The horrible Expelled is now available on DVD. I have no plans to view it. However, you can get it from a site called redbox, which has a bizarre synopsis.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Who better to interview fanatics than the hilariously deadpan Ben Stein? Here, the former host of “Win Ben Stein’s Money” (and, it should mentioned, trusted Nixon advisor) hosts a documentary in which he sets out to ask the hard questions about the Intelligent Design theory to its most fervent believers.

I don’t know what they were thinking when they wrote that.

Northern Kentucky University is going to have a mock trial on teh creation/evolution debate. They say the intent is to legitimately explore the issue.

“It is part of the mission of the Scripps Howard Center to conduct public forums,” said Mark Neikirk, the Center’s executive director. “I’ve heard President Votruba state many times that a college campus should be a safe place for difficult conversations.” Neikirk said that while the evolution/creation science debate is a difficult and polarizing topic, the mock trial format is designed to provide structure for a civil, informative exploration of the public policy questions raised by the debate.

I have to call bullshit on that. What this really is is an attempt to contrive a debate between science and superstition in which the superstition side gets to pretend they have equal status. And, of course, science issues are not settled in a courtroom, ever.

Worst of all, though, is the way they’re planning to resolve the issues.

The first 200 people in attendance will have an opportunity to serve as jurors, using small remote control clickers to register their opinions both before and after the trial. At the conclusion of the proceeding, they will decide the case.

Yeah, right…in Kentucky. The local churches will bus in a mob, retired godbots with nothing else to do will get in line early, and they’ll all have predetermined (and blessedly ignorant) views of the outcome before they get started. The theological lackwit they have babbling the case for the supernatural can come in half-drunk and still count on ‘victory’. This fight has been thrown before it even gets started.

Here’s something you can do. Write to the president of NKU, James Votruba, and let him know that this is a joke of an event that only brings embarrassment to his university.

That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!

If you’re concerned about the escalating creationist activity in the Texas Board of Education, then SIGN THIS PETITION. Now. Let’s send a message.

The Texas Board of Education has named the six people who will be on a committee to review science curriculum standards. Texas, you’ve got trouble. The people are:

• David Hillis, professor of integrative biology and director of the Center of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the University of Texas at Austin;

• Ronald K. Wetherington, professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence;

• Gerald Skoog, professor and dean emeritus of the College of Education at Texas Tech and co-director of the Center for Integration of Science Education and Research;

• Stephen Meyer, vice-frakkin’-president of the odious Discovery Institute in Washington state;

• Ralph Seelke, a pro-ID creationist and biologist from Wisconsin;

• Charles Garner, a chemist from Baylor who is also a pro-ID creationist.

Note that Meyer and Seelke are co-authors of that ghastly new ID textbook, Explore Evolution, and would no doubt love to tweak the curriculum to make their book marketable in Texas. Conflict of interest? Nah.

So, three good guys and three ignorant ideologues, with the overall head of the board of education being Don McLeroy, the creationist dentist. It’s going to get ugly.

My colleague at the Twin Cities branch campus of the University of Minnesota, Randy Moore, has won an award from the Discovery Institute: The Award for Most Dogmatic Indoctrinator in an Evolutionary Biology Course. Congratulations to Randy! He won it for this paragraph:

The evidence supporting evolution is overwhelming and comes from diverse disciplines, such as molecular biology, paleontology, comparative anatomy, ethology, and biochemistry. There is no controversy among biologists about whether evolution occurs, nor are there science-based alternative theories. Evolution is a unifying theme in biology; teaching it as such is the best way to show students what biology is about and how they can use evolution as a tool to understand our world. [Evolution] is as important an idea as there is in science – it is a great gift to give to students.

The Discovery Institute claims there are at least four mistakes in that paragraph. Their summary of the “errors” is hilarious, and shows how delusional those guys are.

• The evidence isn’t overwhelming, because their books, Icons of Evolution and Explore Evolution, say so. Those two books are propaganda pieces put out by the Discovery Institute itself, and they are awful: poor scholarship, sloppy reasoning, and and an abysmal ignorance of the science characterize both. If you want some good popular books on the subject, try The Making of the Fittest^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, Your Inner Fish^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, Why Evolution is True^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, and The Ancestor’s Tale^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, all much better and more informative, and actually representing the evidence accurately.

• There is too controversy because they have a list of crackpots dissenters from evolution. Any field will have kooks and crackpots on the fringe; compiling a short list of loons is a relatively trivial and entirely meaningless exercise. Even at that, the DI’s list is very short on people who are actually biologists…and the whole petition is misleadingly worded.

• Evolution is a theory in trouble because some scientists discussed alternative modes of evolution at the Altenberg conference this summer. Science is not fixed, but adapts to the evidence, so it is perfectly normal to have conferences that discuss new ideas. The Altenberg meeting did not challenge the fact of evolution or try to displace known evolutionary mechanisms; it discussed some new findings that might add to the theory. It’s absurd that people are still going on and on about how a small meeting of scientists working on extending some parts evolutionary theory is a strike against evolution. To the contrary, it’s what we expect of good science.

• There are too science-based alternative theories: Intelligent Design, endosymbiosis, and self-organization. Margulis’s endosymbiotic theory was a natural explanation for eukaryote evolution — it is not an alternative, but a part of evolutionary theory. Similarly, self-organization (as, for example, described by Kauffman) does not oppose evolution at all, but suggests that physical and chemical properties of the universe could facilitate evolution. Like I said above, these are part of the normal process of science, that people propose new explanations and try to back them up with evidence, and they become incorporated into our body of knowledge. Intelligent Design creationism does not qualify. IDists don’t do science, don’t propose testable theories, and don’t have any evidence to back up their claims.

So I hope Randy Moore doesn’t get too cocky here — the award was given by a gang of incompetent judges who don’t know what they are talking about.

The latest issue of Science has a deservedly cruel review of Steve Fuller’s dreary philosophical assault on evolution, Dissent over Descent: Intelligent Design’s Challenge to Darwinism. I could tell from the title alone that the book was going to be worthless—Intelligent Design creationism provides no coherent “challenge” to evolution other than the purblind relabeling of it as “Darwinism”—but poor Michael Ruse had to actually read the whole book. Here’s his quick summary of the contents:

More amused than cross, let me go to the heart of Fuller’s case against Darwinian evolutionary theory and for IDT—for his is as much a negative critique of the opposition as a positive defense of his own beliefs. Fuller feels that Charles Darwin failed to make the case for his mechanism of natural selection. Darwin did not give a cause for evolution. He certainly did not unify the field. At most he gave lists of facts. Moreover, today if we feel that advance has been made, it is primarily in the molecular field, and this owes little or nothing to traditional evolutionary thought. At best Darwinism is a kind of tarted-up natural theology and, this being so, why not IDT?

Well. If that is an accurate description, and I have no reason to think otherwise since I have read some of Fuller’s pronouncements on these topics and they are entirely in line with the summary, then Fuller is an even bigger fool than I thought. Those statements are wrong in every case. Not just wrong, but transparently wrong, since even a non-philosopher like myself can read The Origin and see that his accusations against Darwin’s argument are false, and as someone who follows the field of molecular evolution somewhat closely, I think his claims about the state of the modern biological sciences are utterly silly.

Fortunately, Ruse has concisely skewered Fuller’s arguments for us.

The important thing is that all of this is completely wrong and is backed by no sound scholarship whatsoever. In at least one case, Fuller makes his case by an egregious misreading—of something I wrote about the role of genetic drift in Sewall Wright’s shifting balance theory. For the record, Charles Darwin set out to provide a cause, what he called—following his mentors like William Whewell (who in turn referred back to Newton)—a true cause or vera causa. Darwin felt, and historians and philosophers of science as well as practicing evolutionary biologists still feel, that he succeeded, for two reasons. First, he showed how organisms can be changed by human picking or selecting. Although Fuller repeatedly claims that Darwin intended no analogy here, that is simply not true. In the face of virtually everybody—including Alfred Russel Wallace, who (in the manuscript he sent to Darwin in 1858) explicitly denied a link between artificial and natural selection—Darwin insisted that we can gain confidence about selection in nature from what happens when humans are active. Second, Darwin brought everything together in a “consilience of inductions.” He argued that if you take selection as the causal mechanism, then you can explain instinct, the fossil record, geographical distributions of organisms, anatomy, systematics, and embryology. In turn, the success of these explanations feeds back to support the belief in selection. About as unifying a setup as it is possible to imagine.

One can go on to look at things today. It is ludicrous to claim that modern evolutionary biology is not integrated with molecular biology. Motoo Kimura’s neutral theory depends crucially on the claim that selection has little or no effect on processes down at the molecular level. Genetic fingerprinting has proved absolutely vital for observational and experimental studies of evolution. Someone like British ornithologist Nicholas Davies, working out the relationships among individual dunnocks (Prunella modularis), would have been powerless without the technique. And in evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), currently the hottest area of evolutionary research, how does one speak of genetic homologies between fruitflies and humans without talking about molecules?

Somehow, Fuller has been granted the status of an authority by Intelligent Design creationists. I don’t know how or why, but I hope they keep picking buffoons to represent their cause.

Ruse M (2008) A Challenge Standing on Shaky Clay. Science 322(5898):47-48.