Just Keep Piling It On

Posted by Jason Terk on Saturday, April 19

The New York Times weighs in on Expelled:

Every few minutes familiar — and ideologically unrelated — images interrupt the talking heads: a fist-shaking Nikita S. Khrushchev; Charlton Heston being subdued by a water hose in “Planet of the Apes.” This is not argument, it’s circus, a distraction from the film’s contempt for precision and intellectual rigor. This goes further than a willful misunderstanding of the scientific method. The film suggests, for example, that Dr. Sternberg lost his job at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because of intellectual discrimination but neglects to inform us that he was actually not an employee but rather an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term.

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Shameless Plug

Posted by Jason Terk on Tuesday, April 15

The National Center for Science Education has a site specifically set up to take down Expelled, it's called Expelled Exposed.

But wait, there's more!

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Vomitous

Posted by Jason Terk on Thursday, April 10

Scientific American has a review of Expelled:

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.

...

It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don't know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don't know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists' curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It's one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.

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