Mark Mathis, the guy who did the interviews for the creationist movie Expelled, has been doing the Christian talk radio circuit lately. He was on in the Twin Cities yesterday, although I missed it … but he’s about to go live on WAMT 1190 in Florida, at 11:05 ET. Listen in, or even call in…make him dance.
The call-in numbers are 407-273-1190 and 888-300-3776, by the way. And the KKMS interview in the Twin Cities might be accessible here, I haven’t tried it myself.
OK, all done. What an amusing show! Mathis is your classic, standard creationist, constantly claiming (falsely) that evolution is about nothing but pure chance. He made the usual bogus statement that we biologist teach evolution as a fact rather than as a theory, which is precisely the reverse: we consider theory to be a higher order description of a phenomenon than a mere collection of facts, so we teach it as a theory and thereby emphasize its importance. We’d be trivializing it if we taught it as just a fact.
He also played the equivocation game: these are just different “views” and we should let students learn about “views” and express their “views”. Science isn’t just about opinions. We build a story on a framework of hard evidence, every step of the way. We don’t just say that such-and-such is our opinion, we have to present observations and experiments in support. We cannot do that with ID. They have no experiments. They have no observations that can’t be explained in better ways by evolutionary biology.
Finally, he was rather frantic about trying to turn the audience against me by declaring me an atheist, even plugging Pharyngula and urging everyone to go look and see that, oooh, PZ Myers has an atheist blog!
That ploy doesn’t work on me. I proudly admit to being a militant atheist and own up to my beliefs, unlike the Intelligent Design creationists, who are clearly ashamed to be Christians.
um, i’m pretty sure you posted this at 10:24am your time… meaning 11:24 ET. Boo.
No, I posted at 9:24 my time — all the posting times on sb are given in Eastern Time.
forgiven. i’ve got to refersh pharyngula more often.
for a religious radio station, they’re giving an awful lot of time to evolution and very little to what mathis has to say. weird. but good.
direct link to listen live
I almost feel sorry for Mathis. He hasn’t been able to finish one point without being interrupted by the host.
i’d feel bad for him if what he was saying made any sense. PZ pwned him.
PZ has hijacked the interview!
Listening to you on the show now. Mathis is pathetic. Admittedly there are technical difficulties but the host stopped Mathis when he again repeated the bogus claim that neo-darwinism is taught as absolute fact and squashes all other ideas. And when she stopped him what did he do? He starts saying, “PZ is an atheist! He mocks people of religion.” What a class act.
Oh man… Transcript please!!
Can someone kindly provide a blow by blow account?
Mathis just plugged Pharyngula!
fucker just quote mined Darwin about the eye…
but PZ corrected the quote mine and put it in context. whee!
Nice job nailing him on the Darwin quote.
I could not believe he actually stooped to the best known Darwin quote mine in the universe.
Mathis is an asshat.
We got quote-mines, ad hominem attacks, well poisoning, and false claims of persecution in a matter of minutes.
Good point PZ. No work for ID. To bad you and Mathis can’t hear each other. Mathis gives the post-modernist take to try to claim that he can’t know for sure. When you indicated that you allow a week to discuss the issues around creationism he attacks you as an atheist. He then presumes that you mock students and their views in your class. Mark is not the best at this format. He had trouble with both me and Jan Jaros yesterday. He then goes on to quotemine Darwin. Nice job PZ, I am so glad you got the last word pointing out the dishonesty of Mathis. That was an opportunity that I didn’t get yesterday and that really ticked me off.
You came off as reasonable, even professorial. Mathis sounded like the whining, dishonest, mean-spirited creationist he truly is. That gets you that homebrrewed squid beer, for sure! See you at the Campus Club tonight.
Arrgh, Cap’n P Zed be hoistin’ the Jolly Roger an’ boardin’ the scallywag’s swaggy. Ahoy.
Whoo hoo! Good job PZ! Funny how he couldn’t “hear” you
Well done, PZ. All the Oregonian scientists in Scotland who heard this online are proud to associate with you.
AAAAAAH….no access. Transcript? Anyone? Please!
The link above seems not to be the same thing… extremely credulous and no call-in.
There wouldn’t be a recording of this, would there? I’d love to hear all the action.
Never mind, seem to have hit the call-in 9 minutes in.
If creationists had pet tarantulas, they wouldn’t vomit nonsense about there not being steps between clusters of photosensitive cells and fully formed eyes that function.
The solution to this problem is clear: we must cover creationists with hundreds of tarantulas.
And scorpions. And cnidarians.
He also accused Neo-Darwinian evolution of proposing life from non-life. I could’ve sworn that wasn’t part of the scope of the theory at all?
Blast it! As #22 stated, I ended up listening to a different version of a (the?) Mark Mathis interview (no call-in segment). Any idea where I can go to hear a replay of the far more interesting version of the interview? Or is this one going to be conveniently lost / forgotten / omitted by the station?
–Ray
PZ, I thought it was interesting that Mathis accused you of mocking your students for their religious beliefs. The only mocking of religious beliefs I noted was on the part of Mathis. His tone was quite condescending toward the caller that indicated that he got his church on Sunday and didn’t think it belonged in the science classroom. I haven’t experienced any mocking of my beliefs, only intelligent, good natured and fair minded discussion. When you blast a theist, they generally really need blasting.
He accused me of being an atheist when I called yesterday arguing for the validity of Natural Selection. I called him on it. One can accept science and be a theist. Mathis’ tactic worked better at KKKMS when the hosts help him with the attack style. It came off less well here with a more reaonable host.
The show is called the Guetzloe Report — I don’t know if the site maintains archives.
I sure hope they archive it. Would be great to hear PZ taking smacking this guy down.
Wow, they really know how to convey a subtle, understated message of nationalism at that website. I mean, there’s nothing even slightly fascist about a Reagan-Aircraft Carrier-American Flag slide, with eagles! I can really respect that kind of low-key, quiet patriotism.
And once you get past the flabbergasting intro screen, the main site looks like the kind of blog maintained by some of Pharyngula’s more incoherent trolls.
As others have requested, if anyone has a partial transcript of the show or access to the audio, I’d very much appreciate it (use my listed email or post here). Covering Expelled is one of my main interests atm: I’ve been collecting info from the duped-interviewees, trying to delve into the production and marketing campaign, and I’m working on a press kit for journalists in the hopes of reducing crappy, uninformed press reports on the film when it’s PR efforts start ramping up in January. Any of this stuff would be extremely helpful. I’m quite unhappy that I couldn’t listen at work!
This would seem to be the mp3, but I listened to the whole thing and… no PZ. Did they cut it, or is this the wrong interview?
http://www.kkmslive.com/MP3/15112907-Mark%20Mathis.MP3
This isn’t the former weatherman Mark Mathis who has all the crazy coked-up videos on teh intarweb, is it? A simple google search for the name will turn up the ones I’m talking about, and they are hilarious.
Jack, that mp3 is from yesterday. That has Jan Janos and me taking Mathis to task.
Stephen, they mentioned on KKKMS yesterday that Mathis was a former tv reporter. So, he might be the weather man you mentioned.
Please PZ, out of courtesy for your readers, you should introduce a link like that with NSFNW–Not Safe For Non-Wingnuts.
At first, I thought he had linked to the Colbert Report by accident.
Well in his defense in alot of ways his position is more consistent than yours despite the fact your the good guy here.
If you accept theism on it’s face you have to rationalize away alot of science or just pretend it has nothing to say about events that occured here in the natural world or the interactions between the being and material items.
Again cognitive dissonance makes everything possible.
Jim, I’m not accepting theism on its face if you mean some form of fundyism. Nor am I rationalizing away science. I don’t think science can address how or why we choose to live as we do. I also don’t think that any religious narrative can give us an understanding of the history of the development and diversity of life on earth.
Gould talked of non-overlapping magisterium. I would be more comfortable with that than someone trying to weasal creationism into the schools by denying they eventually want the bible there. I don’t know that my position is consistent, but that is not that big a deal to me.
Mathis kept claiming that we didn’t know this or couldn’t know that. I am quite certain that we can know that the earth and life on it are billions of years old and that the theory of evolution is about as well conifrmed as a theory can be. I am also quite certain that the Genesis creation stories were taking a couple of stabs at defining what it was to be human. From the start, theism has not given a consistent story, so I am not troubled nor offended by your criticism of my position.
When I read PZ’s grandma post today, he pretty much said the way I felt about loving those close to right to the moment of death and grieving the loss afterwards. When I compare PZ’s sentiment to the behavior of Mathis, I am ashamed to be associated with such dishonest mean-spiritedness. At the same time I am proud of the way in which my friend PZ showed charity and patience in the interview. I also liked the way he stuck Mathis with his own dishonest point in the end, but not with the glee that Mathis would have shown. I thank God that I have been able to share a beer with PZ and talk about life on this wonderful world. Inconsistent? Yes. But give me a good beer, and a little cognitive dissonance ain’t nothin’.
With all do respect you are the sum total of a variety of physiological reactions all tied to an evolutionary history. I think all can/do provide answers to these questions. But isn’t it a false dicotomy to pretend religion answers them?
I did not wish to offend. I do not find your position consistent however.
Having said all of that I know your one of the good guys.
For the love of Noodles, someone post a transcript, link, or hosted file recording of where our squidliness PZ puts the smackdown on Mathis!
The show can be downloaded from here;
http://www.kkmslive.com/MP3/15112907-Mark%20Mathis.MP3
Though it is a very slow download at only around 55KBps.
Sorry, just realised that I posted yesterdays link.
You can get a copy of the show by writing Doug Guetzloe [email protected]. I wanted to make a quick correction this is a Fox News station WAMT and not a Christian radio station. This is a political conservative news show but I appreciate the chance to bring about a fresh perspective when able and challenge people to think deeper about issues. I want to thank PZ Myers for calling in and apologize for any technical issues. I appreciate Mr. Guetzloe allowing me to Guest Host at times and I believe that news should show all sides of an issue as fairly and responsibly as possible. After viewing the main website of the movie I saw that there was little way for me to do a fair discussion without allowing Mr. Myers the chance to explain the scientific view. I hope as the movie is released in February that this will help open discussion and not create more division of them against us.
Thank you for listening.
You may want to watch the Ben Stein interview with Bill O’ Reilly http://www.expelledthemovie.com/video.php.
Well. As soon as you get replication, you get natural selection, and this… must have come before what most of us would call life. There’s plenty of natural selection in an RNA world, for instance.
Well. As soon as you get replication, you get natural selection, and this… must have come before what most of us would call life. There’s plenty of natural selection in an RNA world, for instance.
I’m always either amused (when sober), or throwing crap at other crap in a specific way that doctors have advised me will relieve my anger (after a few drinks), when some anti-evoloutionist (can they be called that? I know that they make a large error when they talk of “Darwinists” or “evoloutionists”, but since they coined the terms they have decided to be against, I believe it is fair) smugly asks a question about “how can evoloution explain…” and they then proceed to ask a question which has, without their knowledge, I’m sure, been lifted directly from Darwin’s section of “Origin” where he asks rhetorical questions about possible problems with his theory, and then answers them quite wonderfully.
Pamela (Guest Host for Guetzloe show 11/30) wrote in #46:
I did that and got the reply:
…along with instructions. I don’t don’t want to give him my money, though, so I won’t be following through.
Pamela (Guest Host for Guetzloe show 11/30) said:
I can easily agree with this statement when there is a genuine controversy to report. Yet evolution v. ID is not such a controversy. Only a very tiny percentage, most likely much less than 1%, of biologists would deny the explanatory and predictive power of evolutionary theory. We know of no scientific theory which is complete or fully understood; science doesn’t work that way. But at present, ID offers no explanatory or predictive content whatsoever. Other areas of scientific progress are in similar stages. These are the realm of graduate students and post-docs seeking to make a name for themselves. One might succeed in so doing if their work can stand up to scientific scrutiny. Until that happens, that work needs to remain in labs at universities and not voted on by high school students as if it were another homecoming queen contest.
The central failure of the ID movement is that until it can deliver some science, it has no business promoting its insertion into high school curricula. The idea of ‘teach the controversy, let the students decide for themselves’ is not how we approach teaching any other aspect of science. High school students get far too little science instruction as it is without wasting it on unproven flights of fancy, whether those be Intelligent Design, Zero Point Energy, Perpetual Motion or whatever else is the next great hope of the educationally deprived. In reality, ID proponents want to teach the controversy only because there is nothing else in ID to teach.
A controversy that should be reported is the one in which certain elements of our population insist that the processes which have produced the great discoveries of the last thousand years, including nuclear power, antibiotics, electronics and more, should be considered flawed if and only if they contradict the writings of bronze age goatherders. These people happily use the products of science and technology like cell phones, microwave ovens and GPS satellites, almost all of which at some point depended on following scientific evidence in a direction that was not intuitive. And while all of these technologies can be easily used without knowing the underlying science, I’ll wager that none of these users would say that the developers of these technologies have it all as wrong as they claim biologists do regarding evolution. This controversy wants to subvert the known working methods of science to assuage an emotional need for an eternal father figure.
Certainly there were times in the past when 99% of scientists were wrong about something, yet they were overturned by doing more science, not by confusing teenagers.
Ray S.,
That was a great response. I am going to copy that and send it a fundie friend of mine.
Thanks,
PKSP
P.Z., I’d make this distinction between “fact” and “theory” as applied to evolution:
Evolution (gradual change) of species and of intra-species traits is an observed fact: observed in the fossil record, in the variations among living plant and animal populations scattered across islands and otherwise separated regions, and in the variations among living bacterial populations during our own lifetime (e.g. antibiotic resistance).
We have a theory (or progressively developed theories) of evolution as our way of explaining or understanding this observed fact, its whys and hows, its past and present and possible futures.
That we keep refining the theory to take new discoveries into account — say, how radiation can cause mutation, or how viruses can transfer genetic information across species — does nothing whatever to deny the observed fact of evolution. It only means we’ve incorporated new knowledge that Darwin didn’t have available to him, just as in physics we’ve incorporated knowledge that Newton didn’t have.
The Creationists are denying not merely the theory or theories of evolution, they are denying the observed fact. For their religious belief to be literally physically true, all those hominid and proto-hominid fossils would have to be modern-human remains, back to the earliest fossils found. Likewise for all other modern animal and plant species, whose absence from the early fossil record is equally inexplicable, unless evolution is a fact as well as a theory.
So forget all the “transitional” species we’ve actually found; let’s look for what Creationism predicts instead, as supportive evidence for that theory. Where are all those modern cat and modern dog and modern human skeletons among the trilobyte fossils, possibly even with trilobyte remains in their bellies?
I hope as the movie is released in February that this will help open discussion and not create more division of them against us.
sorry, but you have your head firmly wedged up your ass if you think “Expelled” in any way intends to do anything BUT create more divisions via espousing ignorance as a valid viewpoint. I guess you learned absolutely nothing either from hosting the show, or listening to either of the speakers.
get a friend to help you with that before you die from the unbalanced weight of fox’s version of “fair and balanced”.
To be fair I contacted PZ Myers for the show after seeing him mentioned on the movie site and did not know if he would call in or not because he did not confirm the day before. I had a local guest in the studio to discuss the issue with Mr. Mathis instead. I didn’t have to have anyone but Mr. Mathis on for the hour so to accuse me of having my head up my ass is every bit as judgmental as any other side of this issue making judgment calls without any knowledge.
There is only limited time in an hour show to cover any topic not to mention something that is so highly charged as the discussion on evolution.
Like it or not there is a movie coming out on this and it is going to have wide release in theaters unlike most independent films. In the best of all possible worlds it might bring light to all sides of the discussion. If you wish to attack a person that attempted to bring both sides to the table then you are the one with your head firmly placed in your rectum.
To sit comfortably in the halls of academia and spew judgment on the rest of the country will surely create a wider divide than what already exists in our country today.
One needs to look no further than the last several years of elections to see the divide our country has.
I do not work for Fox news, or for the Show or do I have any personal interest in promoting one side over the other. I hope as coverage of this move comes out in the future that both sides will be discussed openly and we can trust that the average American can make their own decisions on the matter and don’t need to be spoon fed by any side.
I am an independent advocate and am glad the show went on for our local area even with the technical issues of the callers. In the South the debate on creationism vs evolution is a very hot issue and as you can see in other parts of Florida they are including creationism in the curriculum. Before you make your judgment you may want to know a little about who you are commenting on or about.
Pamela,
Bringing both sides to the table is not constructive in this instance, as one side is pseudoscience and one is not. “Teach the controversy” is only valid if there is a controversy. There isn’t.
@Onias16:
I am somewhat handicapped in that I haven’t heard the show; however it doesn’t seem to me that Pamela is suggesting that there is a (genuine scientific) controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory, but that “Expelled” will have a wide release and that without some counterbalancing argument – from our side – its truth will be accepted. There is a huge amount of controversy about the message of “Expelled”.
Pamela, perhaps the next time you have the opportunity to guest host you can bring light to one of the controversies listed below.
You’re quite right that you didn’t have to have PZ on. You could act just like Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh and shout down or belittle viewpoints other than your own, no matter how factual. But I’m hoping you would like to retain your dignity and credibility through listening and learning to real scientists, and thus educate your listeners. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt in that you may not have had a sound biological science education; very few get one in the US even still. So I’ll cut you a little slack that until now, you didn’t know there was no controversy among biologists over the basics of evolutionary theory.
Quantum mechanics and relativity are both decidedly non-intuitive for someone without training in those areas. I’ll accede that some may think aspects of those theories to be as crazy as some think common ancestry might sound. Perhaps you can tell us why ID proponents are not also suggesting we teach about controversies in these areas. I’ll guess it’s because QM and relativity do not directly contradict anything in a literal reading of the Christian bible.
@Robin
If that’s the case, I apologise.
Ray S #50 = good post
the controversy is not between evolution and ID. It is lying to our kids or not. I don’t think it is admirable to promote the controversy. It is also not good journalism to promote the controversy.
When a pigeon drops in on a chess game and knocks over the pieces and craps on the board you don’t include that move in your next chess lesson to your child. You also don’t report on the news that pigeons are shaking up the chess world with ground breaking moves
I haven’t heard the show either, but Pamela’s words were:
She specifically says she has no personal interest in promoting one side over another. Perhaps she can enlighten us if she has any personal interest in promoting one side or another in the spherical Earth / flat Earth controversy. Or whether the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. Or whether Bush & Cheney masterminded 9/11. These are not really controversies at all to an educated, informed person.
We really do not need to wait for the Expelled movie or any other to have an open discussion. One can become educated and informed on the subject of evolution at the Talk Origins Archive or the website for the Evolution show on PBS, among many others. Among the educated and informed, evolutionary theory has near unamimouns assent. After 150 years of voluminous evidence for it, I feel certain that if evolutionary theory is supplanted, it will be in the same way that relativity supplanted Newton’s laws of motion. As a note to the uneducated and uninformed regarding relativity, Newton’s laws are extraordinarily accurate unless large masses or high rates of speed are involved. And we have discovered many things that have helped us refine Darwin’s work; so much so that those in the know often refer to it as the modern synthesis and never as Darwinism.
As to the last of Pamela’s quoted words, Americans are generally so scientifically illiterate that we do in fact have to spoon feed them. A media that gens up false controversies, such as Fox News’ annual war on the war on Christmas, isn’t helping.
I don’t work for the show I hosted or Fox news. Simply I was a guest host that did the right thing to try to bring all sides to talk on a topic. The Host trusted me to do the right thing and I believe I did.
I think that PZ Myers was calm and polite and to the point and I am sure he will; or at least I hope he will have chances to talk about this in the future. Since the movie producer has included Myers in the promo of the movie website it would seem only fair.
Like it or not this item is coming back in a big way. I have trust that people aren’t that stupid they don’t understand basic science or trust the natural laws. You seem to think you have some innate knowledge that if you spoon feed some they will come to your way of thinking because how on earth could they not see it is the right way.
I think the issue is their faith and to challenge some people’s faith when for many that is everything their existence is biased on it a terrifying thing. You might want to consider some empathy for talking with some people on the issue in the future because it is a life altering thing for someone to question what they have always been told to be true by those they trust.
Some people just believe in faith and creationism and that is the end of that and you can not change their belief as much as they will change yours. So somewhere for the rest there should be discussion about what the goal of this movie is and how it might impact education if at all in the future.
A little more empathy for those in the cross hairs of this issue might help everyone as it comes up in the near future.
Pamela, you’ve already been credited for allowing someone to rebut the foolishness of Mathis. We know you didn’t have to do it and have said as much. I wasn’t the one who suggested you were an accomplished contortionist. Yet you still seem to think that reasonable people can see two sides of this issue. One side has a collection of writings thousands of years old of questionable provenance, much of it demonstrably false. The other side has the track record of science and a basis of empirical objective evidence. If you still think there’s something of value in the creationist screed, then you should be guest hosting the Art Bell show, where you can joust with the UFO abductees also. Creationists are just as loony and should be treated in a similar manner. They’re entitled to believe what they want and also to be ridiculed for their gullibility.
The second part of the problem is that if it’s creationism you want, there’s many different versions. What gives the Christian version priority? Why not teach all of them? Because none of them has any science behind them at all.
We know that creationists are not just going to go away. We’re not either. We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that a student in a science classroom gets real science instruction. We know we can’t reach everyone, but we cannot allow a few wingnuts to put roadblocks in front of everyone else’s opportunity to learn about science.
You think the issue is faith. I disagree. There are many who maintain faith, yet do not use it to deny reality on a daily basis. Yet you seem to want sympathy for those who not only live their lives in a fantasy world, but want to impose that fantasy on the rest of us. I cannot offer such. Many of these people are the ones who kill abortion doctors or protest homosexuals at military funerals or try to ban books like the Harry Potter series or instigate a war because his god told him to do it. Yes, those people are in a for a rude awakening if anyone ever breaks through their fantasy bubble. That’s when my empathy will kick in. Perhaps you can see me in the same light as a missionary preaching the gospel to the savages.
So perhaps you’ll agree that there are some creationists who can never be educated enough to believe in evolutionary theory. They’re probably the same ones who believe the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, not just the solar system. It’s the same type of belief with the same justification. We know few if any of those will ever embrace reason and evidence. And perhaps you’ll agree that scientists are not going to be impressed by any culture’s sacred writings unless accompanied by voluminous evidence. The ones in the middle, the ones who are given the false impression that there is a controversy with valid evidence on both sides, those are the ones who are hurt by your mischaracterization of the issue and by your giving publicity and credibility to people like Mathis. You are misleading the public and betraying their trust in you. Please stop.
So, Is it possible to listen to this one anywhere?
Check #44. I’m listening to it now, not sure if the call-in portion is included. Still it is gag worthy.
I did get the link from #44, but that was from the previous day. I agree with you, though, very gag-worthy indeed!