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.

Meijer ends Humane Society contest after sportsmen complain - Latest News - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Meijer is a grocer/retailer that operates in the Midwest. Recently, they offered customers the opportunity to donate a $1 towards a $5,000 goal for a donation to aid people who have pets and whose homes have been foreclosed upon.

Sounds OK, doesn’t it?

The problem is that a couple of layers underneath that bright, shiny surface, one finds the poser group HSUS (”Humane Society of the United States”) as the folks being aided by the donations. HSUS is a radical animal rights organization masquerading as an animal welfare group. From the name on, they borrow legitimacy from the hard work and effort of local shelters and the national 130-year-old animal welfare group, the American Humane Association.

The US Sportsmen’s Alliance, a hunting advocacy group, criticized Meijer for its donation plan. Meijer decided to truncate the donation period in response.

Meijer Inc. ducked Monday after finding itself in the cross hairs of a national hunting group over donations to help families and pets going through foreclosure.

The Foreclosure Pets Fund is run by the Humane Society of the United States — an organization the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance charges is anti-hunting.

I’ve noted before the problem of animal rights groups feeding off legitimate concerns of animal welfare:

This isn’t to say that the fakes haven’t gotten on the bandwagon of pushing legitimate reforms already suggested by animal welfare advocates. But their participation is best considered a form of crypsis, since they have an agenda that goes far beyond the laudable aims of animal welfare.

Support animal welfare. Don’t get conned by animal rights groups trying to disguise themselves as animal welfare advocates.

Essentially, the radical animal rights groups appear to be implementing a plan to become the only voices for animal welfare, though their aims go much further than those of legitimate animal welfare groups. The radical animal rights groups want an end to any human “exploitation” of animals, and that includes pet ownership and the extinction of domesticated animal species, as well as any take of wild animals for any reason. Eating meat is right out. Hunting and fishing are targets. Biomedical research using animal models would be history. However, selling the general public on those goals is not a public relations winner right now. How would Meijer, Inc. care to contemplate a grocery store without milk, butter, eggs, meat, fish, or any other animal-based product? How would Meijer customers take it? That’s right, no sale. On the other hand, animal welfare is an incredibly popular idea and causes people to open up their wallets for charitable giving. There’s only some much money in the animal welfare charitable giving pot, though, and those pesky folks running the local animal shelters and the AHA as the national organization for them are soaking up quite a bit of that money. If, though, a radical animal rights group spends enough money on a public relations campaign to “own” some particular animal welfare issue, they can get most of the money that gets donated by people interested in that cause, say shutting down puppy mills or, as in current events, aiding pet owners in financial straits. That money does not go to the local shelter or the AHA, and they are able to do less in making progress on those animal welfare concerns, making them appear less effective than the disguised radical animal rights groups, causing a further shift in charitable giving toward the radicals.

Many of the comments following the news item linked at the top take issue with Meijer and those against the donation scheme as unfairly depriving the people at the end of the charitable giving chain, the pet-owning foreclosed, of needed funds. They simply don’t understand how having the cash flow go through a radical animal rights organization is a problem. They note the activism and enthusiasm of these groups for specific animal welfare issues and call it “good, good, good”. The problem is that, just like a legitimate front organization for the Mafia, that’s not all that is going on. If we are going to have our established animal welfare groups, locally and nationally, it is they who need to be able to receive our limited donations, and not the radical animal rights groups who are seeking to displace and silence them.

I got the following notice from the Michigan Hawking Club:

Attention Michigan Falconer

Last Wed April 23rd the Senate Natural Resources and Environment Affairs Committee passed Senate Bill 1085. This bill will allow a continued take of Wild Raptors for Falconry use. It Ends the Sunset and puts the rules and regulations concerning wild take in the hands of the DNR and Natural Resources Commission. Please write your Senator and Representative and tell them you want them to support this Bill. Do it Now!!! Follow it up with a phone call to their office in Lansing. Please….. the fate of a wild take is now up to YOU!!

Michigan Hawking Club

I’m not nearly as enthusiastic for the bang punctuation, but the message is spot on.

Find contact information for your Michigan State Senator

This is the info for my senator.

	Senator Information
State Senate District:	23
Senator:	Whitmer, Gretchen
Address:	415 Farnum Building
Office Phone:	(517)373-1734
Office Fax:	(517)373-5397
E-mail:	SenGWhitmer@senate.michigan.gov
Website:	http://www.senate.michigan.gov/whitmer/

Find contact information for your Michigan State Representative

My representative is one or the other of the following. I’ll get it down to one tomorrow.

067	Byrum	Barb	D	S 1086 HOB	517-373-0587	barbbyrum@house.mi.gov
069	Meadows	Mark	D	S 1088 HOB	517-373-1786	markmeadows@house.mi.gov

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.

Fishing throws targeted species off balance, Scripps study shows

Back on my birthday in 2006, I had a post about fishing as a cause of evolution in fish stocks. The linked article at the top of this post dances around the implication, saying that fishing makes the age structure of a population “dynamic” and “unstable”, but they keep a relentlessly ecology-only mindset on the issue. Nonetheless, the answer remains the same so far as regulatory policy is concerned.

Fishing typically extracts the older, larger members of a targeted species and fishing regulations often impose minimum size limits to protect the smaller, younger fishes.

“That type of regulation, which we see in many sport fisheries, is exactly wrong,” said Sugihara. “It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger, older fish that should be spared. Not only do the older fish provide stability and capacitance to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring.”

If you want a population to produce bigger fish, you need to stop taking the very biggest fish available.

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.

A news report says that actor Wesley Snipes gets a three-year prison sentence for tax evasion.

Tax evaders, like Kent Hovind, should do the time their cases indicate.

But there’s something extra to the Snipes case, according the the report.

“This case cries out for the statutory maximum term of imprisonment, as well as a substantial fine, because of the seriousness of defendant Snipes’ crimes and because of the singular opportunity this case presents to deter tax crimes nationwide,” prosecutors wrote in a memorandum to the judge, as quoted by the AP.

Uh, no. It corrupts our system of jurisprudence if individuals are sentenced based upon “opportunities” and not upon the specific facts of the case. If this advice were followed, obscurity ought to let offenders out on the street, because no one pays attention to them, and anyone with name recognition would have to beware any brush with the law. If the government wants people to know that tax evasion doesn’t work, it should develop a reputation for assiduously tracking down and fairly prosecuting each such case, not taking the cheap route of nailing the occasional celebrity.

Falconers hawk bill to let them continue capturing raptors - Capital News Service - MLive.com

It looks like a bill aimed at dropping a 2009 sunset on a falconry law is getting general support. Getting rid of the sunset provision means that falconers in Michigan can continue to trap birds from the wild under provisions of the law. This is especially important for apprentices, who are barred from using captive-bred birds during their apprenticeship here in Michigan.

In general, statements from Audubon Society representative Thomas Funke were supportive of the bill and falconers. Perhaps the following was not intentional on Funke’s part:

Funke agreed, “Today, falconers are committed to the conservation of their species.”

The use of the qualifier “today” sends the wrong message. Falconers were in the forefront of organizing conservation efforts for falcon populations pushed to the brink of extinction by indiscriminate pesticide use, and continue to be conservation-minded. I’m a bit sensitive on such usage coming from other conservation groups who should be allies, for there is a history there of short-changing falconers on the credit for the recovery of raptor populations, even though falconers contributed their time, money, effort, and often their own birds to captive breeding programs right from the start of the problem being noticed.

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.