On the non-necessity of evolving large brains:

It requires big brains and they in turn demand lots of protein, which, outside modern yuppie societies, generally means meat. As the late evolutionary paleontologist Jack Sepkoski used to say: “I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.”

(from a review of an interesting book.)

Don’t just link to the Expelled Exposed web site, read it! A whole bunch of new content has gone live, including this video of Chris Comer.

One of the more effective parts is the truth behind Expelled, which goes one by one through the cases of “expelled” creationists, and shows that they weren’t — the quality of a good persecution has gone down considerably since the days of Romans with lions, I guess.

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We need to get the NCSE’s counter-site to the hideous little propaganda film, Expelled, to rank higher in the search engines. The way to do this is for lots and lots of you to link to the Expelled Exposed site with the word Expelled. It’s not hard: just copy this code into a blog post.

<a href="http://expelledexposed.com/"><i>Expelled</i></a>

Whenever you write about the movie, use that link. Do it a bunch of times, if you want. It’s more effective if many people use the same link every time, though, than for one person to be repetitive.

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From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Every semi-knowledgeable moviegoer and reader of movie criticism knows what the words “not screened for critics” means: The movie is a dog.

So what are we supposed to make of Maciel Giertych, anti-Darwinist loon and one of the interview subjects in Expelled, who is also an anti-Jewish bigot who characterizes Jews as “those who did not recognise Jesus Christ as the awaited Messiah”?

Scott Hatfield is asking for assistance: one of the old school Liars for Jesus, Don Patton, is going to be speaking at his public high school. This is disgraceful. Patton is a sleazy fraud, and to have him abuse public school facilities with his dishonesty is completely inappropriate; confine him to the churches, where nonstop lies are a regular feature.

Scott asks what can be done. Here’s my general prescription for dealing with these slimy hoaxsters:

• Advertise. These guys feed on an ignorant audience; they get a lot of praise by packing auditoriums with the most stupid people they can find by farming the churches. Counter that by recruiting at colleges. Get people to volunteer to drive attendees to the venue. It doesn’t take much — getting a few people to raise their hands and ask informed, critical questions usually discombobulates them.

• Research. Find out ahead of time what the subject of the talk will be, and study the actual science. Usually, you don’t have to have an advanced degree to counter the creationists — you will discover that their talks tend to be far more moronic than you would ever believe.

  One difficulty here is that creationists tend to be nonspecialists themselves. While Patton’s idee fixe is that the earth is young, he’s such a blithering boob that he’ll probably wander all over the place, and if you start to pin him down on radiometric dating, for instance, he’ll skitter over to biblical archaeology.

• Find experts. Getting a skeptical audience is a good step, but finding an expert who can refute the guy on details is invaluable. I note, for instance, that the title of the talk at the high school is “The Record of the Fossils”. Get a paleontologist to show up! This has two useful effects: one, it will mean someone there can refute the creationist in detail; two, the expert will probably be so outraged at the putrid lies the kook is spreading about his discipline that you will have a lifelong ally.

• BUY THIS BOOK: The Counter-Creationism Handbook^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, by Mark Isaak. Buy a couple of copies. I guarantee you that the creationist will recite fallacies straight out of that text, and even if you aren’t comfortable with public speaking, you’ll be able to get up to the microphone at the Q&A and simply read the short refutations provided. Wave the book around and tell people where they can get a copy. You might even let your town bookstore know that you’re going to be plugging it so that they get copies in stock.

• Be polite. Seriously, I get lots of credit at creationist talks simply because I don’t show up and throw tomatoes or gnaw on a baby’s arm while I’m there. Critique the claims of the speaker without compromise and in the strongest possible terms, but do so professionally. For instance, Patton is one of those frauds with a fake Ph.D. from an unaccredited institution — don’t touch that one, unless he starts slandering the qualifications of legitimate scientists first. Focus on his arguments. Criticize him, and the audience will tend to side with him; show that he isn’t as smart as he claims he is, that he doesn’t understand some basic idea that anyone in the audience can grasp, and they’ll begin to doubt him. They might want to believe in creationism, but if you can show him up as a poor representative for creationism and Christianity, they’ll turn on him.

• Get an evolution-friendly blogger on your side. You know, one who will tell all his readers in the Fresno area to turn out with blood in their eye. Maybe you can also advertise a pre-talk session at a local bar where the sensible evolutionists can meet up, get to know each other, talk about their expertise, and coordinate a little bit.

Rarely, you can go over the creationist’s head and complain to whoever is providing the venue and get them to back out — that might be a possibility here, since it is a little shocking that a public school is hosting the event (it’s after hours, though, and they may be leasing the auditorium, which makes it more difficult to block). I don’t generally favor that, though: let the enemy occupy a position, and then send in the scientific troops to attack it, I say. In some ways it actually makes your position stronger that they are using secular facilities to promote religious nonsense — the church-based audience is on unfamiliar ground.

Most of you have probably already seen this: David Bolinsky accuses Expelled of theft. Bolinski is the professional who invested a great deal of time and money in generating the “Inner Life of the Cell” video, only to see it misappropriated, misinterpreted, and misused by creationists to promote their absurdity. You can tell that Bolinski might be a little bit angry about this, but of course there’s not much that a few poorly paid college professors can do against the huge buckets of money from unscrupulous fat cat investors and bloated right wing ‘institutes’.

To Mr. Dembski: The only reason I am involved in this discussion is because I do not want the reputation of my company, hard-earned as it is, to be sullied by even oblique affiliation to your sort of smarmy ethics, if only through works of ours, purloined to fit your agenda. Last year you were charging colleges thousands of dollars to give lectures showing a copy of The Inner Life of the Cell, you claimed you “found somewhere”, with Harvard’s and XVIVO’s credits stripped out and the copyright notice removed (which is in itself a felony) and a creationist voice-over pasted on over our music (yes, I have a recording of your lecture). Harvard slapped you down for that, and yes there is a paper trail. One can only assume that had we not taken notice then, we would be debating The Inner Life of the Cell being used in EXPELLED, instead of a copy. You have enough of a colorful history that Harvard, in its wisdom, decided to ‘swat the gnat’ with as little fuss as possible. Imagine our surprise earlier this month, to see our work copied in a movie trailer for EXPELLED! And you are in the movie too! Not quite a star, but brown dwarfs are cool. XVIVO has no intention of engaging alone, in asymmetrical fighting against an ideological entity with orders of magnitude more resources than we have. That might make great theater, but would resemble a hugely expensive game of whack-a-ID. Boring!

You might also want to read Wesley Elsberry’s account of an interview with Stein: one of the problems with lying is maintaining consistency — big elaborate lies involving many people tend to unravel as the principals begin to contradict themselves. Mark Mathis has one account of the creation of the movie that claims it simply, gradually evolved to its current ideological state; Ben Stein casually mentions, however, that he was drawn to the film because, right from the beginning and well before they interviewed me and others, they had a clear, predetermined accusation to make. This is a movie built on lies from the very beginning.

Meanwhile, the reviews are trickling in. Greg Laden tells me there is a review in Time, and it’s negative. You can tell the writer is inclined to be sympathetic to the movie and wants to give it some credit, but has to admit that the claims of the film are unsupportable. Since he can’t do that, though, he has to resort to irrelevant atheist-bashing.

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism. Biologist P.Z. Myers, for example, tells Stein that religion ought to be seen as little more than a soothing pastime, a bit like knitting. Books such as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion often read like pure taunting, as when Hitchens pettily and pointedly types God as lowercase god. Tautology as typography is not the stuff of deep thought. Neither, alas, is Expelled.

Yes, I did say that. But remember, I was told specifically that this movie was to be about the “intersection of science and religion”, and their questions were all about atheism and religion, and my quote in that section is about why I think science erodes religious belief, well in keeping with what I was told the movie was about … if they’d asked me about specific issues in Intelligent Design creationism, I would have gladly addressed them (and they may have, but answers that were examples of “clear-eyed scientific empiricism” would not have made it into this movie). This is yet another example of how they skewed the interviews with editing. Hitchens isn’t in this movie, so why bring him up? And why get irate about capitalizing the name of a god? I can’t say that the typological argument for bestowing respect on a deity is very persuasive, either.

Man, at least Expelled is getting the reputation it deserves: a dishonest documentary that fails to make its case, that relies on dishonest interviewing techniques and misleading guilt-by-association … and don’t forget the Lord Privy Seals.

One thing I know: I never want to piss off Peter Irons, Esq., Attorney at Law.

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First Fox News, now Scientific American gives Expelled both barrels. They dedicated a fair amount of space to ripping into the movie, and you might be wondering if it isn’t giving the movie more publicity than it deserves, a question I’m getting asked a lot, too. Of course it is! The controversy is exactly what they want, since it will help put butts in seats. However, this is bad publicity, and what serves our ends is that people see the movie skeptically, and are made aware of the fundamental dishonesty of the makers. John Rennie notes this problem:

Rather, it seems a safe bet that the producers hope a whipping from us would be useful for publicity: further proof that any mention of ID outrages the close-minded establishment. (Picture Ben Stein as Jack Nicholson, shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!”) Knowing this, we could simply ignore the movie–which might also suit their purposes, come to think of it.

Unfortunately, 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.

I agree — this is a movie that goes beyond stupidity to actual malice, and it shouldn’t be ignored. SciAm does a great job in exposing the intellectual poverty behind this propaganda film.

Also, remember how Mark Mathis was mentioning that they allowed Michael Shermer to see the movie, as if he were expecting a thumbs-up from Shermer? His review is also online, and as I expected, it is not kind.