight.
Re:Two for two (Score:1, Informative)
"Intelligent Design" fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views that can be verified or duplicated by subsequent researchers.
I don't think he was trying to prove that ID is true. I think he was just trying to show their side of the story.
Re:What I am opposed to ... (Score:3, Informative)
You can hand wave about conspiracies all you like, but science has an easy to follow method, and creationists can introduce any scientific theories they like. They merely need to be scientific.
Now ID is "bad" science as it doesn't put forward any testable theories at all, put in a few testable theories based on facts and you might have something that looks like science. Though they may have some problems getting there.
It sounds to me that a lot of the noise in the ID crowd is to close minds to the facts and replace them with fantasy rather than anything that can be tested.
Darwin believed in God. (Score:3, Informative)
The point most people miss, is that the person that actually wrote down a lot of his observations, which lead to the idea of evolution, was trying to show how marvelous God created this universe. That a God could make something so complex and self sustaining as evolution amazed him endlessly.
His point was more along the lines that 'Intelligent Design' created all the basework for the great replication and diversion of what came to be known as 'Evolution'.
As I said, a shame a lot of people seem to completely miss that point.
Re:Academic Oppression (Score:1, Informative)
Here's the link (check out reason #2):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/pi.asp
Of course this won't get modded up, because this is slashdot, and defending faith is like defending microsoft.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course scientists have strong opinions, and of course they have biases. This isn't a problem. Einstein, for example, was a fierce opponent of quantum mechanics -- the 'spooky action at a distance' doesn't fit with c as a speed limit.
But the fact is that one of the primary goals of just about every scientist is to challenge or overturn the conventional wisdom. And to so in a way that is observable and disprovable. You don't get a ticket to Stockholm by echoing the community.
Similarly, every true scientist values being proven wrong, because that is what advances our collective knowledge. A scientist who who has never been wrong, or who doesn't appreciate being proven wrong, is a poor scientist indeed.
But on the same note, challenges to established scientific principles must themselves be scientific, and that is the problem here. This creationist doctrine, whatever term proponents choose to call it, is fundamentally non-scientific -- even anti-science. If a theory can't produce hypotheses, can't be tested, can't be disproven, and can't make predictions, then it's not a theory and certainly not science.
There is no spoon (Score:3, Informative)
The theory of the origin of species through natural selection does not actually address the question of the origin of life, it merely documents a mechanism that has been demonstrated sufficient to explain the phenomenon of speciation. That's all it attempts to do, and that's all it needs to do.
You are creating a straw man, called "Darwinism", that doesn't bear any but a superficial relationship to the reality. Attacking straw men is a blast, it's great fun, but it belongs in the pages of "Mad Magazine", not in the courts and public debate.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes there is a religion and a book based around some guy who lived on earth about 2000 years ago. But that's not proof that he was the son of God.
We also don't have any proof that it was the same guy who came back to life, for all we know he had a twin that nobody knew about. Written text is not proof, lies can also be written down and passed along for future generations.
Good review (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:3, Informative)
Karl Marx's humble life changed the course of human history due to people following his teachings. Doesn't make him the son of an all powerful supernatural entity.
Dawkins' view on Expelled (Score:3, Informative)
Flock of Dodos (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good review (Score:3, Informative)
Even Darwin himself admitted... (Score:1, Informative)
"To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." -- Charles Darwin 1872
The comments here indicate the movie was a success (Score:5, Informative)
This is a lie. The whole movie is a lie. The irony of both invoking Nazis, yet so successfully implementing the "Big Lie" strategy has to set some kind of reprehensible high water mark.
The three "expelled" people presented in the movie -- these are the worst stories the filmmakers could find -- involved a professor who failed to get tenure because he wasn't good enough, a woman who had her contract run out and didn't have it renewed, and them someone who said he was "fired" from the Smithsonian, despite actually being an unpaid research assistant whose term ran out.
Compare [expelledexposed.com] and contrast [sunclipse.org].
This movie makes utterly baseless claims that the academic freedom of ID proponents is under attack.
This is a lie.
Yet, they tell the lie, and then you look at comments about the movie, and you have people assuming that the truth is "somewhere in the middle", or that "both sides need to be considered", or some other trite cliche.
Why do they get a free pass here? Seriously, the production of this movie has been filled with lies by the makers -- these allegedly religious people -- and yet, people still take the movie at face value.
They lied to the interviewees, they attempted to pirate animations used in the movie, after being humiliated during the pre-release screenings they lied to cover it up, they lied to the people who wanted to see screenings -- they're liars.
And then you look at comments here, and people talk like the movie makes valid arguments -- it does not. Aside from lies about academic suppression, it's just one long Godwin -- "there's a very tenuous link between social Darwinism and the philosophy of the Nazis, therefore believing in Evolution leads to the Holocaust".
If, in an argument, someone tells baseless, reprehensible lies about a subject, the truth isn't "somewhere in the middle". The liars are really just lying [richarddawkins.net].
Re:Indeed, Scientific Zealotry Hurts the Cause ... (Score:3, Informative)
Having seen the trailer, it's quite heavy on propaganda, and light on everything else. What did these people write, why were they persecuted? (using "persecuted" liberally). Many of the quotes seemed taken out of context. One man mentions "neo-Darwinism" which I've never heard about before.
Remember, evolution has been proven. It exists. But just because it can't explain *everything* these people reject it. When Mr Stein says "intelligent design", he means "created by God". He's stated that quite clearly before, and does so in the trailer.
It's bad of course when people fall victim to witch hunts, just for stating a differing opinion, but that's a different issue altogether. Then there's a problem with the society we live in.
And please stop with the Moore-bashing, it's getting tiresome.
Re:Indeed, Scientific Zealotry Hurts the Cause ... (Score:2, Informative)
What Ben Stein and co. are engaging in here is basically selective data dredging where all they show is the bits and bobs that are in their favour. Objectivity? Bah! We don't need no steenkin' objectivity.
Secondly, I also don't get why the "believers" want their point of view to be handled with kid gloves. If you are going to present it as evidence to a bunch of scientists, it's subject to the same rules of peer review as any other paper. (which means if it's bullshit they will call it what it is)
In any case, there's tons more information about the movie on Scientific American
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=ben-steins-expelled-review-john-rennie [sciam.com]
Re:'Intelligent Design' Advocates Make Kids Idiots (Score:2, Informative)
Ok, ok, by science you mean scientific method or hypotheses or what?
And trust in mathematics is questionable as well - even if in theorems there are no errors, one must always make sure that axioms are appropriate.
P.S. It is sometimes hard to remember that mathematics has nothing to do with reality, it should come with "COMES "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
Re:Can you please link to the CNN article? (Score:5, Informative)
Reprinted below:
A talking point among "climate sceptics" on both sides of the Atlantic has been the bizarre tale of how the BBC's chief reporter on climate change censored an item on the BBC website after being harried by a "climate activist".
On April 4 Roger Harrabin posted a story on the fact that world temperatures have not continued to rise in the past 10 years, and this year will fall to a level markedly below the average of the past two decades.
Citing the World Meteorological Organisation, Mr Harrabin accurately reported that "global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory".
This was a red rag to Jo Abbess of the Campaign Against Climate Change (Hon President, George Monbiot), who emailed Mr Harrabin demanding that he "correct" his item.
Mr Harrabin insisted that what he had written was true. There are indeed eminent climate scientists "who question whether warming will continue as predicted".
This only angered Ms Abbess further. She said it was "highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics", to "even hint that the Earth is cooling down again".
Mr Harrabin, though he has led the BBC's tireless promotion of warmist orthodoxy, stood firm. Even in the "general media", he replied, "sceptics" highlight the lack of increase since 1998: to ignore this might give the impression that "debate is being censored".
His item had, after all, added "we are still in a long-term warming trend".
This was too much for Ms Abbess. She responded that this was not "a matter of debate". He should not be quoting the sceptics "whose voice is heard everywhere, on every channel, deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth".
Unless he changed his item, she said, "I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated". She threatened to expose him by spreading his replies across the internet.
At this point the BBC's man caved in. Within minutes a new version appeared, given the same time and date as that which he had consigned to Winston Smith's memory hole.
Out went any mention of "sceptics" who question global warming. After a guarded reference to this year's "slightly cooler" temperatures, a new paragraph said that they would "still be above the average" and that we will "soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of the global warming induced by greenhouse gases".
Of course we have long known where the BBC stands on climate change. But it is good to have such clear evidence that, even when one of its reporters tries to be honest, he can be whipped back into line by a pressure group.
In the end, Ms Abbess still circulated the exchanges on the internet, to show the great victory she had won for the "emerging truth".
Re:Indeed, Scientific Zealotry Hurts the Cause ... (Score:5, Informative)
You must be a cdesign proponentsist (Score:4, Informative)
It's an unprovable theory (as unprovable as the existence of God).
And as for ID not being the same as creationism, would you like to explain this - http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/11/missing_link_cd.html
Except the people who lost their jobs didn't... (Score:5, Informative)
To briefly (and probably not completely accurately) summarize: 1) one guy did get fired, but that's because he wasn't getting published or graduating many students. Sorry you didn't perform. 2) a guy who said "I was fired" from the smithsonian wasn't actually fired (and was never employed there anyway), still has access to the collections and an office there, etc. They did move him to a different office, so the fact that he said "they changed the locks on my office" is true. Even worse, this is the guy who, in his last month as editor of a scientific journal (not because he was fired, but because his time was going to be up anyway) basically took it upon himself to wave a publication into print without peer review, saying that he was the only qualified editor, when there were others who could have and should have been able to review this paper.
So the ID advocates portrayed here seem to be acting in deceitful or unethical ways, and then this movie is compounding their deceit.
There are a lot of interesting questions still to be answered in evolutionary theory; rehashing the same battles over and over again with these people is a distraction at best.
Re:Monkey's uncle? (Score:3, Informative)
You're right! There's noise in the data! But can you show that the 'noise' rises to the level of statistical significance? Can you show that there's a recognizable chance that there's a 'signal' in that noise? I said that it fit a bell curve "very, very well" - I didn't say it fit "perfectly", because you don't get perfection in the real world.
The point is, despite a lot of people looking very very carefully, nobody's been able to show any statistically-significant deviation from random in mutations. That doesn't prove that such deviations don't exist, but it does justify a presumption of randomness until and unless someone can show something different. Feel free to get started - if you succeed, the Nobel Prize awaits.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently you need to investigate harder. There is very little argument at this point over whether Jesus existed or not. Wikipedia has an article which details historical sources used to reconstruct the existence of Jesus independent from the religious views about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus [wikipedia.org]
Whether you believe him to be the Son of God or simply a man who started Yet Another Religion(TM), not too many historians will take the position that he simply didn't exist.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:An honest question for the young-Earth types. (Score:4, Informative)
Most of them go bankrupt and financially ruin their investors, a few of them are simply fraudulent from start to end, and there's one or two that employ actual geologists, but still aren't very successful.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/01/let-there-be-light-crude.html [motherjones.com]
Re:It is so sad. (Score:3, Informative)
Two points.
(a) All documentaries are propaganda. They are designed to present the film maker's view point of a situation. Objectivity does not exist in such works, since their purpose is to influence peoples thoughts.
(b) The major premise of Expelled is that scientific debate is squashed due to view point elitism. (I actually watched the movie) It does not matter what the debate is about, but when the stance is that 'you cannot oppose us', then there is a lot of problems. We see this in a lot of fields. Climate Change is a good example, but so is Health Care Management, Health Care Economics, and a plethora of many other fields. You can try this in the classroom. Challenge a professor on a topic that they are ideologically strong in, such as I did. I asked a Sociology professor ,who believed everything could be described in the Marxist Dialect, to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall in the Marxist Dialect. Her response was to scream at me and call me names. No discussion or debate, just hostile action. When I teach, I encourage debate and learning in the classroom. However, many of my fellow professors do not.
As a side point, I would recommend that you do not make assumptions on where people's viewpoints come from. It is a logical fallicy to assume that opinions that disagree with yours to be from the Bible. It is called a strawman arguement and is an invalid line of reasoning.
Re:Indeed, Scientific Zealotry Hurts the Cause ... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know... [sciam.com]
As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion." They were subsequently surprised to learn that they were appearing in Expelled, which "exposes the widespread persecution of scientists and educators who are pursuing legitimate, opposing scientific views to the reigning orthodoxy," to quote from the film's press kit.
To say those interviewed expected a 'completely different film' is a bit of a stretch--it's not like they thought they were doing voice-over work for the latest Pixar movie. But it is clear some interviewees were deceived.
Re:Indeed, Scientific Zealotry Hurts the Cause ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:3, Informative)
Er, no. There are enough writings from early enough to make his existence a lot more probable than that.
The usual trope "better attested than many other accepted ancient individuals" seems to be a reasonable summation.
Don't confuse history with mythology. (All history deals with probabilities alone.)
Now the nature of the individual Jesus referred to in the writings, well, there's an area for discussion. But please, not (non-)existence.
Re:Can you please link to the CNN article? (Score:5, Informative)
This statement was widely quoted to discredit climate change/global warming but it's really just a case of cherry-picked data. It was anomalously hot in 1998, and it's deliberately mis-leading to make generalized statements from anomalous data.
It is accurate to claim that global temperatures in every year 1999-2007 have been cooler than the temperatures of 1998*. However, stating that the temperatures "have not risen since 1998" implies that temperatures have been cooling since 1998, which is not true. Temperatures from 2000 through 2005 certainly rose every year.
Here's some pretty graphs [nasa.gov] to back up my statements.
* It depends on the data set (land, ocean, atmospheric, US only etc). For certain data sets, 2005-2006 was hotter than 1998, but on average 1998 wins.
I don't care which side of the argument you're on, I just hate it when someone deliberately mis-represents the data to support their side.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:4, Informative)
Chaos' technical name is "Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions." Any time a model is constructed, initial conditions must be fed into it before it is used in a simulation; those initial conditions are based on measurements and are therefore not infinitely precise, nor completely accurate. In certain systems, like weather, a small perturbation in the initial conditions causes a drastic change in the output. These systems are informally called Chaotic, but, in reality, they are just as deterministic as any other system because for a given input they give the same output.
Weather is, after all, still just modeled by a set of equations; in fact, a passable model can be constructed with something like only 8 or 9 equations.
Re:No need for debate (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can you please link to the CNN article? (Score:3, Informative)
The quasi-retraction is here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/04/climate_change_debate.html [bbc.co.uk]
Re:The irony is thick in this one (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So much to say... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who the hell is Ben Stein ... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:1, Informative)
People like you say, "Your religion is wrong, because you have no proof." Well, first of all I have a ton of anecdotal evidence that supports what my religion says. Is my personal anecdotal evidence enough to convince anyone else of the truth? Of course not. You'll have to find your own evidence.
Secondly, I say to you, where is the proof that my religion is wrong?
Also, I want to point out that I am Mormon (aka. I go to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), and I believe that the earth was created in 7 "days", though I don't believe that said day was defined as one revolution of the earth. (Why would God define time by the rotation of a celestial body that wasn't yet created?)
I believe that the account of the creation of the Earth in Genesis supports scientific findings of evolution.
Also, let it be known, that when I say Religion, I mean denomination. Mormons are Christian.
Re: You were modded flamebait for THAT comment?? (Score:2, Informative)
Take the weather channel chick a while back calling to remove any and all AMA certifications from weather reporters who state some anomaly in the weather isn't because of global warming. Sure the certification doesn't remove any credentials he has but it effect the implied accuracy of his forcasts and thereby effect ratings which means he would lose his job. Hence the reason people now think global warming is fact and if it isn't, it is a good idea anyways.
There are quite a few other places where this has been complained about. It seem that attacking someone's livelihood seem to be the choice weapon instead of attacking statements with facts. How anyone can look at that and think it is objective and impartial is beyond me. How anyone can watch this shit and not think a scam is happening explains why people are defrauded all over the world on a daily basis.
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Which do you believe? (Score:2, Informative)