Contra Ben Stein

Just found a website called Expelled Exposed that strives to correct the disinformation in the movie Expelled!, which I groused about in this post here. I particularly liked this section here which discusses how evolution actually works, along with other topics that I don't find covered often enough. Nice general grounding of information.

Note also the sections in the sidebar, which debunk the spurious claims of the few researchers the moviemakers were able to find, all of whom claim that they were hurt in the academy because they taught creationism...and all of whom are misrepresenting the issues. (In the case of the takedown of Caroline Crocker, I found myself wondering why anyone would hire this person at all. If you actually say, "Well, we have doubts about evolution because a cat has never turned into a dog in a laboratory," surely you're actually saying, "I don't know even the basic facts about what I've been hired to teach, and I wouldn't know a common ancestor if it offered me tenure." If a theology professor was fired because he taught that Catholics believe that the Holy Wafer is made of actual muscle tissue and that all Christians are cannibals, he'd wind up fired because of incompetence, not because of a conspiracy to hide some scandalous truth.)

The "film" (I think I'll call it a "dickumentary") opens tomorrow just ten minutes walk from here. I'm not sure I'll be able to resist. If you knew there was going to be a spectacularly stupid car crash nearby, wouldn't you want a seat? Of course, if it was an insultingly stupid car crash, I might have second thoughts. I still have to examine my conscience on this one.

UPDATE: I take it back. This is my favorite section of the site. It gives historical examples to show how scientists have, in fact, successfully challenge the scientific mainstream on evolution. In doing so, it repeatedly demonstrates how science progesses even when someone has an unpopular opinion: the researcher continues to present testable hypotheses and gather evidence so that other people can replicate the results. The fact that Intelligent Design people don't even bother to write scientific papers is exactly what damns them. (Of course, they don't write papers for good reason: "God did it by magic" isn't a scientific assertion so much as a demand to stop asking questions; it's the complete opposite of curiosity.) My favorite quote comes from here, after a section describing the paucity of Intelligent-Design research despite decades and decades of work and untold millions of dollars: "[T]he failure of intelligent design can readily be laid at the feet of its advocates, whose main activity appears to be to carp about the success of evolution."