Ben Stien's new movie EXSPELLED

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2004009/posts?page=4#4

Actually, if DrewDad will reexamine his words here - it is he who is begging the question.

Right now george, only gunga has even seen the movie. Any speculation or critique by anyone else is (IMHO) invalid. I dont accept secondary sources, like movie reviews, valid. Im taking gunga at his word until Ive seen it meself.

I probably should see the film myself. If gustavratzenhofer posts a review of the film, I would have complete confidence in his assessment.

http://www.midiowanews.com/site/tab1.cfm?newsid=19499416&BRD=2700&PAG=461&dept_id=554432&rfi=6

The president of Iowa State, is not without credentials in the chemistry of celestial bodies and Astronomy. He was an applied geochemist with connections to the physics and astrophysics department at Penns STate before being named as dean of college of SCience at PEnn State. This, before he was brought on to Iowa State as similar dean and then president. Gonzales, didnt make the tenure cut and I think he wants to associate his tenure denial to his belief in ID. SImilarly, Dr Sternberg , who was at the SMithsonian did not have his contract renewed. (Sternberg was never a full time perm staff employee)

Gonzalez is basically a rising star in his field and Geoffroy is basically full of ****.


The good news is that Stein's film is going to expose this science mafia we have to the world at large.

I love your style gunga. Even when your totally ignorant of the topic, you can be counted on for some opinion, no matter how stupid.

What, did Geoffry flunk you in chemistry? .

Apparently the committee that assessed Gonzales consideration for tenure didnt feel that he made the "cut".

The general outline of the story is well known. There is a severe selection process even getting as far as associate prof at ISU and apparently only four of the last 12 candidates for tenure have not made it and those making it included several who were in no way comparable to Gonzalez. You can read a condensed version on wikipedia if you want to, even that left-slanted version of the tale indicates that something is amiss in the story which ISU puts out.

Er... I asked the question. Anyone have an answer?

This is unbelievably infuriating (just read the Scientific American article and also watched an interview on Youtube between Bill O'Reilly and Ben Stein.)

First: Evolution occurred. There might be pieces missing from our explanation of it (just as there were pieces missing from Newtonian physics), but it is undoubtedly true. The DNA evidence (vouched for by noone less than Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project when he gave a lecture at my college) is overwhelmingly in proof of common ancestry.

Second: Science is an attempt to offer an explanation of the relationships between observed phenomena. Whether or not you believe that God exists, stating that God is the way that life emerged cannot possibly come under the realm of science. Such an "explanation" does not say anything at all other than that there is no explanation. Saying that "God created man" is an explanation for the origin of man would be equivalent to Newton, wondering why the planets interacted with one another, said "God makes them." (Anyone see the Simpon's episode with "The Leader?")

Third: Science cannot disprove God, as long as your conception of God is not so naive and simplistic that it denies empirical observation. Francis Collins expressed a view essentially saying that intricacy of the process by which evolution occurred is perhaps an even greater expression of His greatness than immediate creation. Intelligent design and creationism spit in the face of all intelligent and nuanced religion.

The idea of macroevolution, which is what the theory of evolution is about, has been massively disproven over the last 100 years in more ways than anybody could count. The fruit fly experiments in the early 1900s alone should have been enough for most rational people.

Yeh, and the Earth is flat, I don't care what anyone says.

I would love to hear some evidence to support that statement. It seems that nobody has said anything to the scientists about how macroevolution has been "disprooven".

Also,Id suggest that you read up about tenure. MAny universities are doing away with tenure so they dont have to support the likes of Mike Behe or Steve Jones (of the 911 conspiracy wackadoos). Gonzales had apparently gotten afree ride for 5 years, didnt score much grant returns and didnt have much telescope time or grad students . Hed been a fellow at the Discovery Institute and , apparently is able to be a senior fellow there. (Unfortunately the DI is unaccredited). Mike Behe was granted tenure before he became a polished monkey for ID. SO Lehigh's kinda stuck with him for most cases. Hie molecular biology research goes on because much of what he does, does NOT involve ID, and he cn skirt along. Hes now involved in identifying" irreducibly complex genetic "packets" that serve as primary indicators of design across many genera. However these also have uses to define functionally active areas of a genome that trigger specific somatic responses. So, in a sense, hes actually showing the key functional kernels of evolution that exist among (and between) all taxa.

In reality, the IDers recognize that evolution, common descent, and derived forms for life's forms exists and is the correct working model. They also recognize that the earth is very old and fossils are accurate depictions of evolutions tracks. Their argument is solely trying to find some evidence of a "master blueprint " that cannot be dismissed as some evolutionary starting point. Their "reserch" into the premise that "life is too complex to have occured by evolution alone", has not produced much so far so IDism is now a search for some key functional groups in biochem.They feel that is they take the argument back far enough, they will be left with somekind of default evidence that life was designed. Excellent debating scheme but kinda lousy science.

Fruit flies breed new generations every couple of days; if you run experiments on them for two or three decades continuously, as was done in the early 1900s, then you're talking about more generations of fruit flies than there ever have been of monkeys, apes, humans, or anything like that on the planet.

They subjected the flies to everything in the world known to cause mutations, heat, cold, blast, shock, every kind of radiation and every sort of chemical they could survive, and then recombined the mutants every way they could think of.

All they ever got were fruit flies, sterile freaks, and non-sterile freaks which returned to the norm for fruit flies in two or three generations.

No wasps, no hornets, no bees, no ants, no mantises, no grasshoppers or butterflies or anything else at all, just fruit flies. The whole thing is driven by information and the only information they had was that for fruit flies.

So unambiguous were these results that a number of the scientists publically renounced Darwin and evolution. including the famous case of Richard Goldschmidt who afterwards claimed he was being totally ostracised and subjected to something like the "two minute hates" you might have read about in Orwell's 1984. Same kind of treatment Bein Stein describes in his movie.

That was basically a laboratory disproof. If evolution were about science rather than ideologies and lifestyles, it would have been dropped at that point.

Another argument made by people who don't understand science.


The only observation that can be made from this is "these scientists were unable to mutate fruitflys."

Wrong, they "mutated" the flies considerably. What they were unable to do and what nature is unable to do as well was produce any new kind of animal via such a process.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26046&s=rcmc

Ben Stein's 'Expelled': A Little Background
by Granville Sewell

With the release of Ben Stein's new movie "Expelled" on April 18, the question as to whether Intelligent Design is a scientific theory, or only religion in disguise, will be debated across the country as never before. Here is a little background, and a prediction as to how this controversy will play out in the coming years.

A November 5, 1980 New York Times News Service article, reporting on a meeting at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History of "nearly all the leading evolutionists in paleontology, population genetics, taxonomy and related fields," begins:

Biology's understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years. At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin's epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor... At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested...how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists. [The rest of the article is reproduced here.]

These excerpts summarize nicely the main issues, which are really quite simple, in today's dispute between evolution and Intelligent Design (ID). On the one hand, there are many things about the development of life on Earth which suggest natural (unintelligent) causes: the long periods involved, the similarities between species, the many evolutionary dead ends, and so on. Furthermore, science has been so successful in explaining natural phenomena in other areas that many have come to believe the explanatory power of science has no limitations. On the other hand, Darwin's attempt to explain the origins of all the magnificent species in the living world in terms of the struggle for survival (easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science, in my opinion) is rapidly losing support in the scientific community, as the true dimensions of the complexity of life are revealed by scientific research, especially at the microscopic level. The majority still give lip-service to Darwinism, but only because all the alternative natural explanations which have been proposed are even more far-fetched.

This "paradox," as the New York Times article calls it, has left people searching for some middle ground. Many people feel silly attributing the origin of each species directly to God, yet understand that a completely unintelligent process could not possibly have produced what we see on Earth today. For those who do not understand this, I recommend a little thought experiment, proposed in my February 15 HUMAN EVENTS essay "My Failed Simulation," which will help them think about what they have to believe, to not believe in Intelligent Design.

As Ben Stein's new movie documents, some good scientists now conclude that only intelligent causes can explain the incredible complexity of life. For example, biologist and genetic mutations expert Wolf-Ekkehard Loennig of the Max Planck Institute for Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, has written a very detailed, thoroughly researched, article "The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe" which shows that nearly everything about the popular Darwinian story of how the giraffe got its long neck (including the idea that it happened gradually) is either false or unsubstantiated, and concludes, in Part II:

...the scientific data that are available to date on the question of the origin of the giraffe make a gradual development through mutation and selection so extremely improbable that in any other area of life such improbability would force us to look for a feasible alternative. Yet biologists committed to a materialistic world view will simply not consider an alternative. For them, even the most stringent objections against the synthetic evolutionary theory are nothing but open problems that will be solved entirely within the boundaries of their theory. This is still true even when the trend is clearly running against them, that is, when the problems for the theory become greater and greater with new scientific data. This essential unfalsifiability, by the way, places today's evolutionary theory outside of science...

Dr. Loennig, who has studied mutations for nearly 30 years, argues that Intelligent Design is the only possible explanation for the evolution of the modern-day giraffe from its short-necked, okapi-like ancestors. I am convinced that Dr. Loennig is right, but he is ahead of his time. Will we ever see the day when Intelligent Design is taught as a scientific explanation for the origin of species in high school and university biology classrooms? Perhaps, but probably not in my lifetime.

A much more likely result of this paradox is that in the not-too-distant future, biology texts will refer to evolution as an amazing, mysterious "natural" process, which scientists do not now understand, but hope to understand some day. Natural selection may then be mentioned only as a historical footnote, as a very simplistic early attempt to explain the workings of this natural process.

But for most ID proponents, this will be a quite satisfactory outcome, certainly a huge improvement over the current sad state of affairs, where Darwin's natural selection is the only scientific theory around which enjoys widespread legal protection from scientific criticism in the classroom. The Discovery Institute, a leading promoter of ID as a scientific theory, does not (contrary to common belief) support the teaching of Intelligent Design in science classrooms, they only hope that biology instructors will be allowed to "teach the scientific controversy" over Darwinism.

Perhaps after a few generations in which biology texts confidently predict that future discoveries will uncover the mechanism of evolution, eventually some will begin to recognize the obvious, that there is no possible explanation without design. Until then, I will be happy with texts which simply acknowledge that the idea that the survival of the fittest can turn bacteria into giraffes, and cause human consciousness to arise out of inanimate matter, is doubted by some scientists.

Granville Sewell is a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso.

Loennig is an example of why we stress teamwork in science. Not many sole surveyors pout there who take one or two observations and then turn that into a conclusion. The fact that Loennig's work is long doesnt make it believable. The occurence of girrafidae in the fossil record, while sparse, is not absent. The occurences of many giraffe body types circle around a few million year period at either end of the Miocene and , limatological data in the stratigraphy shows that each of the "Samotherians" had several "bauplans" that derived from earlier okapoids. The interesting thing is that fossil evidence shows , from fosils of young pre-giraffe species, the neck lengthwas about 85% of present giraffes and had a length ratio that was an outlier of existing okapis. SO we had fossil evidence that occurs in a time that africa and Asia were undergoing desertification and spread of savannas. The several species, like "evolutionary trial balloons" appeared at roughly the same time and within the range of variability of okapoids. So loeenig has already asked the question but arrives at a philosophical rather than accurate geological answer. EVOLUTION OR ID FOR GIRAFFES-by WE Loennig

Oh dear... the old canards.

Macroevolution as defined by a fundie, which has no bearing or relevance to Evolution at all. I'd like to point out that the researchers in fruit fly experiments mostly knock genes out to see what they do. Still, you can get wingless fruit flies, which yes, are a variety of fruit fly, but if you continued to breed them, you would get an established new species of wingless fruit fly. It wouldn't be a fly anymore, because quite frankly, it has no wings.

Species, gunga, are organisms within a genus. The Drosophila genus are all flies, yet there are 1,500 species within Drosophila.

Likewise Canis are all dog-like animals, yet are you saying that the wolf and coyote aren't different species? They both have muzzles, pointed ears, tails, four legs and fur. So they must be the same species.

As for Professor Sewell, what was the point of you quoting an article by him? It is very telling that he uses the word, Darwinism. Darwinism, yes, is defunct. The Theory of Evolution, however, is not. It is also very telling that he doesn't understand Evolution at all, as is evidenced by his comment on bacteria turning into giraffes. Still, what was the point in you quoting him? Argument from authority?