Win Ben Stein's Mind

From Little Green Footballs:

Roger Ebert's comprehensive skewering of Ben Stein's anti-evolution film Expelled (a right-wing Michael Moore-ish piece of deceptive propaganda) is a must-read: Win Ben Stein's mind.

Ron Bailey on Expelled

Flunk This Movie!

Ben Stein's Expelled is all worldview and no evidence.

Ronald Bailey | July 2008 Print Edition

“This is not a religious argument,” Discovery
Institute President Bruce Chapman asserts in the new
anti-evolution propaganda movie, Expelled: No
Intelligence Allowed. Yet the film is free of
scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence
against biological evolution and none for “intelligent
design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the
movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory
for their religious views.

The film begins with moody shots of Stein backstage
before he addresses an unidentified audience on the
alleged suppression of scientific research in the name
of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and
suggests that we are losing our scientific freedom.

As evidence, Stein trots out a small parade of
martyrs. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, then editor of
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,
published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the
“Cambrian explosion” 570 to 530 million years ago in
which most of the body types of animals developed was
evidence for intelligent design.

Many of Sternberg’s colleagues reacted with dismay,
and the journal retracted the article. In the film,
Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian’s
Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign,
and had his religious and political beliefs
questioned. Yet he still has office space in the
museum and has been reappointed for three more years.
True, some of his colleagues might not want to hang
out with him anymore. But that is a far cry from the
grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies and
concentration camps featured in the film.

In 2005, George Mason University did not renew a
teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct
biology lecturer who believes in intelligent design.
She tells Stein that she only wanted to teach students
to question scientific orthodoxies: “I was only trying
to teach what the university stands for—academic
freedom.” Since George Mason let her go, she says, she
can no longer find work.

Interestingly, Crocker delivered the same offending
lecture at a local community college later. It didn’t
turn out to be a “balanced” presentation of evidence
for and against biological evolution. Why not? “There
really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” she
says.

An assistant professor of astronomy, Guillermo
Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University
in 2007. In 2004 Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged
Planet, which argues the Earth was precisely
positioned to enable researchers like him to make
scientific measurements. An Iowa State colleague,
Hector Avalos, neatly skewers this conceit: “This
rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if
our planet had not been positioned precisely where it
is, then he might not be able to do his work as a
plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much
closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the
Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not
exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the
reason that our planet was located where it is.”

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his views?
The university denies it, but my guess is he did. On
the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo’s
colleagues could reasonably worry that his views
weren’t likely to lead to fruitful research results.

The most egregious part of the movie is the attempt to
link evolution with Communism and Nazism. The claim
that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just silly.
Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism,
and Russian Darwinists were denounced as “Trotskyite
agents of international fascism” and thrown into the
Gulag for their scientific sins.

And Nazism? In the film, the mathematician David
Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient
condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it
was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that
scientific materialism undermines the notion that
human beings occupy a special place in the universe.
If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking,
then morals don’t apply.

But people through the millennia have found all sorts
of justifications for murdering each other, including
plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile,
insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us
understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics
contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism,
xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. The field also
offers new ideas about how human morality developed,
including our capacities for cooperation, love, and
tolerance.

At one point in the film, the science studies gadfly
Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes
first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question
at the proponents of evolutionary biology. As this
dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the
question is far more relevant to the supporters of
intelligent design.

Hitler and Evolution

Did Hitler use Darwin's ideas as a basis for his Final Solution?

While Hitler uses the word "evolution" in Mein Kampf, it is clear that he is not referring to Darwin's theory --- indeed, he never mentions the man. In fact, a look at his writings reveals his sentiments on the subject to be those of an orthodox creationist.

Like a creationist, Hitler asserts fixity of kinds:

Like a creationist, Hitler claims that God made man:

Like a creationist, Hitler affirms that humans existed "from the very beginning", and could not have evolved from apes:

There is another point in Mein Kampf where Hitler refers to "evolution", in volume IV chapter II. Creationists are fond of quoting a bit of it out of context in order to give the false impression that he is talking about biological evolution.

....

But it is clear from the context that he is talking about social evolution, not biological evolution, and about ideas (technical knowledge, military strategies) that are culturally transmitted rather than biological traits transmitted by genetic inheritance.

Hitler's main point seems to be that every good idea has a single origin, an idea that will sound very strange to anyone with a knowledge of the history of science and technology, and which of course has nothing to do with the theory of evolution.

And while I'm at it, here's the section at talk.origins.org.

"Rare earths" -- maybe not

One of the stars of "Expelled" is an astronomer who argues that Earth is a rare beast -- a planet sufficiently fine-tuned for life as to be very improbable. Thus, more than chance is at work.

He says.

Another researcher thinks the sun, at least, is not that uncommon.

There's nothing special about the Sun that makes it more likely than other stars to host life, a new study shows. The finding adds weight to the idea that alien life should be common throughout the universe.

"The Sun's properties are consistent with it being pulled out at random from the bag of all stars," says Charles Lineweaver from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. "Life does not seem to require anything special in its host star, other than it be close."

Some previous studies of the Sun's vital statistics have concluded that it is unusual among stars, for instance, by having a higher mass than average. Such atypical properties might somehow help explain why the Sun seems to be unique, as far as we know, in having an inhabited planet.

With his ANU colleague José Robles and others, Lineweaver has now analysed 11 features of the Sun that might affect its ability to have habitable planets. They included its mass, age, rotation speed and orbital distance from the centre of the Milky Way.

Then they compared these with well-measured statistics for other stars to answer the question – overall, does the Sun stand out from the crowd any more than some other randomly chosen star would?

The Sun did stand out in two ways: it is more massive than 95% of nearby stars and its orbit around the centre of our galaxy is more circular than those of 93% of nearby stars.

Very ordinary

But when all 11 properties were taken on board, the Sun looked very ordinary. Robles's team calculates that there would be only about one chance in three that a star selected at random would be "more typical" than the Sun.

They conclude that there are probably no special attributes that a star requires to have a habitable planet, other than the obvious one – the planet must be within the star's habitable "goldilocks" zone, orbiting at a distance where the temperature is not too hot for life, nor too cold, but just right.

Kenneth Miller on "Expelled"

Kenneth Miller, author of Finding Darwin's God, has a few words to say about "Expelled".

"Intelligent Design," the relabeled, repackaged form of American creationism, has always had a problem. It just can't seem to produce any evidence. To scientists, the reasons for this are obvious. To conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Intelligent Design is nothing more than a "phony theory." No data, no science, no experiments, just an attempt to sneak a narrow set of religious views into US classrooms.

Advocates of Intelligent Design needed a story to explain why the idea has been a nonstarter within the scientific community, and Ben Stein has given it to them. The story line is that Intelligent Design advocates are persecuted and suppressed. "Expelled" tells of this terrible campaign against free expression, and mocks the pretensions of the closed-minded scientific elite supposedly behind it.

I've linked to posts by John Derbyshire where he calls "Expelled" "a blood libel against civilization". Here's another take on why this is an apt description:

Why is all this nonsense a threat to science? The reason is Stein's libelous conclusion that science is simply evil. In an April 21 interview on the Trinity Broadcast Network, Stein called the Nazi murder of children "horrifying beyond words." Indeed. But what led to such horrors? Stein explained: "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. Science leads you to killing people."

According to Stein, science leads you to "killing people." Not to cures and vaccines, not to a deeper understanding of nature, not to wonders like computers and cellphones, and certainly not to a better life. Nope. Science is murder.

"Expelled" is a shoddy piece of propaganda that props up the failures of Intelligent Design by playing the victim card. It deceives its audiences, slanders the scientific community, and contributes mightily to a climate of hostility to science itself. Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word "expelled" may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

Berlinski invokes Godwin's Law

David Berlinski draws a connection between Hitler and Darwin

One man -- Charles Darwin -- says: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. …”

Another man -- Adolf Hitler -- says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.

Is there a connection?

Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense.

Published in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said nothing of substance about the origin of species. Or anything else, for that matter. It nonetheless persuaded scientists in England, Germany and the United States that human beings were accidents of creation. Where Darwin had seen species struggling for survival, German physicians, biologists, and professors of hygiene saw races.

They drew the obvious conclusion, the one that Darwin had already drawn. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. German scientists took the word expense to mean what it meant: The annihilation of less fit races.

The point is made with abysmal clarity in the documentary, Expelled. Visiting the site at which those judged defective were killed -- a hospital, of course -- the narrator, Ben Stein, asks the curator what most influenced the doctors doing the killing.

“Darwinism,” she replies wanly.

The view that we may consider the sources of Nazi ideology in every context except those most relevant to its formation is rich, fruity, stupid and preposterous. It is for this reason repeated with solemn incomprehension at the website Expelled Exposed: “Anti-Semitic violence against Jews,” the authors write with a pleased sense of discovery, “can be traced as far back as the middle ages, at least 7 centuries before Darwin.”

Let me impart a secret. It can be traced even further. “Oh that mine head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears," runs the lamentation in Jeremiah 9.1, “that I might weep day and night for the slain daughters of my people.”

And yet if anti-Semitism has been the white noise of European history, to assign it causal powers over the Holocaust is simply to ignore very specific ideas that emerged in the 19th century, and that at once seized the imagination of scientists throughout the world.

So Berlinski's thesis is that even though hatred of Jews has run through the past couple of millennia of history, no one had tried to eliminate them before Hitler. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

What is often called social Darwinism was a malignant force in Germany, England and the United States from the moment that social thinkers forged the obvious connection between what Darwin said and what his ideas implied. Justifying involuntary sterilization, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” He was not, it is understood, appealing to Lutheran ideas. Germany reached a moral abyss before any other state quite understood that the abyss was there to be reached because Germans have always had a congenital weakness for abysses and seem unwilling, when one is in sight, to avoid toppling into it.

Interestingly enough, Jonah Goldberg devotes a chapter of his book, Liberal Fascism to eugenics, including the Final Solution.

He has some interesting things to say about Social Darwinism"

Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.

[emphasis in original]

Note: the term was invented by progressives to label opponents of eugenics. Continuing:

Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist – he coined the phrase – "survival of the fittest" – but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good—albeit classical—liberal: he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported itlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigeur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing "greed" and even the Holocaust.

[emphasis in original]

[pp. 257-258]

And of course the point remains: Hitler could have slept with Origin of Species under his pillow, and read passages from Ascent of Man over every meal, and it would have no bearing on whether Darwin's notions have any merit or not. The most we could infer is that some minds are too addled to handle science.

The Evolution 'Controversy'

Good take here via Nobel Intent:

Evolution clearly has no shortage of controversies. But none of those controversies involve the basic principles of evolution, and all of them operate within a framework where random mutation and selection play a key role in creating diverse species that are related by common descent. It's clear that the Discovery Institute is trying to introduce controversies that don't exist, while ignoring those that do. That's why the academic freedom bills it's promoting are such dangerous things; while supposedly promoting intellectual analysis, they're actually an attempt to pave the way for misinformation to enter the scientific classroom.

Indeed they are.

Out for a Spin

Mark Perakh over at Talk Reason is discussing the flagellum.

Actually, he's discussing several flagella, with particular emphasis on the distinction between real ones and fictional ones.

It is this image of the flagellum which Behe displayed on the wall of Larry Kane's studio. Pointing to that image, Behe triumphantly claimed that the flagellum looked exactly like a man-made "machine." Since all machines we know about have been designed, Behe confidently asserted that the flagellum bears features doubtlessly pointing to Design. QED.

....

If I had seen Behe's pictures, I could have simply repeated what I wrote in a post to the Panda's Thumb blog on June 15, 2004 regarding the Dembski-Shanks debate [17]. Here is a quotation from my post:

[Dembski] has devoted a considerable attention to the discussion of what he referred to as the mascot of intelligent design - the bacterium flagellum. He insisted that the flagellum is in fact a machine, and to support this statement, he displayed that standard picture where the flagellum is shown in a geometrically perfect shape, fully symmetric and consisting of geometrically perfectly formed parts. Of course, such a presentation was misleading as the real flagellum is far from having such a perfect geometric shape. Unlike machines, which may be close replicas of each other (say, all Jeeps of the same year have almost exactly the same shape) the flagella, first, have shapes with many deviations from a perfect geometric symmetry, and, second, there are no two flagella exactly identical. Individual flagella differ in various respects, like the entire biological organisms vary from an individual to individual. If Dembski's picture were closer to reality, it would be much less effective in supporting his claims. Since he did not offer a disclaimer pointing to the idealization used in his depiction of the flagellum, we are entitled to conclude that he was interested not in an honest discussion based on facts, but rather on winning the debate regardless of means.

The above words can be addressed to Behe as well as to Dembski.

In fact the images Behe, Dembski, and their ID colleagues are showing are not pictures of real flagella but rather pictures of imaginary (usually computer-generated) machine-like contraptions remotely reminiscent of real flagella, pictures composed in a way artificially creating a false impression of flagella's machine-like appearance.

To illustrate my thesis, let us survey some examples of flagella images found in various publications.

....

One more picture of the molecular structure of a flagellum is shown in Fig. 7, in this case representing a filament's cross-section view.

Instead of machine-like parts with a smooth surface, we see in these pictures garlands of protein molecules constituting the elements of the flagellum assembly. Which man-made machine has anything in common with these images? These structures rather look like typical bacteriophage viruses.

(Some of the pictures can be seen here: http://sciencenotes.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/whos-zoomin-who/)

ID advocates often point (see, for example, [18]) to the allegedly fraudulent "icons of evolution" supposedly utilized by the "Darwinists" for their nefarious purposes. One of such allegedly fraudulent "icons" is the images of embryos by Haeckel. In fact, Haeckel's embryos images were shown to be erroneous not by any creationists but rather by the "Darwinists" themselves. On the other hand, ID advocates, including Dembski and Behe, incessantly reproduce images of flagella which are heavily doctored, without any disclaimers as to the great degree of idealization inherent in these images. Indeed, look again at the real electron photographs of flagella and/or at the images of their actual molecular structure, as shown above in Figs 4, 5, 6, and 7, and it becomes obvious that real natural flagella are far from looking like man-made machines like those whose artificially constructed images are shown in Figs 1, 2, and 3.

It seems that Behe, Dembski, and their companions in the anti-science endeavors, may be with a much better justification accused of resorting to frauds, because the images of flagella they endlessly reproduce are in fact fraudulent insofar as they are not accompanied by disclaimers admitting the substantial degree of idealization, resulting in those mages being misleading made-up representations of real flagella.

Ten Foot Pole

John Derbyshire has a question for David Berg:

Then tell me, if you can, why any educated person of integrity would touch creationism with a ten-foot pole.

Answer: because their demand for a God they can emotionally understand outweighs any consideration of what's actually true.

Ed Morissey on Expelled

His review of the movie is here.

Ron Bailey on Expelled

At Reason Magazine

One the movie's shticks is to grill atheist advocates of biological evolution as a way to warn viewers about the corrosive effects on science on religious belief. But are faith and reason incompatible? Not all scientists think so.

Among them is Dr. Francisco Ayala, a former Dominican priest:

Dr. Ayala, a former Dominican priest, said he told his audiences not just that evolution is a well-corroborated scientific theory, but also that belief in evolution does not rule out belief in God. In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.”

Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts.

For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

Berlinski Responds to The Derb

Berlinski Responds to The Derb

David Berlinski has written a piece in response to John Derbyshire on "Expelled".

Having not seen the documentary that he proposes to criticize, Derbyshire is nonetheless quite certain that he knows what it conveys. “It is pretty plain,” he asserts, “that it is a piece of creationist porn.” Perhaps I will be forgiven for suggesting that John Derbyshire’s late-night scrutiny of the Internet may have corrupted his habitual search for le mot juste. Expelled has nothing to do with creationism, and if it is pornographic, the details have not become widely known.

Unfortunately, Intelligent Design is Creationism -- albeit with the serial numbers filed off. In his opinion in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, Judge Jones made precisely that finding:

[p. 136]

H. Conclusion

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Expelled promotes Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is Creationism. Therefore, Expelled promotes Creationism. Q.E.D.

Go ahead and read the rest of his piece. And then go ahead and read ExpelledExposed.com, and some of the other pieces I've linked at my site.

For what it's worth, I've read a couple of Berlinski's comments on evolution, and decided this is an area where he doesn't read for content very well. In particular, his discussion of a piece by Nilsson and Pelger, "An optimistic estimate of the time required for the evolution of the eye", he did not read the article he presumes to debunk. Seriously. He claims the article fails to address points that it most definitely does address.

The only explanation of the content of his "response" to the piece is that he read Richard Dawkins' description of the article, tracked down the article, and read only the captions of the illustrations therein.

The other piece he wrote was less memorable, and not nearly as egregious, but it still fell far short of the sort of analysis (or understanding) I'd expect from someone with his credentials.

Jim Manzi on Expelled

Jim Manzi says, "Show me the science".

Expelled makes two key assertions. First, the scientific establishment has prevented adequate consideration of Intelligent Design (ID). Second, the scientific finding of evolution through natural selection logically entails atheism and nihilism.

There is a germ of truth to the first assertion. I’m sure that you would hard-pressed to get the editors of a reputable scientific journal to publish a paper that depends explicitly on ID. Of course, it would be just as hard to convince them to publish a paper that was premised on the phlogiston theory of combustion or that presented a perpetual motion machine.

This is because, in order to make practical progress, scientists accept paradigms (e.g., the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology) that have demonstrated the ability both to account for a wide range of empirical observations, and to produce useful scientific results. A paradigm helps to create a coherent discipline. The day-to-day work of scientists is to solve intellectual puzzles that fall within the relevant paradigm.

...ID advocates say Aha! You see, scientists aren’t giving ID a fair hearing, because it’s just too far outside of the box for the intellectual pygmies who comprise the biology faculties of every major research university in the world. The problem with this is that science has a proven track record of subverting existing paradigms, and replacing them, once superior alternatives are proposed. This process is imperfect and always takes time to work, but it does work. Obvious examples include the triumphs of heliocentric astronomy, the law of conservation of matter, the oxygen theory of combustion, the germ theory of disease, plate tectonics, special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.

...the obvious question for ID proponents is never asked: OK, this great science is being suppressed, so please show me the data, lab notebooks, scientific work papers, unpublished manuscripts, and so on that contain all of these amazing discoveries that nobody will confront. But we never see it.

As for the second charge:

it is true that many people have reasoned from evolution to atheism. But is their reasoning correct? Expelled gives lots of screen time to several prominent scientists, philosophers, and other academics who claim that it is. It doesn’t bother to present those who disagree, and believe that evolution is fully compatible with faith: the director of the Human Genome Research Institute, to pick one example, or Pope Benedict. Why would the pope be part of a multidisciplinary conspiracy to promote atheism?

And finally...

Trying to wish away valid scientific findings because you believe that they imperil religious or ethical beliefs is a fool’s errand on many levels. Augustine’s guidance from The Literal Meaning of Genesis is quite relevant here:

Even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipse of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

Dennis Prager often feels compelled to point out that the literal translation of the third commandment is "Do not carry the Lord's name in vain." This does not refer to casual mentions like "Oh God", but to the act of doing evil (or absurdities) in God's name. Shouting "God is great!" while beheading a captive does not make God look worthy of worship.

Similarly, claiming that God demands you ignore established facts in order to be true to him makes him look petty, or perhaps scared that the real world might undermine the faith of his followers.

This does not help God's image at all.

And if it qualifies as a violation of the third commandment, apparently, that's the one sin God won't forgive.

Ben Stein Misses the Point

Ed Morrissey at HotAir says Ben Stein misses his own point.

Stein misses the target by a mile when he says this at about the 28-minute mark:

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the 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.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Science does not lead to Dachau; ideology perverting science led to Dachau. The Holocaust occurred when raving anti-Semites and materialists latched onto scientific theory as a philosophy, making it into a rationalization for what they would have done regardless.

The Intelligent Design movement happens to oppose all of science as it's currently carried out. The Wedge document blames "materialism" for a multitude of social ills, and seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies". While cultural materialism leads to bad things, you can't do science in any way except materialistically. When you're trying to pin down the materialistic rules that govern things, you're not allowed to bring in non-material causes. Period.

As soon as you do that, you're no longer doing science.

Expelled and More

John Derbyshire is taking flak over calling anti-evolutionism in general, and "Expelled" in particular, "A blood libel against civilization".

No, David. "The world is truly revealed as upside-down and backward" when intelligent young Jews sign up to the anti-science crusade.

....

Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don't the two of you know, don't Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don't, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). You new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

I am sure you know the fine speech that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, but "people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed":

More … What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on Roper) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Bolt's More understood a thing you and Stein don't understand, the thing that Waugh credited Kipling with understanding in that quote I posted earlier in the week, and that Adolf Hitler (hey, you started the reductio ad Hitlerum), in his own way, and of course from the other side of the Wall, also understood.

You and Stein are playing a dangerous game, a game that Jews should be the very last to play. The ADL, for all its faults, at least understands that.

The heart and soul of my objection to the Creationists, and to the Intelligent Design / Intelligent Origin Theorists (ID/IOTs) is that bad theories kill people.

And these groups promote the bad theory that science is the enemy of civilization. (Nowhere spelled out more clearly than in Ben Stein's recent interview where he declares scientists guilty of gassing his relatives in Nazi germany.)

Well, one of the first things "a scientist" told me to do was drink a vial of sugar water -- mixed with polio vaccine. For every scientist involved in the Final Solution against Jews, there are thousands, at least, involved in a Final Solution against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Those who wish to call science their enemy are free to reject any solutions it comes up with. They are not free to reject them on my behalf.

Expelled and Godwin's Law

Expelled and Godwin's Law

There are a number of people who take issue with the contention in Expelled that Darwin's ideas helped the Nazis justify their Final Solution.

One group that has spoken out is the Anti-Defamation League.

Unfortunately, their positions of late don't inspire a great deal of confidence in their judgment, so I haven't cited their press release.

David Klinghoffer at Jewcy has more to say about the ADL.

Stein Says Science Kills

Stein Says Science Kills

Instapundit Begs To Differ

SCIENCE LEADS YOU TO KILLING PEOPLE? If this quote is accurate, Ben Stein has completely lost it.

Auschwitz was not conceived as science, nor was it impelled by science, or scientists. The Holocaust was not a scientific endeavor, but had its roots in the Nazis' unscientific loathing of the Jews. The Nazis did try to dress up that loathing in scientific dress, but that was a propaganda move, not science. (Indeed, Nazi science, for the most part, was dreadful science, made up by people to suit their preexisting beliefs without actual resort to the scientific method.) One can argue quite compellingly against moral relativism without engaging in raw intellectual dishonesty.

STILL MORE: In the comments at ChicagoBoyz, David Foster writes:

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Stein’s writing, and it saddens me to see him descending to this nuttiness.

“the 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”…surely Stein knows that the concentration camps were run by the SS, 99% of whom were not scientists. While it is true that the Nazis employed chemists for nefarious purposes, it is also true that the Nazis employed musicians to help hide from inmates the true purpose of the camps. Would Stein also assert that music is evil?

Good point, exposing just how cheap Stein's cheap shot was.

A BadIdeas Review of "Expelled"

Another review, including this on the "link" between "Darwinism" and Nazism.

What about the link between evolution and Hitler?

Frankly, the film does a lot more than simply call Darwin out for playing directly into Nazi and eugenic ideologies.

Now, a lot has been made of the upfront citations of darwinian influences in these movements, and how these are woefully incomplete and highly selective as history. The film certainly makes caveats about how not all mainstream biologists are Nazis (oh. Gracious thanks!). But it hints that those who are not of a dark bent (an attitude which it tries to pin on William Provine, and fairly effectively) aren’t being logical, not following through with the inevitable implications of their ideas. Like those insincere Christians that support evolution, non-genocidal evolutionists are apparently kept at bay by their better natures (which, as any good apologist will tell you, are merely on loan from Christianity). The idea that eugenics or racial genocide are based on illegitimate and bizarre distortions of evolutionary biology or confusion about how descriptive science relates to normative values… that’s a no-show in the film. And the film ultimately even undercuts its spoken caveats with things like Stein accusingly staring Darwin down and quote mining Descent of Man (again, something that’s right out of young-earth creationism 101) directly subsequent to a visit to Dachau.

But all of this is arguably less important than where the film goes next: basically asserting that these horrible things are going to happen all over again, or maybe are already happening, because of how pernicious the influence of the “Darwinian” worldview is. Berlinski quotes a German saying that means “this is how it always starts.” And what, exactly is starting again? Stein asks Jeffrey Schawrtz “What’s going to happen if this doesn’t change?” “I think we’re watching it happen.” Again, this comes straight out of the film’s musing on the horrors of the Holocaust.

I just don’t see how there’s much room for quibbling over what the film is getting at here either.

Truth "Expelled"

When Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, and others were interviewed for the movie "Expelled", they were told they were being interviewed for a movie with a more balanced premise, called "Crossroads".

Now it's possible the producers simply decided to change the name of the movie halfway through. After all, I saw ads for a magazine named "Nova" a year before it hit the newsstands, same format, same font, but with the name of "Omni". And I once went to a screening for a movie called "Eaters of the Dead", based on the Michael Chrichton novel of the same name. It was excellent, and I told all my friends to go see it when it came out, under the title of "The 13th Warrior".

But the question arises, just when did the producers decide to call their movie "Expelled"?

Wesley Elsberry did some digging:

One of the things that has dogged Mathis is the fact that the “expelledthemovie.com” domain was registered at the beginning of March, 2007, about a month earlier than the invitations for interviews went out to Eugenie Scott and PZ Myers. No similar domain seems to have been registered by Mathis for the alleged “Crossroads” concept. Ben Stein adds another piece to the burgeoning chronological evidence stack that argues against taking Mathis at his word. When did Ben Stein get the word that he’d be the front-man for an attack piece? According the WORLD interview, that would be sometime in 2006...

Creationists, Hitler and Evolution

Lenny Flank, the moderator of the Debunk Creation mailing list, has written a number of essays about creationism, ID, and evolution. Since one of the claims offered by Expelled is that "Darwinism" led directly to Nazism, here's a link to his essay.

A common charge made by creationists is that evolutionary theory is "evil" and is the source of racism in general, and of dictatorial killers in particular. The most often-heard assertion is that Hitler and his racist genocide were the product of "evolutionary philosophy". Henry Morris, for instance, flatly declares, "However one may react morally against Hitler, he was certainly a consistent evolutionst." (Morris, "Evolution and Modern racism", ICR Impact, October 1973) Morris adds: "The philosophies of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche--the forerunners of Stalin and Hitler--have been particularly baleful in their effect: both were dedicated evolutionists." (Morris, Troubled Waters of Evolution, 1974 p. 33)

How accurate is this creationist finger-pointing? Not very. The creationists are apparently unaware of the fact that Stalinist Russia rejected Darwinian evolution as "bourgeois" and instead embraced the non-Darwinian "proletarian biology" of Lysenko and Michurin (a disaster from which Russian genetics and biological sciences has still not completely recovered). As for Hitler, even a cursory reading of his book Mein Kampf reveals that the true source of Hitler's inspiration and exhortations came from a source that creationists, understandably, would rather not talk about.

Hitler's goal was the "purification" of the "Aryan race" through the elimination of "subhumans", which included Jews, gypsies, Asians, black Africans, and everyone else who was not a white Aryan. Despite the creationists claims that this was based on Darwinain evolutionary theory, Hitler's own writings give quite a different story. The ICR claims that "Hitler used the German word for evolution (Entwicklung) over and over again in his book." (ICR Impact, "The Ascent of Racism", Paul Humber Feb 1987) Like so many of ICR's claims, this one is simply not true---a quick scan of several online English translations of Mein Kampf shows only ONE use of the word "evolution", in a context which does not refer at all to biological evolution, but instead to the development of political ideas in Germany: "This evolution has not yet taken the shape of a conscious intention and movement to restore the political power and independence of our nation."

Had ICR made even a cursory reading of Mein Kampf, they would have seen a quite different source for Hitler's racist inspiration than the one they would have us believe. White Aryans, Hitler writes, are the special creations of God, the "highest image of the Lord", put here specifically to rule over the "subhuman" races: "Human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe. The undermining of the existence of human culture by the destruction of its bearer seems in the eyes of a folkish philosophy the most execrable crime. Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent Creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise." (all quotes from Hitler, Mein Kampf, online version) Actions which aid the "subhumans" at the expense of the Aryan master race, Hitler declared, were an offense against God: " It is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions."