Intelligent Design
goodmath | June 24, 2008 So I hear, via the Panda's Thumb, that Uncommon Descent has a new
poster. And he's off to a rollicking good start, with a post
explaining why Christians who accept the fact of evolution are
incoherent and deluded. (As usual, I don't link to UD, due to their rampant
dishonesty in silently altering or removing links.)
I am, perhaps, not the best person to respond to his claim, given
that I'm not a Christian. But his argument is so inconsistent, and so
typical of a type of argument that constantly occurs in fundamentalist
gibberings that it doesn't take a Christian theistic evolutionist
to…
jlynch | May 9, 2008Not looking good for the cdesign proponentsists and their attempts to weaken science education by proposing "academic freedom" bills. First Florida. Now Alabama.
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
jlynch | May 1, 2008Busy here so here are a few things to keep you amused:
Larry Arnhart asks whether Michael Behe has fallen from favor at the Discovery Institute.
Dembski (a pseudo-mathematician) wonders what a pseudo-documentary is and in so doing naturally calls folks names. Stay classy, Bill.
Jeffrey Shallit (a real-mathematician) fisks Robert Marks.
And while I’m at it ... sample size of one analysis from Dembski.
Ed on the Week 2 performance of Expelled. Here in the Phoenix metro area they’re down to seven screens (from nineteen).
jlynch | May 1, 2008Ben Stein’s anti-science stance continues. In March he opined that scientists "were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews." Now he’s giving us the following gem of wisdom:
[T]he last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed ... that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science -- in my opinion, this is just an opinion -- that’s where science leads you. ...Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing…
jlynch | April 26, 2008From Evolved and Rational:
You only start to feel insulted when Ben Stein decides that the Holocaust is his "personal" reason for "investigating" evolution, and trust me, you feel really insulted. No, Ben Stein, your movie is not a personal crusade on behalf of your lost ancestors. No, Ben Stein, periodically putting your head in your hands while walking around Dachau at inappropriate points in a conversation does not endear you to an audience that you’ve already openly belittled, bored, and been dishonest with. NO, Ben Stein, you’re not poignantly reflecting on the dangers of…
awild | April 18, 2008Ben Stein's propaganda flick Expelled comes out today. Since other people have hashed the film to death, I won't write about Expelled except to make the following observation.
This is a graph showing the number of technical publications indexed in PubMed under the search terms "evolution" and "intelligent design". I threw in a third search term, "biochemistry", just to give a sense of how evolution sits relative to another large research field. Basically, the graph measures the productivity of a field in terms of scientific publications. In 2007, scientists produced 17 technical…
jlynch | April 16, 2008 I’ve been sitting on this for an hour because, frankly, I can’t stop laughing quietly to myself. As Andrea over at the Thumb notes, the producers of Expelled are now in trouble with Yoko Ono for using Lennon’s "Imagine" without permission. Seriously. I’m not making this up. First it was plagiarism from, not one, but two sources, now it’s ripping off the Lennon estate. These guys are going to need to hire some damned good lawyers.
jlynch | April 16, 2008Richard Weikart:
Today's Darwinists are not Nazis and not all Darwinists agree with Dawkins, Wilson, Ruse, Singer, or Watson. However, some of the ideas being promoted today by prominent Darwinists in the name of Darwinism have an eerily similar ring to the ideologies that eroded respect for human life in the pre-Nazi era.
There you have it folks - if we're not careful and muzzle those "prominent Darwinists" we're heading for Nazi Eugenics Version 2.0.
jlynch | April 16, 2008 So I’m all a-flutter with anticipation for the opening of Expelled - two days to go to the big day on which Darwinism will finally fall. To prepare, I checked Yahoo Movies for the screening times in my area. What’s this? Only two cinemas are brave enough to show it? The AMC Mesa Grand and the AMC Arizona Center. Strange. I wonder why Harkins (the big-dog in Arizona theaters and host for the infamous Tempe screening) has not picked up such a cultural tsunami? And look at this! Both AMC theaters have only one screening scheduled for Friday (a.k.a The Big Day). At 10:30am. Wow, that’s sure to…
jlynch | April 13, 2008A few days back I took on Denyse O’Leary’s "science journalism by press release" modus operandi. Now, T. Ryan Gregory has taken on the same press release while dispelling the "early branching equals primitive" fallacy that underlies O’Leary’s claims. Wander on over and have a read.
jlynch | April 12, 2008 One of the central themes within Expelled is the equation of Darwinism with Nazism. We are treated to a somber Ben Stein visiting the death camps. Without Darwin they wouldn’t have existed goes the simplistic viewpoint. Yet, before we criticize Stein and the producers of the movie, we must acknowledge that there are scientists - biologists even - who harbor(ed) anti-Semitic views. Witness the following:
By their own will, [Jews] prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities. They form their own communes (kahals), they govern themselves by their own rules and…
jlynch | April 11, 2008 David Bolinsky of XVIVIO has posted an open letter regarding the copyright infringement by Expelled. Interestingly, Mike Edmondson who was the animator for the movie has been scrubbed from the Expelled website and Dembksi has hinted that the producers had squirreled away money for copyright lawsuits. Sayeth Dembski:
I’ve gotten to know the producers quite well. As far as I can tell, they made sure to budget for lawsuits. Also, I know for a fact that they have one of the best intellectual property attorneys in the business. I expect that the producers made their video close enough to the…
jlynch | April 10, 2008Predictably, Denyse O’Leary is getting all excited about a paper in this week’s Nature that finds Ctenophora (comb jellies) to be the first multicellular branch off the Tree of Life, a divergence that precedes that of the relatively simpler sponges. Apparently only accessing a LiveScience article, O’Leary breathlessly declares:
All this shock and awe comes from not taking the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian explosion of life forms seriously for what they can tell us about the real history of life, rather than the Darwinian fantasy.
Problem is, if one reads the original article, one gets a…
jlynch | April 10, 2008
Chris Heard on Mark Mathis’ admission that Christian scientists were excluded from Expelled because they "would have confused the film unnecessarily":
Mathis as much as says that because he personally cannot reconcile Christian belief with evolutionary biology, prominent Christian scientists ... who do affirm both at once don’t deserve attention. Remember, please, that this comes from the associate producer of a film whose entire thesis is that well-meaning religious scientists are being persecuted or ostracized --"expelled"-- for wanting to talk about God! Yet prominent Christian…
jlynch | April 9, 2008
More Expelled dishonesty. Michael Shermer wondered why the movie opens with a packed house of Pepperdine students listening to Stein:
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…
jlynch | April 3, 2008
Remember the e-mail I received stating that tonight’s Expelled screening in Tempe was canceled? The e-mail simply stated:
The Tempe, AZ Screening has been canceled.
Well, Ken McKnight called the theater today two or so hours before the screening. Ken says:
I just called the Arizona Mills Harkins theater and said that I had heard that the private screening of Expelled had been moved from 7:00 to 6:00 (I didn’t mention that I had been emailed that the showing was canceled). The person I spoke to confirmed that the movie is showing today at 6:00. Clearly the promoters are somehow screening the…
goodmath | April 3, 2008Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog sent me a link to some clips from Ben Stein's new Magnum Opus, "Expelled". I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer - it's the one titled "Genetic Mutation".
Care to guess how long it took me to find an insane, idiotic error?
4 seconds.
It's the old "evolution can't create information" scam.
The clip is Ben Stein interviewing a guy named "Maceij Giertych",
who is allegedly a population geneticist. (I say allegedly because looking
the guy up, he appears to be an agricultural biologist studying…
jlynch | April 2, 2008Received an e-mail this morning notifying me (and five others) that the Tempe screening has been canceled. Interesting thing is that the original mailing I received had a further 15 names on it. In addition, "boughtbythecross," "homeschoolma," and "covenant-dad" were not CCed on the e-mail I received today. Interesting.
Some thoughts ... either (1) the screening is going ahead and myself and five others are being lied to about it being canceled, or (2) the screening is canceled. The former would be easy to check, I'd imagine but I wont be able to get down to Arizona Mills that evening, while…