The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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Dardedar
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The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

Post by Dardedar »

These shameless dishonest bastards are handing out Ben Stein "Expelled" DVD's!

This is in April so we have lots of time to plan for it.

***
WHAT:
Is Intelligent Design a stronger scientific theory than Blind Evolution? Is Intelligent Design just religion in disguise? Should an atheist or theist care? Join us as these questions and more will be answered on April 16th and 17th by noted speakers from the Discovery Institute Dr. John West and Casey Luskin. They will answer any/all questions on what the theory of “intelligent design” is and what it is not. So please invite any/all Darwinian Naturalist professors and friends to these events – this should be a perfect opportunity for opponents of design to ask tough questions about ID.

Attendance is FREE.

WHEN/WHERE:
Monday April 16th at NWACC (Northwest Arkansas Community College), 6pm; In the Shewmaker Center in the Peterson Auditorium directly behind the main campus building (simply follow signs). https://www.nwacc.edu/web/presidentsoffice/map.php)

April 17th at the Union Theater at the UofA, 5:30pm (http://union.uark.edu/1852.php).

The first 40 attendees will receive a complimentary copy of Ben Stein's DVD "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed" AND for EVERY person who attends I will be donating $2 to the NWA Food Bank - so please make plans to attend either the Bentonville or Fayetteville events (or both) and support a good cause.

Please visit: www.ReasonableFaithFayetteville.org for more information, directions, etc, or simply shoot me an email. I do hope that everyone that can will at least plan on attending one of the events; what could it hurt?"

http://www.facebook.com/events/372901112728811/
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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Nice rebuttal to standard material Casey Luskin (guy giving the above lectures), here.

God this stuff is dumb. As he notes:
And at the Dover v. Kitzmiller trial, it was shown conclusively that the editors of the book in question – Of Pandas and People – were clearly attempting to change the terms “creationism” into “intelligent design”. In fact, an analysis of the various editions of this book during the trial revealed this trend of terminology replacement, with the most obvious shift taking place almost immediately after the 1987 Supreme Court decision which found scientific creationism to be in violation of church-state separation due to its religious nature…

Image

This was nothing more than a mere re-labeling from an explicitly religious terminology to an attempted scientific-sounding terminology, but they messed up… badly. For example, there were editions of the book which contained glaring editorial errors such as this, where it is obvious to any observer that the editors were simply replacing the now-forbidden “creationist” wording with the new “intelligent design” language, with little or no other substantive changes to the material:

Image
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

Post by kwlyon »

I have a copy of pandas...it is comically bad.
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

Post by Dardedar »

I just posted these questions on the Facebook page of our Intelligent Designers coming to town:

***
QUESTIONS FOR CREATIONISTS AND I.D.ists by Stephen Schaffner, statistical geneticist at the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research--He's also a Christian, so he's both a Christian and a Darwinist when it comes to evolution, simply because the evidence is so compelling:

Where is the creationist or I.D.ist model that explains the following
types of observed genetic data? Such a model should produce estimates of
the following measurable genetic data for modern humans:

1) The minor allele frequency spectrum.
2) The relationship between minor allele frequency and probability that
the minor allele is the same as the chimpanzee base at that site.
3) The ratio of transition (purine<->purine or pyrimidine<->pyrimidine)
polymorphisms to transversion (purine<->pyrimidine) polymmorphisms.
4) The ratio of polymorphisms at CpG sites to the overall polymorphism
rate.
5) The distance over which significant linkage disequilibrium extends in a
chromosome.
6) The genetic distance (difference in allele frequencies) between African
and non-African populations.
7) The difference between African and non-African populations in the
extent of linkage disequilibrium.
8) The distance over which significant autocorrelation in heterozygosity
extends in a chromosome.
9) The ratio of fixed transition to transversion differences between
humans and chimpanzees.
10) Same as (9), but for CpG sites.

There are other possible questions, but these are a reasonable starting
point, since the quantities in question are all ones that I routinely use
evolution to predict or interpret. If the claim is true that
creationists/I.D.ists look at the same data and just interpret it
differently, there should be no difficulty in providing the creationist
interpretation of these data.

(Note that the answers should be derivable by anyone using the same model.)

I'm happy to answer questions about my list (which is deliberately terse
-- I didn't feel like writing a survey of population genetics).
Young-earth creationists should have the most trouble meeting my
challenge. As you allow more and more time, and more and more evolution,
it becomes harder to distinguish special creation from evolution. In the
extreme case where all God does is cause a small number of critical
mutations in the development of humans, the results will look exactly like
evolution (provided the mutations occur in a fairly large population). In
that case, of course, you have to wonder why those mutations also couldn't
have happened on their own, since every other mutation can."
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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kwlyon
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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These are all WAY over my head:) But really that is the point, is it not? I have yet to hear a creationist argument of sufficient complexity and depth that I could not understand completely even with my menial understanding of genetics and biology. It seems that, with very few exceptions, they know less than I do...and that is kinda pathetic.
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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"And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism." --Conservative commentator John Derbyshire, ripping Expelled a new one in the National Review.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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Roger Ebert on Expelled:

Image
This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion." LINK
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Re: The Fundies are Coming: ID lecture

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Here is the content of the handout we will have at the NWACC ID event tonight:

***

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...
...about intelligent design and evolution

1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.
How the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections in red):

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

"Further, Stein fails to quote the very next passage, which includes the lines: "Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature . . . if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil." --Vancouver Sun (see below)

In effect, then, the producers are doing precisely what the Nazis did: Distorting Darwin's writing in order to justify their beliefs.

2) Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup.

3) Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.


Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator.
"According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!" --Michael Shermer, http://tinyurl.com/yjgjuyk

"...the film charges that Iowa State University astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez -- who, according to Stein, had a "stellar academic record" -- was denied tenure thanks to his ID views and his pro-ID book, The Privileged Planet. Yet one-third of Iowa State's astronomers fail to receive tenure, and Gonzalez's previously impressive publication record dropped off dramatically when he assumed his position at the university."
--Vancouver Sun, http://tinyurl.com/7nwug77

In another case of alleged persecution, George Mason University (GMU) did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in ID. She says that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies... In the film, Crocker insists, "I did not teach creationism." Interestingly, Crocker apparently delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn't turn out to be a "balanced" presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution," Crocker said." --Reason magazine, http://tinyurl.com/894nq9b

5) Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.

Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are "forbidden" by "big science." It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of "big science" are just described as having an atheistic preference.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.

Expelled includes many clips of scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, William Provine and PZ Myers who are also well known as atheists... the film is wrong to imply that understanding of evolution inevitably or necessarily leads to a rejection of religious belief. Scientific American... [asked] why Ken Miller was not included in the film. Mathis explained that his presence would have "confused" viewers. " --Scientific American http://tinyurl.com/yh6myer

***
This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion." --Roger Ebert, http://tinyurl.com/37sb2s

"We devote the core of this issue to Evolution and the ID Wars. The "Intelligent Design" movemment is the most pernicious pseudoscience of our time. It seeks to undermine the teaching of evolution, at a minumum, but at its root is a broad attack on the nature of science itself--science's insistence on evidence, its unrelenting testing of hypotheses, its tradition of first airing new propositions before knowledgeable colleagues, its requirement of peer-reviewed scientific publication, its skeptical scrutiny of all new ideas, its error-correcting mechanisms and welcome acceptance of new ideas that better fit better evidence, its wonderful and imaginative creativity. In its place, ID advocates would give equal time to an ancient and long-discredited faith-based idea with zero scientific evidence. They would bypass all of science's institutional mechanisms that painstakingly sift unsupported ideas from well-supported ones and that are at the core of what science is all about." --Skeptical Inquirer, Editors note, Nov/Dec, 2005

"ID is not science for the simple reason that it doesn't produce testable hypotheses that could be used in an empirically-based research program," Massimo Pigliucci said. "That's why the best arguments against ID are philosophical in nature -- there really is little a scientist can say. I once debated ID proponent William Dembski at the NY Academy of Science, and pointedly asked him what he would do if he got a grant from the National Science Foundation. He couldn't come up with anything..." -- http://tinyurl.com/8667tq8

Watch Dr. Plavcan's lecture dismantling ID at our Fayetteville Freethinker meeting: http://blip.tv/file/3415313

http://www.expelledexposed.com

fayfreethinkers.com

fayfreethinkers@yahoo.com
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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