http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1091617/
Yes, I am the kind of nerd that will go to see a documentary on its opening night, and in this case, I’m glad that I did.
I thoroughly enjoyed Expelled. Many “conservative” documentaries are pretty badly done, dull, witless, and just preach to the choir. (guilty of it myself) but Expelled is well done, paced well, extremely interesting, and actually entertaining.
You’ve probably heard the critics harping on it, about how it is biased, unlike other successful documentaries like an Inconvenient Truth, because according to critics, it was the BEST THING EVAR!
Yes, Expelled is biased. Good. Sometimes the underdog side needs to get a turn too.
As somebody who has tangled with the self-righteous world of Academics (‘cause guns in school are baaaad), it was really interesting to see the parallels between this topic, and other topics that I’m more familiar with. The MO stays the same. They misstate what you believe in to make it absurd, then they throw up every barrier they can think of, including threats and bullying, fire you if they can get away with it, vilify you in the press, then sue you. Now where have I seen that before?
The best part of Expelled was when Ben went to Germany to look at the dark underbelly of Darwinian thought. The Eugenics movement. That part was actually very moving.
The most entertaining bit was when Ben interviewed that prick, Richard Dawkins, and made him look like a complete buffoon. Word to the wise, Dick, you shouldn’t have underestimated somebody who has like 75 more IQ points than you do. You’re being interviewed by a man that wrote speeches for presidents and knows more trivia than anybody. He made you look like a tool, Dick. Go back on O’Reilly, you fared a lot better there.
I guess I’ll have to check it out if it ever shows up locally.
Having not actually seen this film, I’ll withhold judgment on what he says in the movie. But I will say this: Using the arguments of eugenics to imply that everyone who believes in evolution (thanks to the actual, observable evidence, as well as pure logic) is a Nazi is like saying that all firearms instructors are just fronts for Scientology a la Front Sight. From what I’ve read and what little I’ve seen, this movie looks to be up there on the Bowling for Columbine level of “let’s make a lot of overblown arguments that sound really good until you think about them.”
And no, I don’t plan on seeing it.
Ben Stein is a genius. Verifiable. He is a staunch supporter of the right. There was an essay that he penned making its way around the web that exposed the lefts political correctness for what it was. I had always thought he was entertaining before, but at that moment I gained thorough respect for the man. Thanks for profiling this movie, it really needs to get out that we may have a voice, even if the the critics flog it. And as far as implying that anyone who believes in evolution as nazi, I am kinda scratching my head on that one. I guess if you have no problem tracing your family tree back to Bubbles or Bonzo, knock yourself out. I kinda like that whole intelligent design thing myself.
I can’t comment to the quality of the documentary, although what I’ve heard is less than complimentary, much in the same way that the Goredom piece was.
However, the Nazi references Godwinned the whole damn thing in one shot. Any credibility Ben might have had was shot the moment he did that. I mean, the Nazis can be linked to Christianity just as easily and effectively as the can to the works of Darwin, and a lot of the quotes they took from Darwin were plucked piecemeal and presented without context.
FYI – 6 Things About Expelled
Okay, so the people that haven’t seen it, don’t like it because Ben brings up the Nazis Eugenics. To dismiss the work because of that is doing the movie an injustice.
Trust me on this one. It isn’t Godwinned if it actually is appropriate. The Eugenics movement was alive and well in the US in the 1930s as well. It wasn’t just the Germans.
The Eugenics movement is one of the saddest, grossest, terrible blights in the history of the modern world. We did it, others did it, and the Germans did it with industrial precision.
However, Eugenics is a logical outgrowth of Darwinian philosophy. Don’t take my word for it, and don’t take a critics word for it. Evaluate it for yourself.
Eugenics =/= “Darwinism.” Eugenicists didn’t understand Darwin or the theory of evolution. You might as well tell people to beware of “Mendelism’s” dark underbelly.
I love Ben and his ideas most of the time. However, Expelled did not make a strong case for why ID should be taught, rather it spent to much time on the inequity of ID not being taught. Add to that the several errors already reported in the media, Expelled fails to make a point stick without overstaying it’s welcome. Ben could have made his argument better in a series of essays and left this medium to Penn and Teller.
Larry
I have great respect for you as a writer and as a shooter and trainer and advocate of the 2A, but in this I find you to be running on your biases and emotions, not logic and rational thought.
Now, Darwin did not believe in Eugenics, or promote it (follow that link I provided, read what Darwin really said). Evolution is merely a mechanism that provides a scientific explanation for how the diversity of life came about on this tiny little mudball.
Eugenicists take their bigotry and prejudices and use Darwin and evolution to justify them. There is no logical outgrowth. I have evaluated evolution and I find no such logical path, although you are free to provide your logical thought process.
As I see it, Eugenics is a perversion of evolution, not an outgrowth of it, just as the freaks of Westboro represent a perversion of Gods love.
I have not seen Expelled, so I can not comment on the quality of the film, but I stand by my position that if Stein played the Nazi card, he Godwinned his whole production.
I don’t care if you are a deeply religious person who finds the idea of evolution abhorrent, or if you just like the idea that the hand of God touched us at some point or another and guided our development, if that is what gets you through the day, fine. But ID is not science, because it fails a key test of science in that it is not testable and that it provides no predictions. Creating a hit piece of a documentary that is as scientifically vacuous as Al Gore’s Dreck is not how you give a scientific theory credibility.
When I was in high school, I asked my biology teacher how land animals evolved from fish. All we were taught about Darwinian evolution was the natural selection process, i.e., species that are, say, harder for predators to locate will survive when others die off and will come to dominate.
But natural selection doesn’t explain how water-breathing creatures devloped lungs. Lungs aren’t really necessary for the survival of a fish. Nor does it explain how land-borne animals learned to fly, nor how plants, which usually survive by photosynthesis and absorbing nutrients from the soil, can evolve to lure, capture, and eat insects for sustenance.
My biology teacher, ironically named Mr. Body (his wife, Mrs. Body, also taught biology), explained that these things happened through spontaneous mutation.
Now, normally, when an organism experiences mutation, it usually ends poorly for the organism. A burst of gamma radiation is a lot more likely to result in super tumors than super powers. So I was curious about how this mutation thing worked, since given our species diversity it must’ve happened, successfully, time and time again.
The funny thing is, we’ve never actually observed this happeneing. Has any human been borne more resiliant to gunfire, pollution, or immune to cancer? These things would certainly benefit our survival.
Not only have we not observed this kind of spontaneous mutation, it can’t be replicated in a laboratory under controlled conditions. Neither, for that matter, can the act of making life from non-life, which obviously happened at some point, nor can we create matter and energy spontaneously, despite what we understand about the origin of the universe.
As such, it can be argued that the mutation aspect of evolutionary theory fails the scientific test because it cannot be observed nor replicated. For that matter, life itself fails the same test because we can’t duplicate nor explain how life started from non life. Technically, life, and possibly all of existence, should be impossible.
What a droll universe that would be.
Anyway, I’m not arguing for or against intelligent design. I’m not religious, I’m not a biologist, and I don’t have a dog in this race. But for all of the self-important pontificating of modern academia, all evolutionary theory is is the best they can come up with the information available. They don’t know how life started or developed, so they came up with a theory that makes sense to them, and will hold to it until something they think is better comes along.
It’s been like this before. We thought we had physics figured out once, too. Our view of the universe was solidly grounded in the simple principles laid out by Isaac Newton. Then a bunch of nobodies like Einstein had to come around with this Quantum business, and we learned how much we don’t know.
You know what? Even if we do manage to create life from scratch, or replicate one of these spontaneous mutations that results in an entirely new species*, it’ll have been from years of research, trial and error, and countless man-hours of scientific effort.
That sounds suspiciously like “intelligent” design to me. For the time being, they’re asking us to accept that species randomly mutate into new species with entirely new and distinct properties, and that life spontaneously develops from inoranic matter. They can’t demonstrate any of this under the best conditions, but they expect us to believe it’s happened time and time again in the primordial soup.
No matter which side of any issue you take, a certain amount of faith is required, whether or not you’re willing to admit it.
*By “new species”, I don’t mean genetically altered wheat. I mean something as different from what we have now as land and flying animals are from fish, or as different as venus fly traps are from run-of-the-mill weeds.
Cambo
The Theory of Evolution is a little more complete than that, but you are right, there are still lots of gaps because there is not complete evidence in the fossil record. Regarding mutation and such, visible changes do not happen in a single generation, but rather minor changes occur at the DNA level until enough changes happen to cause an external adaptation/mutation. I don’t think they know what the mechanism for change exactly is, but I do believe they’ve gotten fruit flies to adapt to new environments in the lab.
As for the gaps, I don’t care if a person wants to put God in the gaps. Hell, I think any scientist of faith would put God in the gaps to some degree. I have a problem with trying to push ID as a science when it is demonstratively not. Evolution may have gaps, and it may someday be proven as false or so incomplete as to have to be reworked entirely, but if ID wants to compete with Evolution as a Science, it needs to stand on it’s own evidence and predictions. Tearing down Evolution does not make room for ID, as science is more than happy to entertain multiple theories at a time, and has done so numerous times in the past, but each theory must stand on its own evidence.
When ID can begin to make predictions and can provide reproducible and testable results, and can create a set of conditions that will render it falsifiable, then it will have a better standing as a science, but right now, as it stands, the only way one could prove ID false, is to essentially prove that God, or any other advanced intelligence, does not exist.
And you can not prove a negative.
Well, Madrocketscientist pretty much said everything that I was going to. The Godwinning of the evolution debate is only the most blatant of the issues I have with the film. My more central problem is that what ID proponents are doing is saying that because there are gaps in a theory that nonetheless has at least some supporting evidence, another theory that is taken entirely on faith is just as legitimate. Want to believe in ID, or teach your kids about it? Fine, that’s your right. But science classes should be teaching science, not faith, and until there is some scientific evidence to support ID (and that means more than just saying “well evolution is an incomplete theory”), it should be kept out of science classes.
Cambo: There are some examples of fairly rapid mutation. For example, during the Industrial Revolution, at least one species of British moth dramatically changed color to better blend in with the new, polluted environment. This happened over only a few years. Granted, most mutations and evolutions are not this quick, but nonetheless there are documented examples of the phenomenon–which is more than can be said for ID.
I’m sure I’ll see it on DVD and equally sure it’ll never play on a theater screen in this area, so I’ll just have to wait and see.
I do find it interesting that Dawkins and one of the other eeeevil atheists interviewed in the film (and thanked in the credits!) showed up to a screening, having arranged their presence beforehand just like everyone else, and were told to leave. They were later accused of “crashing” the event and of “showing up without tickets” even though there were no tickets and they had phoned ahead to arrange seats just like everyone else in the theater. Both men state that they think the filmmakers didn’t want them in the theater because both men felt they had been tricked into participating under false pretenses and it was feared that they would “cause a scene.”
It’s great that Ben Stein is smart and all, but a lot of the rest of us ain’t too shabby ourselves. Intelligent Design is NOT science and does not belong in a science class. People are upset that we lag behind some other nations in education, but a lot of those same people don’t make the connection that in those countries they aren’t wasting any of their time or money arguing over whether science classes should teach science or religion.
Fruit flies adapting to new environments and moths changing colors are fine.
It’s still a far, far cry from an organism which has no genetic traits for breathing air spontaneously being born with a lung, or land-based organisms with no particular need nor genetic traits for flight being born with wings and learning to fly.
There really isn’t any middle ground here. You can either fly or you can’t. You either have lungs or you don’t. Moreover, in addition to your new wings, you have to have the inclination to use them. If you grafted eagle wings onto your Yorkshire Terrier, would it know how to fly? Would it have any inclination to fly? Probably not.
Frankly, I think they have no idea what happened. Their current theory is that ants, birds, and dinosaurs all have a common ancestor in the first creatures that crawled onto land. Each of these three distinct organisms, tiny insects, flying birds, and massive reptiles, all successfully mutated from the same genetic stock of a lungfish or something.
They can’t *prove* this, because, well, half a billion years is an unfathomably long time. There probably isn’t much to work with, assuming the evidence they want ever existed at all.
The fossil record does show the change of, say, large mammals over time, birds, etc. Much of this change can be credited to simple natural selection.
But until they can oberve a species making a rapid, dramatic, and spontaneous change, successfully resulting into an entirely new species, it remains only a theory.
Which is fine. That’s the way it goes. If you can’t handle not having all the answers right away I don’t think science is the best line of work for you.
What I don’t understand is why people get so defensive about this. I’m not talking about intelligent design; I’m talking about asking the wrong questions about evolutionary theory. You basically get accused of beliving the world is 6,000 years old and of being completely ignorant. I’ve encountered this more than once, albeit my personal sample was very small. Still. What’s the deal?
Cambo: You’re misunderstanding the theory of evolution–as are most proponents of ID/creationism, though many seem to do so deliberately. One animal does not change into another. There is no place where “a log becomes a frog becomes a dog” as the fundamentalist crusading on campus last year put it. What there is, is tiny changes to each successive generation, over (as you said) an unfathomably long time. The idea that microevolution and macroevolution are two different things is false–macroevolution is just a whole lot of microevolution. You say that you can accept moths changing color. Presumably, that means you could accept that, say, a species of bird could start to develop longer beaks, so as to be more successful at eating burrowing insects. They wouldn’t start out with long beaks, any more than fish started out with lungs; over hundreds or maybe even thousands of generations, the birds with longer beaks would be more successful at living, and therefore reproducing, thus changing this bird with an average sized beak into a bird with a long beak.
Now, if you can accept that, then you can possibly also accept that the original bird ate both nuts and insects. The ones with longer beaks were better at eating insects, while the ones with shorter beaks were better at breaking open and eating nuts. As time went by, and reproduction happened mostly within the two groups of birds, the groups split so far apart that the became two different species.
This is exactly what Darwin observed in the Galapogos Islands, which led to his theories of evolution. You are correct that the idea that animals suddenly mutate and have crazy, never-before-seen internal organs that lead to new species is ridiculous. Most of the “mutations” are things like slightly longer beaks, or slightly darker skin pigmentation. Natural selection leads to microevolution. Microevolution leads to macroevolution. If you accept one, logic dictates that you should accept them all.
Evolution is not survival of the fittest, it is culling of the least suited. Anything that survives propagates in proportion with its success.
Now, may the blessings of His Noodly Appendage be upon y’all.
http://www.venganza.org/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0
Logic dictates that saying that logic dictates your position doesn’t validate it. It implies, obviously, that if you don’t agree, well you’re just silly.
Two species of birds are both still birds. At some point, however, a land or marine animal learned how to fly.
Flight is not necessary for the survival of land animals. Air-breathing is not necessary for the survival of aquatic animals.
Beaks are part of a bird’s genetic makep. At some point, species began to develop entirely new traits, spontaneously, successfully, and against all odds.
What are the odds of a random mutation allowing a marine animal to be born with a functioning air breathing lung? As I said, you either have a lung or you don’t. You either fly, or you don’t.
Same with plants. Some plants somehow evolved to lure and eat insects. There is no “kind of” eating insects, nor is there “slightly” having a lung. It’s kind of an either/or situation.
You could say, “well, some fish probably had a habitat dry up, and evolved lungs to compensate.”
Well, first of all, saying the evolution happens as a mechanism for solving a survival problem serves only to give the intelligent design crowd fodder, as you’re implying that “nature” or whatever was able to assess the situation and come up with an evolutionary solution. Careful wording is required here.
If your oxygen supply was depleted, you wouldn’t evolve. You’d die. There’s no variation of air-breathing animal that won’t drown if you submerge it in water for long enough. Gills aren’t any more effective at breathing air than lungs are at breathing water.
As is, we’ve never observed any sort of macroevolution taking place, and cannot replicate it. They say that microevolution leads to macroevolution, but the question is how? Where does the genetic code for lungs come from when all life up until that point was aquatic?
Where’s the evidence? “It has to have happened in order for the theory to work” isn’t evidence, nor is “It’s logical” or “it stands or reason”.
Neither, for that matter, is “it MUST’VE happened!” Obviously we have air-breathing animals and intelligent primates. But their existence proves nothing other than that they exist. It doesn’t serve to validate anybody’s theory as to how they got there.
You know, it’s okay to admit “we just don’t know yet” and go back to doing research.
The evidence may well be right in front of us. The genetic code for everything, lungs, gills, fly-luring, flight, you name it, may well be buried in the DNA of every living thing on earth. There may be a completely different factor that we’re not really aware of at this point.
It’s also possible that land and aquatic animals spawned and developed entirely separately, so the leap from water breathing to air-breathing didn’t happen as such. Given how closely all life on earth is related to each other, this doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible.
All of these possibilities would serve to answer one question, but would open the door to many, many more.
It’s funny. Physicists will readily admit there’s much we don’t know about the makeup of the universe. Any historian will tell you that much has been lost to time, and as such is lost forever.
The life sciences crowd seems to have a hard time swallowing “I don’t know, we’ll have to keep doing research”. Much like the Global Warming crowd, whose predictions for disaster get surer and more dire every year, even when half the world is having the worst winter on record. Frankly, after THAT fiasco, the “most scienctists agree” argument should rightly hold about as much water as “nine out of ten dentists agree” should guide you in your toothpaste selection.
Anyway, it’s nice to see that there can be a calm discussion about this without anyone being accused of believing the earth to be flat…
First: I CAN’T be the only one that thinks a flying Yorkshire Terrier would make an awesome pet.
Second: Good lord, did someone actually make a ten-MINUTE YouTube video to argue with intelligent design people? Honestly, considering how much contempt folks have for the ID crowd, they certainly spend a lot of time thinking about them.
I wish I had that kind of free time. I’ve been falling WAY behind on my Half-Life.
Third: Before things get heated, let’s all remember: whether or not life evolved at random chance or God said “let there be” and it happened doesn’t change your day-to-day life one iota. Not even a little bit. As such, it’s not worth getting worked up over, regardless of your opinion. Let’s not turn Larry’s blog into a big argument, okay?
All of those in the ‘pro evolution’ camp on this thread have one thing in common: They haven’t seen the film and therefore have no idea what is actually said.
A quote from the film (kinda, from memory)
I think it was Ben who asked one of the scientists: “Do you think Evolution is true” (something like that)
scientist: “That depends on your definition of Evolution. If you mean simply “change over time”, yes, we can see a good bit of that. But if you mean that somehow life just happened from things that were totally inorganic, than no.”
Like I said, that’s ROUGHLY what the quote was. There was much more.
So, about half of you are thinking the movie is pushing things that it’s not.
Word to the (apparantly) wise: Check out the facts of the film before you condemn it.
“let’s all remember: whether or not life evolved at random chance or God said “let there be” and it happened doesn’t change your day-to-day life one iota.”
– It is not possible for you to be more wrong than you are right here.
But, I’ll just bite my tongue, because as you said, we shouldn’t turn his blog into an arguement.
I use the phrase “logic dictates” only in situations where one belief leads directly to another. For example, if you believe that the right to bear arms is essential to liberty, and you believe that Hillary Clinton will infringe upon the right to bear arms, logic dictates that you won’t vote for Hillary. But that’s semantics, I suppose.
As for wings or lungs or whatever, you only have to look at the physical structure of animals. An x-ray of a bird’s wing looks like an exceptionally long arm, with exceptionally long fingers. Is it so hard to believe that, say, bats and flying squirrels have a common ancestor? The squirrels simply lived in an environment where the ability to glide only needed to be advanced enough to go from tree to tree, or tree to ground. But some of the common ancestors, living in areas with sparser vegetation or different geological features, evolved to be able to glide longer distances and to control direction and speed to a greater degree–through natural selection. Eventually, over hundreds of thousands of years, the skin and muscles and bones that allowed for gliding gradually turned into full-blown wings.
Nobody is saying that evolution is a complete theory. But based on available evidence, it’s the best and most scientific explanation we have. The argument for teaching intelligent design alongside evolution is basically “although there is some evidence behind this theory, it is not complete, so let’s say that our faith-based theory is just as legitimate.” And that’s a fallacy. It’s like saying that because we’re not sure of the nature of light (since it has qualities of both particles and waves), we should just start teaching that the Flying Spaghetti Monster shoots light out of his noodly appendage, and that’s just as legitimate a theory.
As for the life sciences types being all or nothing, that’s more the media’s impression, since it’s a public debate. Scientists, real scientists, who believe in global warming or evolution or whatever will tell you right off that the theories are incomplete, and that although the available evidence supports the theory to a degree that they feel comfortable espousing the theory it doesn’t mean that no more research is necessary. The problem is that the media gets ahold of it, and gets a few extremists on either side, and turns the debate into intelligent design vs. evolution, man-made global warming vs. no climate change whatsoever, faith vs. science, Christian vs. atheist, whatever. It’s a lot easier for them to report on something that’s black and white.
Yep … that is why it is science.
Science IS fallible. If a theory is wrong, it will get chucked out with the trash. This is a feature, not a bug. Theists have problems understanding this, and think it is some kind of weakness … the notion of voluntarily accepting fallibility is alien.
Religion is not fallible. You either believe, or you do not.
It is called Theory, not Law and that on itself should be enough. However I do not see any inconsistency by using BOTH currents to explain life.
There was a BBC TV miniseries in 1973 called The Ascent of Man by Jacob Brownoski. It was the first time I saw the conjunction of Science, Humanism and Religion as one and not mutually exclusive. Yes, Science gives us an explanation of things and the more Science shows the complex poetry of Life (from photosynthesis to gravity to conception, to how the brain works), how can any reasonable human being think it all was created by a simple throw of the cosmic dice and not a Divine Power?
I found the 2 minutes of the miniseries in youtube. It sums his case darn well if you ask me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA
The miniseries is available in Netflix if you want to watch it and the book of the same name is in Amazon.
I have no issue with the basic idea that maybe God IS the ultimate author of life. I may be an atheist/agnostic type, but I don’t find the notion fundamentally threatening, and I readily admit that maybe, at the end of the day, once we’ve covered everything science CAN cover, maybe that’s the truth.
Where I have a problem with Expelled is not that it takes on academia (a target-rich environment), and not that it involves omgreligion, and certainly not that it tweaks Dawkins and his ilk, but that it is every bit as much a piece of staged, fundamentally dishonest agitprop as any Michael Moore film. It chops up Darwin in order to misrepresent Descent of Man as the origin of eugenics- and they HAD to have read the full version, which explicitly rejects that kind of thinking, in order to quote it. It lied to Dawkins, Meyers, et al about what kind of movie they were going to appear in. It puts forth the premise that those mean old scientists won’t entertain ID as scientific theory because science fundamentally prefers atheism rather than because abiding by methodological naturalism- no invocation of the supernatural allowed in science, because the whole investigation collapses shortly after- is simply what science is and does, completely regardless of the question of God.
Cambo- if you really want to know where in evolutionary theory is a plausible explanation of the origin of a bird’s wing or lungs for fish, then by all means, go learn. It goes way beyond your high school class version, and certainly beyond that teacher’s ability to explain. Virtually all of what you’re positing as logically impossible were part of my college biology curriculum. (Fish with lungs, by the way, not only still exist, but have a truly fascinating cardiovascular system that give an interesting look at how that portion of transition from all-fish to land tetrapod might have gone.) Nick mentions flying squirrels and bats possibly having a common ancestor- so far as I’m aware, they don’t, at least not more recently than 70 million years ago or so… but the “glider” form is such a useful body plan for a small forest animal that spends lots of time in trees that there are even frogs, snakes, and lizards with some version of that adaptation. They don’t have recent common ancestors, and their anatomy- all different ways to glide- reflects that. Convergent evolution is fun.
It’s a huge subject, because it’s the underpinning of biology. Like any massive part of science, the version that gets passed down in early education isn’t much better than a crayon sketch of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
You have lungs or you don’t? Never heard of an axolotol, a book-lung?
It’s all about gradual changes and lucky breaks. The idea of such an incomprehensibly random and uncaring system being not only functional, but successful to such a degree of complexity as we see around us grates almost antithetically on creationistic orderly-universe theory.
While I wasn’t going to see this film because it’s “pro-Intelligent Design” I will have to see this film now, if only because I WANT to see Ben Stein kick richard Dawkins to the curb like a narc at a biker rally.
Because I believe in God AND Evolution, and Dawkins is an annoying sack of fertilizer atheist with nothing constructive to give to society.
Evolution has a fossil record basis going back hundreds of millions of years. If such subtle development of species isn’t a magnification of the Creator, what is?