What is the cultural significance of the sheer dullness of National Center for Science Education’s Expelled attack site? Is this their idea of an attack site? Rows and rows of links to the usual suspects who have every reason not to like the film’s message, offering the usual denials and denunciations. Maybe an Expelled philanthropist should give them a grant to spice it up. After all, their site will be no use for Expelled publicity unless they come up with something better. But wait … maybe they can’t come up with something better. Does that mean they are losing the culture war? Also: Will Expelled succeed at the box office? Expelled: Intellectual property vs. intellectual territorialism Wanted: Social scientist to Read More ›

This thread is addressed to the animators of The Machine Video (where Dawkins does an Eminem routine) as well as any other talented flash/video animators. Perhaps you could put together a spoof of the PZ Myers’ “plagiarism” allegation (go here) that borrows from the Coca-Cola ads where the idiots from Coca-Cola are trying to get a lawyer to sue Coke Zero for “taste infringement.” It might play well on YouTube the week before the release. Who knows, maybe Coca-Cola will then sue EXPELLED — now that would really generate interest in the film!

With the big release of EXPELLED planned for next weekend, the interviews of Ben Stein keep coming: Mocked and Belittled By Megan Basham | WORLD Magazine Interview: Ben Stein’s new documentary may give macro-evolutionary theory a deserved hard time, and he plans to have fun with it along the way Though audiences probably know Ben Stein best as the economics teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the actor had a distinguished career preceding the classic ’80s movie—just not in the entertainment industry. Long before ad-libbing the world’s most famously boring free-market lecture, Stein was a Yale-trained trial lawyer, a professor at Pepperdine University, an economist, and a speechwriter for presidents Nixon and Ford. Even today, along with his acting, voice-over, Read More ›

Bolinski, with an undetermined appendage writes: So go ahead and release your movie. Just keep track of how many tickets you sell. Read Bolinski’s rant at Richard Dawkins’ website. It’s pretty funny. My guess is either Bolinski got some advice from a real intellectual property attorney and/or got quietly told to back down by Harvard who doesn’t want its name dragged through the mud. I hope Doctor Bolinsky now knows that to protect styles, processes, and algorithms important to his company he must seek design and utility patents. Copyrights simply don’t protect those things.

I just received this announcement (I’ll be presenting at this seminar as well): On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith reports on Discovery Institute’s newly expanded summer seminars on intelligent design. In 2007, the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture launched its Summer Seminar on intelligent design — an intensive mentoring program for college students to gain exposure to the science of intelligent design first hand from researchers and scientists. The 2008 summer seminars on intelligent design will cultivate new leaders in the intelligent design movement among the next generation. Applications to the summer seminars will be accepted until April 30, 2008. For more information, or to apply, click here.

A couple of days ago, I highlighted a recent op-ed in the Waco Tribune celebrating Baylor’s faculty’s cleverness in keeping their affair with Darwin at a discreet distance from lay Baptist donors for decades.

A friend has kindly trolled through Web arcana at Baylor and noted for me the depth of the passion in the Geology department:

Baylor’s Geology department’s FAQS ask, among other things, “What is science?” and  suggest as further reading: Read More ›

Be Sure to Spend Your Money on Ben Stein’s New Movie: My Recent Conversation with Ben Stein
By Jerry Newcombe, 4/3/08

[From email sent to me by Coral Ridge Ministries]

At this time, Ben Stein is unleashing his excellent film on the issue of origins—EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. This motion picture (an entertaining documentary with theatrical release) could cause a sea change on this issue. Ben Stein shows repeatedly that well-qualified scientists are losing their jobs because of their views on origins. If they teach creationism, gone! If they introduce students to the concept that some people believe in Intelligent Design, next! But even if they just believe in Intelligent Design or creation and this becomes known, then these scientists or science teachers get expelled from the Academy. Furthermore, even if they question Darwinism, they can lose their jobs. I have seen a director’s cut of the film (Release: April 18, 2008), and I think it is excellent!

I had the privilege of sitting down with Ben and having a conversation for Coral Ridge Ministries-television. Please, look for him on upcoming editions of the Coral Ridge Hour. Here are some of the highlights or our conversation:

Jerry: What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a nice Christian film like this?

Ben: What’s a nice Jewish boy like me doing in a “Christian” film like this? It’s a film for people who believe in freedom of speech. It’s a film for people who believe that worship of God and the worship of God as the author and creator of the universe is a legitimate belief and legitimately able to be spoken about. It’s a film for Muslims who believe in that. It’s a film for Hindus who believe in that. It’s a film for people who believe in God or believe in freedom of speech or believe in the idea that academic discourse in America’s colleges and universities should not be shut down. It’s a film for people who believe in what Thomas Jefferson thought of as his vision of America. It’s not a proselytizing film for Christians or Muslims or Jews or Hindus. It’s a film for people who want to believe and who do believe that there is a God, an Intelligent Designer, and you know something, it’s even a film for people who don’t believe in that, but they believe in freedom of speech for everyone anyway.

Jerry: Why did you personally agree to participate in the film? Read More ›

The top page of what’s become so large a response at SciAm that it requires an index: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed–Scientific American’s Take Don’t miss John Rennie’s (Editor-in-Chief/Soldier-for-Darwin of SciAm) 5 single spaced pages of Expelled diatribe here: Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Integrity Displayed I note that in what must be thousands of words Rennie wrote about Expelled, where he was trying to play down persecution of the expelled (he mentions Rick Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, and no others), Rennie seems to have conveniently forgotten to mention Guillermo Gonzalez. I find this interesting because Gonzalez’ work in extra-solar planetary discovery was the cover story of the October 2001 issue of Scientific American. I suppose the irony there is something even John Read More ›

“Humans are almost unimaginably complex, but have scarcely more genes than a fruitfly or a worm. The human genome comprises about 99% ‘junk DNA’ — genetic code that is not used to make the protein building blocks of life. Junk DNA accumulates in organisms’ genomes simply because it is good at accumulating.Genes that do code for proteins may recruit some or all of this junk DNA to regulate when, where and how much they are expressed. Something has to instruct genes to team up to produce complex structures such as hearts and kidneys. Regulation is how we can have over 98.5% similarity to chimpanzees in the sequences of our coding genes, yet differ so utterly from them. The huge quantity Read More ›

A new find has shocked scientists who didn’t imagine the earliest critter could be so complex. “This was a complete shocker,” said study team member Casey Dunn of Brown University in Rhode Island. “So shocking that we initially thought something had gone very wrong.”   “Our data reinforce several previously identified clades that split deeply in the animal tree, unambiguously resolving multiple long-standing issues. We find strong support for the placement of ctenophores (comb jellies) as the earliest diverging extant multicellular animals. A single origin of spiral cleavage (with subsequent losses) is inferred from well-supported nodes. A diminishing number of lineages remain recalcitrant to placement on the tree. The spiral cleavage programme, a complex and highly stereotyped mode of early Read More ›

Premise Media has just been slapped with a “cease and desist” letter from XVIVO, the group at Harvard that produced the video clips from which the still images at the top of this thread were taken. They are alleging copyright infringement (not to mention blatant plagiarism). The full text of the letter from XVIVO’s lawyers can be read at:

ERV: Expelled Epelled for Plagiarism
ERV: About That Cell Video in Expelled

The letter makes it clear that if the offending video clips are not removed from the film and all promotional materials by the opening date, immediate legal action will be taken to stop the release of the film.

Read More ›

Last evening I had the joy of meeting David Berlinski at Biola University during his tour of the U.S. to promote his new book, The Devil’s Delusion — Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

I was hanging out on the front steps of the lecture hall when David appeared, and we chatted in both French and English. (As bizarre as it might seem, although I earn my living as a software engineer in aerospace R&D, my three college degrees are in French language and literature, and classical piano.) I was wearing my Harley Davidson windbreaker, and David asked if I was a Harley rider, to which I replied yes. He asked about what model Harley I rode, and expressed his passion for motorcycles.

David is one of the most eloquent, insightful, clever, iconoclastic, and irreverently humorous speakers I have ever had the pleasure to encounter. During his lecture he talked about the great successes of the scientific enterprise — especially in the 20th century with the discoveries of modern mathematics and physics — but how the dreams of this enterprise to explain everything have dissolved into fantastic and unsupported speculation (e.g., multiverses), in the name of the rational and objective science on which it is supposed to be based.

If the dreams of 20th century mathematics and physics have dissolved into fantastic and unsupported speculation concerning the big questions, then surely naive 19th century Darwinian speculation about the origins and diversification of living systems must be in even deeper trouble. But Darwinian “theory” seems to enjoy an extraordinary resistance to being falsified or even challenged. All evidence, however contradictory, supports it.
Read More ›

There was some discussion here in the past year or so of whether retroviruses could indeed infect a germ cell and hence leave deactivated heritable fingerprints in descendents. Mike Behe mentions these retroviral markers as convincing evidence (to him) of common descent, at least in the primate lineage including humans and chimps. This experiment pretty much settles the question. The testis and epididymis are productively infected by SIV and SHIV in juvenile macaques during the post-acute stage of infection Miranda Shehu-Xhilaga*1,2, Stephen Kent3, Jane Batten3, Sarah Ellis5, Joel Van der Meulen1,2, Moira O’Bryan4, Paul U Cameron1,2, Sharon R Lewin1,2 and Mark P Hedger4 Published: 31 January 2007 Retrovirology 2007, 4:7 doi:10.1186/1742-4690-4-7 Abstract Background: Little is known about the progression and Read More ›

A most interesting op-ed appeared in the Waco Tribune (April 6, 2008) by Argye Hillis, a retired biostatistician. Hillis is quite obviously proud of Baylor’s embrace of “the ‘E’ word” (evolution), and of the way in which the institution  skillfully circumvented lay concern. For example,

The late Dr. Cornelia Smith reveled in remembering “the time in the 1920s when the merchants of Waco marched four abreast from downtown Waco in support of Lula Pace.”

Dr. Smith, whose memory is still revered by the older Baylor faculty, carefully avoided labeling Dr. Pace’s teaching as evolution, just as she avoided the “E” word in the more than 40 years that Dr. Smith led the Baylor biology department herself.

In general, Hillis offers the usual boilerplate in favour of a dying materialist idea, accompanied by reassurances that the Baylorites who embrace it are devout Christians. (That glow you are seeing is faith, folks, not phosphorescence.) Read More ›

In an earlier post, I introduced the concept of “denormalization.”

In this second post, I want to talk about PZ Myers. He and his supporters are also candidates for denormalization.

To recap, thuggery or scams that have persisted for a long time and are endorsed at the highest levels of the establishment come to seem “normal.” So the “problem” is not the behavior of thugs and scammers but the attempted responses of those they attack.

The responses sound raucous or incoherent against the tranquil background of accepted misgovernment.

However, in a free society, misgovernment persists because most people do not know what is going on and do not know what they can do to change things. Denormalization means getting the message out to a broad public: Look, this is happening. Do you think it’s fair? If not, here is what you can do about it.

That’s what the Expelled film is doing in the ID vs. unguided evolution (Darwinism) controversy. It shows both the evidence for intelligent design of life and the unconscionable lengths to which the Darwin fans are willing to go, to keep both students and the broad public from knowing why their ideas about the nature of life are probably  wrong.

Myers came to public notice recently when line producer Mark Mathis ejected him from a recent Expelled screening. I suppose he felt ill-used, given that a number of other atheists who were attending a conference in the area (including Richard Dawkins) were admitted. Mathis retorts, Read More ›