Watch this appalling video of homeschoolers misusing the Denver museum to promote creationism. Aside from the general pattern of lies from the tour guides, two things jumped out at me.

The really awful pedagogy. Over and over again, the creationist says some stock phrase and then pauses, waiting for his kids to fill in the missing word. This is simply demanding rote learning. Similarly, he leads the kids in asking a good question — “how do you know?” — while training them to ignore any answers. Right there on the wall is a description of radiometric dating methods, for instance, and they turn their back on it.

Then there is the twisted logic. T. rex has big sharp teeth; they know, though, that he was a vegetarian, because “if this creature was designed to eat meat from the very start, what would he have to do until Adam and Eve sinned, and death entered the world? What would he have to do? Fast and pray for the Fall.” Oh, and of course, he then says, “Is that likely? Everyone look at me and say…<pause>no. Try that with me…no.”

This is child abuse. Those kids are getting their heads stuffed with ignorance.

At least this news report is unsympathetic.

(via Sandwalk)

My account of the affair at the Mall of America has been confirmed by none other than the movie producer, who wrote to Denyse O’Leary:

You should know that I invited Michael shermer to a screening at NRB in Nashville. He came and is writing a review for scientific American. I banned pz because I want him to pay to see it. Nothing more.

This is what I’ve been saying all along; I was not “unruly”, nor was I “gatecrashing”; Mathis saw me there, and on a petty, arbitrary, vindictive whim decided to have me thrown out without legitimate cause. It really is that simple. That is how creationists operate.

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Hey, now Mathis repeats the same thing in IHE.

Mathis later confirmed in an e-mail that he had barred Myers from the screening. “Yes, I turned Mr. Myers away. He was not an invited guest of Premise Media. This was a private screening of an unfinished film. I could have let him in, just as I invited Michael Shermer to a screening in Nashville. Shermer is in the film as well. But, in light of Myers’ untruthful blogging about Expelled I decided it was better to have him wait until April 18 and pay to see the film. Others, notable others, were permitted to see the film. At a private screening it’s my call.

“Unlike the Darwinist establishment, we expell no one.”

Unless it’s someone they don’t like.

(The IHE article isn’t very good — it’s the usual media mush that runs away from the idea of actually calling idiocy idiocy.)

I was wrong — it’s not the Harvard multimedia video. It’s an independently generated copy. I grabbed a few images from the DVD I got at my truncated visit to the Expelled screening, and here, for instance, is the segment that shows that striking kinesin motor protein towing a vesicle down a microtubule. This is the version in the Expelled movie:

Now here’s an equivalent frame from the actual Harvard video.

Now I’m embarrassed to have mistaken one for the other, since the Expelled version is of much lower resolution and quality. However, do notice that they both have roughly the same layout and the same elements in view; this is a remarkable, umm, coincidence, since these are highly edited, selected renderings, with many molecules omitted … and curiously, they’ve both left out the same things.

Another curious coincidence: you’ve heard of the concept of plagiarized errors, the idea that the real tell-tale of a copy is when it’s the mistakes that are duplicated, in addition to the accuracies. In this case, I previously criticized the Harvard video for a shortcut. That kinesin molecule is illustrated showing a stately march, step by step, straight down the microtubule. Observations of kinesin show it’s more complex, jittering back and forth and advancing stochastically. That’s a simplification in the Harvard video that is also present in Expelled‘s version.

It’s clear that what they did was brainlessly copy what they saw in the original. I don’t know whether this is actionable anymore — that they slapped together a look-alike video to cover their butts makes the issue much more complicated.

Hmmm. I should have thought the powerful voices of communications experts shrieking at Richard Dawkins to hide under his bed would have had some effect, but no…he’s gone ahead and written his review of Expelled. And lo, in the camp of the Framers, there was much wailing and weeping and grinding of teeth, and rending of garments, and epic despair, because surely this will cause the destruction of Science.