Kansas Citizens for Science

[Greg Myers]

You've got to check this site out. It meticulously documents that amazing fraud and distortion that appears in the movie "Expelled."

Expelled Exposed

You'd feel sorry for these folks, if they weren't doing so much damage, giving science-bashers the idea that there was actual evidence supporting the creationism and their sense of persecution.
_________________
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos, 1799

[csadams]

Thanks for posting this, Greg - what a great resource!

"Exposed" indeed!
_________________
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – Edmund Burke

Stand Up For REAL Science!

[JonF]

Links help Google rankings; perhaps KCFS would consider a link on the official website somewhere? Maybe under "Current News and Resources"?

[Liz Craig]

Nice try.

[RF Brady]

Hi gang, I thought you should know that this e-mail was sent today to all faculty and staff at the school where I work. I think it's a safe assumption that the same e-mail has been sent to other schools - school districts.

[Liz Craig]

Who sent this e-mail? The school, the school district, the "Expelled" crew? If the latter, how did they get hold of everyone's e-mail address? And isn't it against the rules to spam the faculty with an advertisement?

[Jack Krebs]

It would be illegal for the school to send this, I think, given the "reality of God" statement. School email addresses are public info, so they would probably be easy to get.

What appalling propaganda this is, but the more over-the-top they are the less effective they will be.

[csadams]

Um, RFBrady, please check your pm's . . . thx!
_________________
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – Edmund Burke

Stand Up For REAL Science!

[davidtufte]

[Jack Krebs]

The email presents the specific religious view that science is censoring "evidence from students, teachers and parents that ... points to the reality of God!"

This is a proselytizing statement, so it would be illegal for the school itself to send this out - IANAL, but that's the way it looks to me.

[Gary S. Gaulin]

I would like to suggest an email be sent to teachers through the Kansas education network with links to the best of the academic resources and KCFS.

Include the hyper-linked "Design Theory" and blog url they can give to the hopelessly into ID who need something to try getting teachers to look at which they already did in three paragraphs anyway so everyone's happy. Challenge is then for ID'ers to understand all the science linked to from inside the Design Theory.

Having this happen requires an obligatory official response from the other side. Opportunity to do something educational that gets people into science again. KCFS could probably do that a lot better than anyone else could.

[RF Brady]

[Jack Krebs]

Thanks.

Teacher get spam all the time because our email addresses have to be public so parents can find us. All it would take would be one friendly staff member to supply the IDnet with a list of all the staff email addresses. There's nothing we can do about that, and nothing illegal about what they did.

[Gary S. Gaulin]

On the "Expelled Exposed" the local Rambing VanDog blogger who posted on our tree-hugging Sunday sent me this. It's a video showing Ben is a "fool". Has the wiki on AbioGenesis in it too:

[Oh Henry]

Awesome quote from Josh Rosenau!

Scientist: Ben Stein's 'Expelled' should really be 'Flunked Out'
Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday April 16, 2008

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Comedian_Ben_Stein_pushed_intelligent_design_0416.html

Comedian and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein's new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will not open until this Friday, but it has already been widely blasted for its alleged dishonesty and looseness with the facts.

Stein has recently emerged as a prominent spokesperson for so-called "intelligent design," a pseudo-scientific gloss over the religious philosophy of creationism. Using film-making techniques clearly borrowed from Michael Moore, Stein set out to confront scientists and educators about their alleged persecution of supporters of intelligent design, whom Stein claims have been "targeted for retaliation and harassment."

However, the National Center for Science Education has performed an extensive investigation of the "martyrs" profiled in Stein's file and has found a consistent pattern of misrepresentation.

"We reviewed public records and reports on the intelligent design promoters who were supposedly discriminated against, and we discovered that the claims that they lost their jobs over intelligent design are unsupported," biologist Josh Rosenau explained. "That said, professors who aren't making advances in their field, editors who disregard their journal's established practices, and lecturers who repeat creationist falsehoods shouldn't be surprised if they have trouble holding jobs. These people weren't expelled; they flunked out."

The controversies over Expelled began last fall, when two supporters of evolution who are interviewed in the film, Professors Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, claimed that they were tricked into appearing by being told the film would present a serious debate about the "controversy that exists in America between evolution, creationism and the intelligent design movement."

"At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front," Dawkins complained. Stein countered, "I don't remember a single person asking me what the movie was about."

Myers recently noted that the producers of Expelled appear to have stolen some of their sequences from PBS and from a small animation company, XVIVO. Those producers have now counter-sued XVIVO, alleging that its claims are "part of an ongoing campaign attempting to discredit the film and its producers."

Expelled has also come under fire for its attempt to link a belief in evolution to Nazi genocide. When its producers offered a private screening to Scientific American, hoping for some sort of positive -- or at least newsworthy -- reaction, editor-in-chief John Rennie was withering in his criticism.

"We could simply ignore the movie," Rennie wrote. "Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks — all recycled from previous pro-ID works — would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, who also appears in the film, expanded further on the Holocaust issue: "Cleverly edited interview excerpts from scientists are interspersed with various black-and-white clips for guilt by association with: bullies beating up on a 98-pound weakling, Charlton Heston's character in Planet of the Apes being blasted by a water hose, Nikita Khrushchev pounding his fist on a United Nations desk, East Germans captured trying to scale the Berlin Wall, and Nazi crematoria remains and Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves. This propaganda production would make Joseph Goebbels proud."

Shermer pointed out in contrast that Darwinian theory has often been used as the unpinning for a belief in Stein's preferred doctrine of free market capitalism, a fact of which he found Stein to be "astonishingly ignorant." In fact, Shermer notes, Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, has said that his favorite book while at Harvard Business School, "was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene ... a form of Darwinism that Skilling badly misinterpreted."