Lying by press release

The producers of Expelled have spent a couple of days sweating over damage control, I guess. They’ve shut down or delayed all the pending screenings of their movie, and now they’ve issued a remarkably dishonest press release. The mendacity is astonishing in its scope; somebody tell me, is this “framing”?

Something amazing happened yesterday. The controversy around Premise Media’s upcoming movie Ben Stein’s EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed became the hottest topic in the blogosphere. According to BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, the issue held the number one slot throughout the day on Monday, March 24th (http://www.blogpulse.com). There were also over 800 results on Technorati (www.technorati.com).

Well, yes, it was HUGE. I know, because I was the recipient of much of the buzz. Most of those links were not congratulating Expelled on their success, they were laughing at their hypocrisy and incompetence, they were linking to me, and they were spreading the news that this was a creationist propaganda film run by particularly clumsy ideologues. It was a hot topic, all right.

Mathis continued, “I hope PZ’s experience has helped him see the light. He is distraught because he could not see a movie. What if he wasn’t allowed to teach on a college campus or was denied tenure? Maybe he will think twice before he starts demanding more professors be blacklisted and expelled simply because they question the adequacy of Darwin’s theory.”

I wasn’t distraught. At worst, I felt a little guilty that I’d escaped a bad movie while my friends and family were stuck with watching it.

I haven’t demanded expulsions or blacklists — I will proudly continue to demand competence. Unlike watching a movie, being awarded a professorship should require some substantial understanding of a discipline; does Mathis really think that the position of teacher and researcher ought to be simply handed to people for showing up, no matter what their qualifications?

They were also aware that Dawkins, who oddly used his formal surname “Clinton” instead of Richard to sign up, was in attendance.

No, this is not at all true. Richard Dawkins was in attendance as my unnamed guest; the reservation form had asked for my name and affiliation, and only asked how many (up to three) guests I would be bringing with me. There was no public announcement anywhere that he would be attending. Also, although he was prepared to show his passport, he wasn’t asked for it at the door.

Also, what kind of illiterate is writing this press release? Dawkins surname is Dawkins. Slow down, bozos, you’re in such a frantic hurry you haven’t even bothered to proofread.

Recognizing the opportunity to make a point of the inconvenience and pain that they, and others like them, have caused to numerous scientists and educators, the decision was made beforehand to deny Myers access to the film if he actually showed up.

Yet another revision of their story…if this were true, why not ban every evolutionary biologist? Their rationale applies just as well to Dawkins as it does to me. Also note that Mathis previously admitted to banning me on a whim: “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.“

Someday, they’ll settle on one story, but it won’t matter — they’ve left too long a trail of revisionist excuse-making.

Executive Producer Logan Craft noted: “EXPELLED makes it clear that academic freedom is at stake. Yet Dawkins and his friends continue to misrepresent the film and slander the producers. It is obvious that they do not want to debate the real issues raised in the movie.”

What misrepresentations? It’s a movie that blames the Holocaust on Darwin — it’s stupid and foolish. How have the producers been slandered? They’re the ones lying at every step. This is their movie, in one perfect picture:

i-ee7412e8c3bc0ee55fee62c865025b5b-buckled.jpg

Myers has apparently been asking supporters to sneak into the different private screenings for many weeks. After being denied his chance to see the movie, Myers blogged about his experience and expressed his outrage.

Errm, what? I haven’t asked anyone to sneak into screenings. I haven’t even asked them to sign up for them, as I did. This claim is as complete a fabrication as anything else in this press release.

As for “expressing [my] outrage”, that’s absurd. I laughed and laughed, and had trouble maintaining my normally sober decorum in a public place as I left the theater. Outrage? Judge for yourself.

The only other thing remarkable about their collection of lies is how desperate they sound — you can practically smell the flop sweat.

But aren’t beards dashing and romantic?

What is it with this anti-beard sentiment? Here’s an article that wonders why so many scientists have beards, with several amusing stories.

But anti-beard arguments also ran rife in pre-Victorian times: Beards trapped food and the stuff you spewed out when you sneezed. At a stretch, they could even go as far as to catch fire and trap vermin, some argued. This all came to a head in 1907, with a rather remarkable experiment. A French scientist took one bearded and one clean shaven man from the streets of Paris and asked each of them to kiss a woman, whose lips were previously swabbed with antiseptic. After each smooth, her lips were swabbed and the the cultures were smeared on agar. The hairy kiss, it turned out, was by far the more microbial-ly diverse.

That anecdote answers the question right there. Overgrown nerds experience very little risk of ever having to kiss French women on the streets of Paris, so there is very little selection against beard growth. Hey, if I had some likelihood of sweeping strange women into my arms, I might shave, too … and brush my teeth more than once a week, and take a shower more often than once a month, habits atypical of us hairy, dirty, microbe-rich men.

(via Pure Pedantry)

Look up!

What an honor: Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and discoverer of asteroids, has been generous to name a recently discovered set of distant rocks after Michael Stackpole, Rebecca Watson, Phil Plait, and me. That’s right, there is now a few billion tons of rock and metal spinning overhead with my name on it, asteroid 153298 Paulmyers. You can find a picture of its orbit and location, just in case you want to visit.

Now I don’t know much about astronomy — I know this rock doesn’t have any squid on it, unfortunately, and that it’s small, cold, and remote (hey, just like where I am now! Only more so!) — but Phil Plait describes the details of his asteroid.

To give you an idea of the asteroid’s size, it has more than 200 times the volume of Hoover Dam. Assuming that it’s made of rock, it has a mass of about 2 quadrillion grams, or about 2 billion tons. If it’s metal it’ll be about twice that massive.

When I mentioned this to Skatje, the first thing she asked was whether mine was bigger than Phil’s. Phil admits that it probably is twice the size, although it’s an estimate from relative brightness, so it could be that they’re of similar size, but mine is brighter, or Phil’s is dimmer … it’s all good. The rivalry continues!

Now I have to wonder…do I have mineral rights? Can I at least retire to 153298 Paulmyers? When’s the next space bus to the asteroid belt? How about some photos of my rock (near as I can tell, any photo is going to be just of a tiny point of reflected light)?

300 million dead

Last night, I attended a talk by Sherman Alexie, who was hilarious and at times, biting. One of the curious things he noted, though, was that he had said something about the disastrous conduct of the wasteful war in Iraq, and despite this being an audience of collegiate liberals, no one applauded. He noted that this is his common experience — it used to be that voicing your objections to an unjust war got clapped, but nowadays, it’s old hat. Even people who once supported the war are backing away from it (although it’s rare for them to plainly say “I was wrong”), and the futility of the war has simply lapsed into the status of a given. It has become the background noise of our country. Protest has been ground out of us by the dreary dun of corruption and destruction and the unresponsiveness of our government — we are in a democracy with a large majority opposed to the war, to no effect and with no expectation that our representatives will actually act to end the killing.

So now we have reached the nice round milestone of 4,000 dead in Iraq. 4000 dead American soldiers, that is; it’s almost as if the two orders of magnitude greater number of slaughtered Iraqis, the millions of refugees, the destruction of an entire country, simply don’t matter and don’t count. Americans find it hard to gather outrage over thousands of our own dead, and tens of thousands wounded, and they sure as hell aren’t going to get stirred up over hundreds of thousands of dead foreigners.

I don’t get it.

As a nation, we stand atop a pedestal of bones and ruined lives. The disruption of families is ongoing, and our honor has been thrown away by the greed and ignorance of our leaders. And yet we carry on as if nothing is happening, nothing is wrong, no action need be taken. We will have an election, and one of the candidates stands for amplifying our involvement in this evil chaos … and he stands a chance of winning. The monsters who have perpetrated this crime will walk away to fat retirement checks and lives of wealth in the service of bloated corporate sponsors, and they will not pay — you will.

We all have blood on our hands, and no one cares.

Once, four dead in Ohio could stir us. Now, four thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, it doesn’t matter … we have all become dead inside.

Another Expelled roundup

The volume of email coming into my mailbox is a bit overwhelming right now — that silly story about getting expelled from Expelled was funny enough that it got picked up all over the world, an opportunity that you’d think some communications experts would use advantageously … but that’s another argument. There has been an uptick in nasty “I-will-pray-for-you-and-laugh-when-you-roast-in-hell” messages, but the majority have been positive, with a lot saying they like the site and are going to be return readers. This is not going to be an all-Expelled-all-the-time blog, however, despite the fact that right now most of my non-spam email seems to be about Expelled. Here, then, in one place, are some of the more interesting recent articles I’ve been sent about the fiasco, and then we’ll move on for the rest of the day.

  • Amanda Gefter got into a screening and reinforces our opinions: it’s a poorly made movie that clumsily tries to associate evolution with Hitler, and that the producer, Mark Mathis, is a bullying control freak. She also makes an excellent point: the Intelligent Design movement has been desperate to publicly distance itself from religion, yet this movie argues that ID is religious.

  • Scott Hatfield digs into the background of the Expelled team. It’s nutty fundagelical Christian kooks all the way down, with not an iota of science expertise among them. I know. That is so surprising.

  • Speaking of a complete absence of knowledge…ah, Uncommon Descent. UD has been having so much fun with this story, especially since one of our local sciencebloggers gave them some useful apologetics. Unfortunately for them, if you read the succession of accounts they give — and do note, none of these people were there — they are mutually contradictory and completely divorced from the facts. Trust me, their kind of sloppy, speculative, and false approach to a recent incident accurately parallels their explanations of life’s origins, too.

Oh. My. Dog.

I just got word that that pompous pimple, David Berlinski, is going to be at the Maclaurin Institute on the University of Minnesota campus on 17 April. Fortunately for me, I just this morning agreed to do an interview on Second Life on that date, so I have an excuse to avoid the supercilious snot. You might want to quickly find some reason to skip the event — is that your evening to wash your hair? Or take the dog for walkies (it might be worth it to get a dog for just that reason) — because there is no one else affiliated with the Discovery Institute more likely to infuriate you with his self-satisfied dimness.

Clueless

Matt Nisbet is currently running a photo of Dawkins and myself with this legend: Dawkins and Myers: It’s Time to Let Others Be the Spokespeople for Science. Never mind the personal criticism, doesn’t he even realize how wrong that statement is? No, it’s worse than that; it’s so bad it’s not even wrong.

Who are the “spokespeople for science”? Is this a formal title conferred on specific individuals, is there a protocol for defining who gets the job, and most importantly, is there a salary? Nisbet doesn’t seem to realize that there are no spokespeople for science — there are just people involved in science who speak out; I don’t know of anyone who even declares themselves to be self-appointed spokespeople for science, especially not me, and not even more prominent representatives like Dawkins. Anyone who mistakes me for one of these mythical spokespeople for science, instead of a guy working within science who happens to have a blog, is too stupid to be taken seriously.

There’s also this bizarre implication that it’s a position someone lets someone else have, as if Nisbet just has to follow some esoteric parliamentary rules of order and presto, someone can be defrocked of their spokesperson’s robes and they can be conferred on someone else. Preferably Nisbet himself, apparently. There is no such process and no such power. All anyone can do is write and talk, and if people listen to them, fine, if they don’t, no problem. There is no autocracy or hierarchy that defines who can do what in this business. All I’m doing is writing, so all he can do is carp at me to shut up…ineffectively, alas.

That statement alone is sufficient to demonstrate that Nisbet is utterly clueless about science, and discredit his opinions completely. And this is the fellow who organizes AAAS symposia to tell us what to do? Weird.

Besides, everyone knows that I’m not the spokesperson for science. I’m the Elvis Presley of atheism. Let’s get the royal titles straight.

Miseducation by the creationists

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)

Return of the Manimal

Britain is experiencing some dissent over research on human-animal hybrid embryos. One the one hand, you’ve got researchers and charities arguing that this is a technique to probe deeper into the genetic and molecular properties of developing organisms, and is key to developing treatments for genetic diseases and developmental abnormalities; on the other side, we have plaintive lowing from the do-nothings and ignoramuses about the “sacredness” of human life, and kneejerk rejection by the usual collection of suspects, the Catholic church.

In his Easter address today, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, will describe plans to allow hybrid human-animal embryos as “monstrous”.

I addressed this a couple of years ago when Bush wanted to ban this kind of research (by the way, we aren’t ahead of the Brits in this game; they’re at least discussing this, while our government has mostly acted to shut this work down, leaving little to argue over). This is not a science-fiction project to create half-human slave labor or anything silly like that — it is serious research in early development that puts human disease-related forms of genes into animal models so that we can try experimental treatments. “Monstrous” would be taking risks or doing experiments on Down syndrome children; humane would be inducing an analog of Down syndrome in mice so that we can figure out causes and treatments of health problems in an informed way. I would also put using ignorance and medieval dogma to prevent biomedical research in the “monstrous” category, but then, I put just about everything about the Catholic church in that bin.

Just so everyone knows precisely where I’m coming from, though, in addition to appreciating the practical value of hybrid research for alleviating human suffering, I also think all forms of reproductive biotechnology are just plain cool. Some people think the next revolution in humanity will be an outcome of advances in neuroscience and technology (the geek rapture), but I’m inclined to think that the most significant changes in how we think about who we are are going to arise from radical reproductive technologies.