The Austringer

SAD 59 debates teaching of evolution

Mike O’Risal at Hyphoid Logic points out that there is trouble brewing in Maine.

I think the following from the news report conveys the essence:

Director Matthew Linkletter claims evolution is an unprovable theory and shouldn’t be taught as fact. He’s urged the SAD 59 Board of Directors to consider his view during its May 19 meeting in Madison, with a goal of removing evolution from science classrooms.

But David Connerty-Marin of the Department of Education says evolution must be taught because, in the state’s view, it’s a proven science.

“For our students to be prepared for college work and life in the 21st century, it’s necessary,” said Connerty-Marin.

Connerty-Marin said the Maine Learning Results program mandates the study of evolution in public science classes.

You have a local school board seeking to overturn statewide standards concerning teaching of evolutionary science, with typical “equal time” and “balanced treatment” claims being made here.

The state of play has progressed since 1987’s Edwards v. Aguillard ruling, though. Now, the federal government under the “No Child Left Behind” law will withhold federal funds from schools whose students do not perform to the adopted state science standards. That means that if the state has evolutionary science in its science standards, efforts to exclude it from the classrooms and tests means that the schools involved are saying they they don’t want the monetary support that comes from compliance.

Maybe Linkletter hasn’t gotten the memo yet.

There was a hearing in the Yoko Ono copyright infringement case this past week, and Premise Media has been enjoined against further distribution of “Expelled” until the case is settled next hearing on May 19th.

That means that theaters that already have a copy may continue to show it, but no further prints may be sent out to other theaters, and no CD or DVD versions may be distributed, either.

The Florida legislature failed to pass either of two forms of the Discovery Institute’s draft “academic freedom” bills, and adjourned Friday evening. We have until the legislative session next year to make sure that those in the legislature know exactly what the history and intent of bills like that are. But it doesn’t feel like a “win”; those of us who invested our time in advocating for good science education in Florida essentially got lucky this time.

Read the rest at the Panda’s Thumb.

The Discovery Institute is not pleased.

The Florida legislature’s session ends tomorrow. Today, the Florida Senate basically tossed the ball into the House’s court, to amend their wording to match the Senate version of an antievolution bill. The House is still in session going on into the evening. There’s a lot of actual legislation needed to keep the state government going that needs to be considered and voted on. So various places have discussed the possibility that the session will end without further action on the antievolution bills in play, including a bizarre claim from Discovery Institute Carpetbagger-Plenipotentiary John West that if the session expired without an “academic freedom” (DI’s sense of “academic irresponsibility”) law resulting that Florida Republican lawmakers would have “a lot of explaining to do”.

But no one’s livelihood or property are safe while the legislature is in session, or so it is said, and there’s another day where the House could decide to capitulate to the Senate and pass the Senate’s version. It likely would not take them long if they decided to just do it, and that would leave the issue in the hands of Governor Crist. Unfortunately, Crist’s reputation for having a low backbone quotient doesn’t bode well if that comes to pass.

Update: Word is that Rep. Alan Hays is planning to bring the Senate bill wording before the House today, just as I mentioned as a possibility above. This is the last chance to inform your representatives just how bad a bill this is.

Update: And the scoop appears to be that the House failed to pass the Senate version of the “academic freedom” bill. Florida gets a one year breather on legislation. Expect a stiff breeze out of Seattle.

Friendly Atheist » Scientists Are Murderers

According to Ben Stein, at least.

Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …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.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

Reprehensible and insane seem to be the only adequate descriptors here.

Now we can see why Ben Stein was recruited for this job. I hope that someone on the spot is able to read out Stein’s statements above in the legislative sessions where “Expelled” is being touted as a reason to pass antievolution legislation. It would go some way towards informing the legislators as to just what they are signing themselves and their constituents up for.

Update: Check it out on YouTube.

Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

The Anti-Defamation League weighs in on “Expelled”, and they don’t buy Stein and Berlinski’s arguments at all.

Anti-Evolution Film Misappropriates the Holocaust

New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world’s leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

I’ve just heard that Alan Hays’ antievolution bill passed the Florida House. I’m not sure what it looked like at passage; more information as it becomes available.

This would be an excellent time to contact Florida State Senators.

The “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” bills currently being considered by the Florida legislature are old stratagems borrowed from antievolution efforts in other states. Ronda Storms and Alan Hays have been asked whether “intelligent design” could be taught in science classrooms. Storms and Hays steadfastly refuse to answer the question posed. You have to look at what has been done in the name of narrow religious antievolution and not what is said.

Storms and Hays are treating this as a rhetorical shell game, that if they consistently claim that religion has no part in their bills, then they are being put upon when the issue comes up. For antievolutionists, the essential viewpoint revolves around this simple argument: creation can only have happened by evolution or by God, and one must choose one or the other. The simple — and erroneous — conclusion they make is that arguments made against evolutionary science are thus also arguments for their preferred narrow religious viewpoint, the one that denies that God could possibly have used the methods science is discovering in creating life and its diversity. They don’t have to mention their religious stance explicitly, or so they believe — if enough of their favored arguments against evolution are taught as if science to students, the students will make the “right” choice in rejecting evolutionary science and accepting their particular interpretation of God as creator. Their choice of this narrow religious doctrine does not have to be named, it is implicit in the ensemble of arguments that they wish to permit teachers and students to bring into the science classroom without oversight, interference, or rebuttal.

This is where the history becomes useful. Following World War I, religious antievolutionists took up the obvious strategy to make sure only their view was heard in science classrooms: exclude evolutionary science. That gave us the Scopes trial and about forty years in which textbooks excised or de-emphasized instruction in evolutionary science. In 1968, the Supreme Court decided in Epperson v. Arkansas that scientific concepts could not be excluded from the science classroom to privilege a specific religious doctrine. And religious antievolutionists made the needed adjustment: they now claimed that what they had to offer was just as scientific as evolutionary science. The new stance was called “creation science” and it repeated all the same arguments as plain old creationism before it, except that it dropped those arguments that made direct reference to scripture. It was during legal battles over twenty-five years ago about “creation science” that antievolutionists began to misuse “academic freedom” as a convenient rhetorical tool to press their view. Those came to an abrupt end with the 1987 Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard, where the court correctly called “creation science” a sham and an illicit attempt to sanitize the narrow religious view of their brand of exclusionary creationism.

This setback famously led to the use of “intelligent design” as a reference to a non-existent field of study, accomplished simply by changing references to “creation science” in the drafts of the “Of Pandas and People” textbook to the new label, “intelligent design”. All the same arguments made against evolution under “creation science” would now be taught as the content of “intelligent design”, except for those that made explicit mention of a young age of the earth and a recent global flood. Along the way, they made an incomplete change from “creation scientists” to “design proponents”, giving us the delightful verbal transitional fossil of “cdesign proponentsists”. In 2005, the Kitzmiller v. DASD decision in Pennsylvania found an “intelligent design” policy to be an establishment of religion and that “intelligent design” itself was not science.

Ohio adopted new science standards in 2002, and it incorporated a compromise urged by “intelligent design” advocates, that evolution be the subject of “critical analysis”. A lesson plan that implemented “critical analysis” went through a first draft with open use of many arguments from creationism and those most closely associated with “intelligent design”. The second draft again chose a sanitized subset of arguments, but they were recognizably part of the religious antievolution ensemble of arguments. In 2006, the Ohio state board of education finally realized that it could not trust antievolution advocates when they asserted that no “intelligent design” would be taught, and removed the “critical analysis” language from their standards.

The arguments comprising “intelligent design” and other labels for the same old religious antievolution are meant to knock down more than “Darwinism”. They also stand for a rejection of the views of Christian denominations that have made their peace with the progress of science, such as the Catholic church and many mainstream Protestant denominations. The methods of deception and subterfuge consistently chosen by religious antievolutionists should earn the scorn of Christians everywhere.

Florida will make a choice soon. Florida can repeat the lessons of history by adopting the narrow religious doctrines that are implicit in the current mislabeled “academic freedom” and “critical analysis” bills, guaranteeing that students across the state are inculcated with a view that science and the scientists who practice it are untrustworthy. Or Florida can benefit from the experience of other states around the country and avoid a morally and legally indefensible adoption of a narrow religious doctrine dressed in secular language.

Reminder: This stuff is on the agenda for the session today. See Florida Citizens for Science for more information.

John Barry reports that law professor Steve Gey of Florida State University has stepped down from his teaching duties because of the progression of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

Gey was involved in the McLean v. Arkansas case in 1981, and has continued to be a staunch advocate of effective science education in public schools. Along with Matt Brauer and Barbara Forrest, he wrote an influential law review article, Is It Science Yet? Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution. I was privileged to speak on the same program with Gey at the 2006 Carolina Law Review meeting on first amendment issues. I am saddened by the news that Gey’s illness, diagnosed early in 2007 IIRC, has progressed so quickly.

With the revelation that the producers of Expelled did not obtain permission to use a short segment of John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, the premiere of this movie appears to be a train wreck in progress. Given that they reportedly used the snippet about “imagine there’s no religion” with various nasty visual content from Communist China, it seems unlikely that they will manage to work out a deal with Ono to license the song at this point. Premise Media (PM) is arguing that the snippet meets the requirements for a “fair use” exclusion, or that they have an “educational” movie, or whatever in order to set aside the issue.

Let’s assume that Expelled does actually open tomorrow at a thousand theaters across the country. (We’ll set aside the very real possibility that Ono will seek an injunction against PM.) Given that the Wall Street Journal has raised the issue that the rights clearance procedure at PM is at the least sloppy if not completely incompetent, there will be lots of observers looking for other potential copyright infringement for photos, music, and video clips. Will it stand up to that sort of scrutiny? Will theater owners stand firm with PM as accessories to infringement as further claims are made? I think that we are likely to have an interesting weekend, and not just like the IDC cheerleaders were hoping for, either.

My part of the day’s events here in Tallahassee is done; I had about three minutes to say my piece at a noon press conference on the capitol steps (just in front of the dolphin sculpture). Vic Walczak of the Pennsylvania ACLU was up first, then Mary Ann Fiala, then Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel laureate in chemistry, and then me.

For those of you in or near Tallahassee, there is a panel discussion tonight at 7 PM at the Challenger center featuring Walczak, Kroto, and David Campbell (a Florida science teacher).

The text of my bit is below the fold.

(more…)

John Lynch noted the presence of one well-known anti-semite in the interviews. So, you might ask, which naughty atheist did the “Expelled” folks catch out on this unseemly behavior, and how many times did they cut away to goose-stepping Nazis while the interview went on?

Surprise! The anti-semite that Ben Stein shares the big screen with is an “intelligent design” creationism advocate often referred to as an authority on William Dembski’s blog and signer of the Discovery Institute “Dissent from Darwin” list Maciej Giertych. Lynch finds this pearl of Giertych wisdom:

In our civilisation, a righteous person living honestly will not get in conflict with the law, even not knowing it. On the other hand, living in agreement with the letter of the law but dishonestly, derives from the pharisaic attachment to rules but not to ethics. The exploitation of rules, of imprecisely written laws, of gaps in them, of their multitude and inconsistencies, activities on the verge of legality, tax evasion techniques, all formally within the law but unethical, derive from the rabbinical casuistry, from the mentality of deriving ethics from the written law. Yet, such a swindler, acting within the law, has in fact no moral respect for any law. He cannot be compared to the Sabbath traveller sitting on a water bottle, who is also using a convenient interpretation of the Law, but he is doing this in order to fulfil the Law and therefore in full respect for it.

Did the producers bother to give Ben Stein the background on this expert speaking for the “Expelled” conjecture? Did anyone bother to tell Giertych that Kent Hovind is not Jewish?

Remember how Mark Mathis, producer of “Expelled”, kept going on about how the “Crossroads”/Rampant Films thing was what they had in mind while interviewing Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, and others, then they decided to chuck all that and go with the “Expelled” concept? It seems that Mathis should have had a session with Ben Stein so that they could make their stories match. Stein was interviewed by the New York Sun and by the WORLD magazine, and there are several interesting things about the content of his responses.

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:

WORLD: How did you get involved with Expelled?

STEIN: I was approached a couple of years ago by the producers, and they described to me the central issue of Expelled, which was about Darwinism and why it has such a lock on the academic establishment when the theory has so many holes. And why freedom of speech has been lost at so many colleges to the point where you can’t question even the slightest bit of Darwinism or your colleagues will spurn you, you’ll lose your job, and you’ll be publicly humiliated. As they sent me books and talked to me about these things I became more enthusiastic about participating.

Plus I was never a big fan of Darwinism because it played such a large part in the Nazis’ Final Solution to their so-called “Jewish problem” and was so clearly instrumental in their rationalizing of the Holocaust. So I was primed to want to do a project on how Darwinism relates to fascism and to outline the flaws in Darwinism generally.

Emphasis added.

So, starting sometime in 2006, Mathis or his fellow producers were engaging Ben Stein with precisely the concept of “Expelled”. There is no mention by Stein of any such thing as “Crossroads” or of being intrigued by the “Crossroads” concept.

And Stein in the New York Sun interview contributes a little something extra to the discussion over the animation used by the “Expelled” project.

Mr. Stein became involved with the film when he was approached by Messrs. Ruloff and Sullivan during pre-production. “They sent me an absolute torrent of information, some of which I read, some of which frankly I did not read,” Mr. Stein said. Intrigued by what he did absorb and by a segment of computer animation commissioned by the producers that depicts life at a cellular level in its nearly infinite complexity, Mr. Stein signed on. “It just became a gigantically bigger project than I even had the slightest clue it was going to be,” he said.

So part of what brought Ben Stein aboard the project was being shown an animation of processes occurring inside the cell… a couple of years ago, if Stein’s statements are in any way consistent. (Hint to Mark Mathis: you can argue for your version of the past by attacking Stein’s credibility in recall of when he was approached for this project.) Now, the whole flap over unauthorized use of the Harvard/XVIVO “Inner Life of the Cell” video didn’t get going until around September, 2007, when IDC advocate William Dembski’s lecture in Oklahoma revealed its use there to people who recognized the source of the animation. It was shortly after Dembski was hit with cease-and-desist requests that the projected release date of “Expelled” was shifted from around February 12th to April 18th, apparently to give time for the copycat animation to be made and edited in to “Expelled”. So essentially the New York Sun gave these folks a pass when they reported,

Intrigued by what he did absorb and by a segment of computer animation commissioned by the producers that depicts life at a cellular level in its nearly infinite complexity

There is no evidence that the producers had commissioned any such animation at the time that Ben Stein was recruited. It appears that the “Expelled” producers were using the Harvard/XVIVO product, “Inner Life of the Cell”, as a recruiting tool for their project. There is evidence that the copycat animation was only “commissioned” relatively recently, certainly long after Ben Stein was signed on to the project.

Remember to visit Expelled Exposed.

When textbooks illustrate crypsis using dead specimens of carbonaria and typica morph peppered moths (Biston betularia) placed on normal bark and soot-covered bark, you get Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells telling people in online discussion that such illustrations represent “fraud”.

When Ben Stein sets up a lecture room at Pepperdine University and fills it with hired extras representing students, DI Senior Fellow Jonathan Wells says nothing at all about that.

Michael Shermer has the goods on the Pepperdine thing.

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

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

Now, one might make an excuse for Wells. Maybe Wells is just not paying attention and the various things happening around “Expelled” simply haven’t come to his attention, and he’d be right up front to show his consistency in denouncing “fraud” wherever it shows up.

Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise. Wells has put in his two cents concerning the very recent flap about charges of copyright infringement and the “Expelled” film:

Expelled does NOT use the Harvard animation. The producers paid a professional to create a new animation that is more accurate than the Harvard one (based on current knowledge of cellular processes). Any similarities between the Expelled animation and the Harvard one are due to the fact that both animations depict many of the same processes.

Wells doesn’t address the issues raised concerning the shared errors in the animations, but notice how hot off the mark Wells is to dismiss that there is any basis to the copyright infringement charges in the “Expelled” case, and how little credit Wells ws willing to extend in the case of the peppered moth crypsis illustration. Is it credible to assert that Wells has not been apprised of the Pepperdine incident? That doesn’t seem likely. Now, even if that were the case, I’m sure that Wells will shortly have that information. Will we then see Wells as loudly proclaiming the fraud-like character of the “Expelled” sequence at Pepperdine as he did for peppered moth crypsis?

I don’t think so.

But I’d love to be proved wrong, with Wells acting on principle here and giving the “Expelled” folks a taste of his displeasure.

Remember to visit Expelled Exposed.

Abbie Smith at ERV has the scoop on this: XVIVO has made the opening legal salvo with a cease-and-desist letter to Premise Media accusing them of copyright infringement concerning the animation showing the interior of a cell used in the film. They request that the disputed animation be removed from the “Expelled” film *before* it makes its commercial debut on April 18th.

Now, that’s a short schedule. Somebody’s going to be out a packet of change over this. It may not even be feasible for Premise Media to alter the film on that timetable and have their big opening, too. There’s speculation that Premise Media may say, ‘damn the lawyers, full steam ahead!’ and simply figure on writing off the financial end of this as a big loss, hoping that they’ll gain martyr cred by doing so. The thing about martyrs, though, is that they not only need to be oppressed, but they are supposed to somehow convey at least a dollop of righteousness along the way. Funny, though, how righteousness just doesn’t seem to be any part of the operating mindset behind the writing, production. or promotion of this film. Getting caught cheating doesn’t make you look like a martyr, it makes you look like a crook.

Hey, maybe Ben Stein will finally get to use Nixon’s most famous line that Ben Stein claims he, Ben Stein, didn’t write.

Update: If the “Expelled” folks think about this for more than five minutes or so, they will do everything in their power to comply with the XVIVO request, including screwing the distribution deal and holding off the premiere for another several months. Why?

Pause and consider.

“Expelled” is a production linked into the persecution stories at the heart of IDC. They have had months of discussions and correspondence with the principal figures of the IDC movement. They likely have recordings of discussions in meetings and other places where all these folks felt free to chat.

There is a serious line of inquiry as to whether there was collusion to infringe on the copyright of XVIVO.

Lawsuits come with the subpeona power of the courts for discovery. Depositions of witnesses are taken under oath. Cross-examination of witnesses is not restricted to a delimited field of questions; anything that could bear upon the credibility or trustworthiness of witnesses in court is fair game for inquiry. The court can compel answering awkward questions with contempt citations if needed.

If this goes to court, what witnesses can Premise Media put on the stand who *wouldn’t* potentially be tainted by the revelation that every single “persecution” story in it is overblown, misleading, or simply false in its particulars?

Premise Media could accomplish what outsiders never have hoped to do: bring about the complete public discrediting of the IDC movement in its most basic claims to personal integrity and suffering in the face of persecution. And it would be a completely self-inflicted wound. All Premise Media needs to do is blow off the XVIVO letter and continue with their opening schedule unaltered.

The FoxNews review by Roger Friedman is in, and it reads like one of those Muppets in the theater balcony wrote it. Skip past the top-of-the-page stuff about Mariah Carey. Down. Further down. Next to “Buy a Link Here”, there it is: “Ben Stein: Win His Career”.

After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career.

Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely “character” for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is released.

Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, “Expelled” is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) “expose” of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in “Expelled” that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and “intelligent design” — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. You see, Stein, like some other celebrities, finally has shown his true colors and they aren’t so pretty.

There’s more good stuff. Go read.

Hat tip: Ross Myers.

The Florida Senate Judiciary Committee approved the “academic freedomirresponsibility” bill by Rhonda Storms on Tuesday. The next step for the bill would be consideration by the full senate.

The Discovery Institute has been pushing hard on this in Florida. Stymied in their efforts to do more than get a minor last-minute change on the new Florida science standards, they have been working hard on getting support for the two “academic freedomirresponsibility” filed in the Florida legislature. And they are doing well, it seems. Storms’ bill has passed two committees so far without a hitch, other than a little tune-up of language in response to a legislative analysis that pointed out many, many problems with it. Those changes, though, do absolutely nothing to close out the misinformation that the DI wants teachers — and students, let’s not forget the students — to take up precious science class time on.

This is no surprise, of course. Unable to make any headway in presenting a positive scientific case for “intelligent design” creationism, the DI has done what creationists have always done — attempt to game the political system to get their way anyway. “Creation science” advocates were talking about “academic freedom” with respect to their arguments back in the early 1980s with the McLean v. Arkansas and the Edwards v. Aguillard cases. Given the simple fact that everything the DI is about is selling old arguments under new, or at least marginally different, labels, one might have guessed it was only a matter of time before they got around to recycling not just the arguments, but the labels, too.

And we have seen these campaigns from the DI over and over, and seen that no matter what they call it, what they are aiming to have teachers — and students, don’t forget the students — bring up in classes are exactly the same arguments they once peddled directly as “intelligent design”. This was the case when they got Sen. Rick Santorum to suggest an amendment to the “No Child Left behind” act in 2000. For years afterward, the DI was erroneously telling school boards and state political bodies that it was the intent of the law to include their “intelligent design” creationism arguments in science classes because a vestige of the Santorum language was left in the joint conference report of the NCLB law. This was the case in Kansas in 2000 and again in 2005, when they pushed hard to take advantage of religious right majorities on the Kansas State Board of Education to get a foot in the door of the science classroom, not by convincing the scientific community that they had good ideas and evidence to back them, but by direct political action. This was the case in Ohio, where their operative tried to get IDC directly included in 2000, then succeeded in pushing for the DI “compromise” of installing “critical analysis” language in the state science standards in 2002. It turned out that she had threatened the governor with political fallout if she didn’t get her way on that. Over the next several years, it came out that by “critical analysis”, the DI had meant not just IDC arguments, but good old-fashioned creationism, too. Finally, the evidence of the swindle the DI was working became too much to ignore for the Ohio State Board of Education, and they removed the “critical analysis” language from the standards and the “critical analysis” lesson plan from their website. The DI has been infamous for years for claiming various numbers of states (usually four or five) as having implemented the “critical analysis” changes that the DI favored, though the record shows that they are wrong on that, too. But they certainly aimed to make trouble in those places and many more.

There is no doubt that the DI “cdesign proponentsists” intend for Florida to become a testing ground for its newest creationist argument/label recycling project. There is certainly no doubt that they have not done anything in the way of coming up with a positive, evidence-based case for “intelligent design”, but they’d like teachers — and students, let’s not forget the students — to undermine any effective instruction in evolutionary science with the same tired, bogus religious antievolution retread arguments they picked up from “creation scientists” before them.

Kevin Miller has a writer’s credit on the upcoming entertainment from Ben Stein, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”. To his credit, he has been engaging people in online discussion. To Miller’s shame, though, he seems to have a penchant for making unsubstantiated personal aspersions, in this case going after me as being a “scoundrel”, basically taking a statement from Michael Crichton as license to libel.

It’s a tiresome, shopworn tactic, but I’ve come to expect tiresome, shopworn tactics from “intelligent design” creationism advocates. Unable to defend his assertions with evidence, scholarship, and logic, Kevin Miller descends to name-calling. In years of discussions with various IDC cheerleaders, I’ve seen the same progression from making what appear, superficially, to be arguments based on principles and about concepts to simple nay-saying and name-calling, but Miller’s retreat into schoolyard bullying proceeded faster than most.

So above the fold here I’ll give a short version of the specific post, then I’ll lay out the exchange as it stands to date. Most of what I’ve entered has been in a thread at the Antievolution.org bulletin board. Miller’s attack on me concerns my use of the word “consensus” and not spitting after I say it. The way he develops his attack is via this title and a long quotation from novelist and gadfly Michael Crichton:

Consensus science, the first refuge of scoundrels–and Wesley R. Elsberry

Miller’s readers are not treated to any exposition of how I have had the dastardly bad taste to dabble in consensus. I’ll have to provide the context Miller fails to convey. When Miller objected to my use of “consensus” in a reply, I clarified my meaning as follows:

[Miller:] But you of all people should know that consensus science is like patriotrism–the last refuge of a scoundrel.

That statement alludes to facts not in evidence. The scoundrels I’m familiar with in the developing story of the forthcoming propaganda film are the producers, and it appears, the writer. The evidence speaks clearly that false claims are made in the movie and that false claims are made in promotion of the movie. It’s not just one “interpretation” that John Lynch was told that the Tempe, AZ screening had been cancelled when the promoter knew full well that the screening would proceed.

I’m not talking, as Kevin has to be, about “consensus” imposed artificially from the top down. We scientists know what that looks like. It looks like the Inquisition that harassed Galileo. It looks like Lysenko’s discarding of genetics and the evolutionary biology of the west in favor of a Stalinist form of Lamarckism. (Scientists died for standing up to Lysenko, by the way.) It looks like a socio-political movement that will do anything and call its arguments by any label to force them into public school classrooms without having passed muster via the scientific process.

What I was pointing out is that a scientific consensus is different, it proceeds from the evidence through hypotheses that are tested, and a community that criticizes the arguments until what convinces that community is the consilience of evidence and theory, not the personal authority of either any one individual or even the collective authority of the community. The process doesn’t always proceed smoothly, as Kuhn noted in discussing paradigm shifts. But what happens even then is driven by the various and sundry individuals of the scientific community, each of whom by Kevin’s earlier (and apparently abandoned) argument having their own separate worldview and thus without any expectation under Kevin’s argument that they could possibly agree upon some one view, and yet that is exactly what the history of science shows us has happened time and again.

I think that is a perfectly reasonable response not only to Miller’s specific objection but also Crichton’s general polemic. Sure, top-down ideologically-driven “consensus”, like Lysenkoism, is justly excoriated. But consensus that follows from the evidence and argument representing the hard work of scientific research is not that sort of thing. Confusing and conflating the two does nothing but further the aims of propagandists.

One can almost feel empathy for Miller. He’s in a bad spot. His conclusion about “Big Science” goes ‘poof’ if he admits that the conclusions of science proceed from evidence and tested theories convincing the scientific community rather than “Big Science” issuing an edict from the top-down that things must be so. It is so obviously the case that the bottom-up view of consensus is the one applicable to how science works that Miller can’t keep to a topical discussion, and instead has found it convenient to trash-talk me. I just noticed the category into which Miller placed the post in question: “Mofos”. I have exalted company there: Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and Christopher Hitchens. Although I have disagreements with them on the relationship of science and religion, I’m thinking that I’d far prefer their company to that of Kevin Miller.

OK, so now for those who care about the picayune back-and-forth that is the background to Miller’s attack on my person, read on. Everybody else can figure out something useful to do.

(more…)

And it is $5.2 million dollars. That’s the fine levied against a political action committee (PAC) funding conservative politicians in Ohio using funds collected by a PAC in Virginia.

And the write-up mentions a familiar name:

The Ohio branch of All Children Matter used the Virginia money to contribute $91,000 directly to 29 Republican candidates for office in 2006.

These contributions included $5,000 to Mary Taylor, who was elected state auditor; $4,000 to state Sen. Kevin Coughlin of Cuyahoga Falls; $2,000 to Tom Cousineau, who lost to state Rep. Brian Williams, D-Akron, in the 41st District race; and $2,000 to Deborah Owens Fink, who was unseated from the state board of education by Tom Sawyer.

Well, “Tom Sawyer” is even more familiar, but I was intending another one in there.

Debra Owens-Fink was the leading advocate for “intelligent design” and other Discovery Institute labels for antievolution on the Ohio State Board of Education from 2000 to 2006. She is also noted as the person whose political threats against Governor Taft came to light after emails were requested in the “Coingate” scandal, essentially saying that if she didn’t get her way on the “critical analysis” language, she’d be targeting Taft’s campaign.

“Didymos” on the AE BB reports on email correspondence with the “Expelled” producers concerning pre-release screenings. Apparently, they have tightened up signing up for the few remaining screenings. But another aspect to the promotion was revealed as well:

Thank you for your interest in Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. If you have signed up for the Expelled Challenge then this is how it works.

Organize a group ticketing event at your local theater and take your group to see the film. Once your group has seen the film, collect the ticket stubs from everyone that went with your group. We will provide and address to mail those ticket stubs along with the name of your group, the date, time, and location of when you went to see the film. The group that responds with the most ticket stubs will be given a $10,000 grant.

This sounds like a different kickback scheme than what has been offered before as a kickback scheme aimed at Christian schools.

Welcome to the
Expelled Challenge web site
where, as a Christian school or a Christian home school group, you will have a chance to win up to a $10,000 donation while educating your students, parents, and staff of the controversy that is surrounding the Intelligent Design and evolution debate. This is an extremely important project for those of us who believe our world was designed by a creator and not an act of random chance.

What is the Expelled Challenge?

To engage Christian schools and home school groups to get as many students, parents, and faculty from their school/group out to see Ben Stein’s new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (opening in theaters April 2008).

# Here are some suggestions as to how to do that: Organize a school field trip and invite parents to attend as well.
# Offer extra credit to your students to go on their own time.

What is the reward?

The reward is two-fold. First, your students will encounter firsthand the debate between Intelligent Design and evolution, and also the importance of knowing what you believe and standing firm in what you believe. Second, by collecting the ticket stubs from your students, faculty, staff and parents, you could be eligible to win a $10,000 donation.

Each school/home group that registers through the link below and submits their ticket stubs will be eligible for a donation as funds permit, but the school that submits the most ticket stubs will win a donation of $10,000!

Please click on the link at the bottom of this page to register your school to take the Expelled Challenge and tell us how many ticket stubs you think your school will submit. Registering is very important as only schools who register will be eligible for donated funds. Please note, if funds are available, they will be given according to the order in which the schools are registered. Deadline for registration has been extended to April 18th, 2008.

Click Here to REGISTER NOW!

The “Expelled Challenge FAQ” has been altered. The listing of amounts schools can earn based on number of ticket stubs turned in? Gone. It appears that there is a directional evolutionary trend toward dwarfism in this kickback scheme. The FAQ emphasizes the tenuous nature of the kickback funding, as it it comes from a third party source and is not controlled by the promoters who are running the scheme:

Q: How are the funds for the donations being provided?

A: Being that this film is viewed as history changing, funds have been provided by the Faith and Arts Community Endeavor project, specifically for Christian schools, organizations, and groups to encourage them to see the film and engage these Important issues.

Q: Will all schools who submit their ticket stubs be given a donation?

A: The goal of the project is to help Christian groups be able to see the film. Funds for the Expelled Challenge will only be distributed to those who register through the Expelled Challenge website you were just on and on a first come, first served basis in the order in which they were registered. Bottom line, funds are limited – register as soon as you can!

All indications are that funds behind this are not just “limited”, but are almost non-existent. I’m sure that they will pony up that “winning” $10K chunk to a Christian school, but if your group is not confirmed to be a Christian school, or comes in 10th place instead of 1st, or signed up just before the movie opening, don’t get your hopes up for anything but a “Thanks for participating in the Expelled Challenge! We regret…” letter.