Notes from Evil Bender

Announcing the winner of the 2nd Phyllis Schlafly award: May 7, 2008

Posted by Evil Bender in Expelled Exposed, Morality, Origins, Phyllis Schlafly Wouldn't Pass Freshman Comp Awa, Science, Uncategorized, wingnuts.
8 comments

And the winner is Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly, who will soon be receiving an honorary degree from Washington University for her hatred of women hatred of gay people intolerance poor argumentation role in the conservative movement, is, as will likely come as a surprise to none of you, an ardent anti-science loon.

It seems Schlafly is eager to defend Ben “The holocaust is all Darwin’s fault” Stein and his crappy movie Expelled. Let’s see what Schlafly has to say:

Ben Stein is known to many as an actor on Comedy Central. But the funniest part about his recent movie “Expelled” is not any clever lines spoken by Stein but the hysterical way liberals are trying to discourage people from seeing it.

I won’t bother reminding Ms Schlafly that “hysterical” has its roots in misogyny, seeing as that seems to be her intention in using the word. This wouldn’t be the first time that Schlafly has attacked women for being women and liberals for being womanly. And it’s never going to be clear which liberals want people not to see Expelled. Scientists and science supporters are rightly pointing out all the lies and inaccuracies in the film, but if anyone seems hell-bent on keeping people away, it must be those mean “liberal” reviewers who seem to be anything but fond of the film.

Schlafly continues:

Stein’s critics fail to refute effectively anything in “Expelled”; they just use epithets to ridicule it and hope they can make it go away. However, it won’t go away; even Scientific American, which labeled the movie “shameful,” concedes that it cannot be ignored.

As was the case in the essay that caused this award to be named after Schlafly, she’s incapable of providing any evidence to support her claims. She doesn’t demonstrate–or even hint at–which arguments have gone unrefuted, but since the film’s two arguments are “ID is being discriminated against” and “Darwin caused the holocaust,” it’s safe to say that one need look no further than expelledexposed.com to see that Expelled has been thoroughly refuted.

The movie is about how scientists who dare to criticize Darwinism or discuss the contrary theory called intelligent design are expelled, fired, denied tenure, blacklisted and bitterly denounced. Academic freedom doesn’t extend to this issue.

The message of Stein’s critics comes through loud and clear. They don’t want anybody to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy or suggest that intelligent design might be an explanation of the origin of life.

We’re going to some throughly dishonest examples of this so-called mistreatment of ID proponents in this essay. If there is so much oppression of ID, one might wonder why ID proponents can’t find anything damning to put forward, and instead must lie and misrepresent facts to make their case.

And of course, the reason ID isn’t taken seriously is no Vast Darwinist Conspiracy, it’s that it isn’t science. It makes no meaningful predictions, it advances our knowledge not a bit. It is a science stopper, which proclaims loudly and repeatedly wherever there is an unanswered question “God did it!” But Schlafly doesn’t want us to notice that. She’s too busy making unsubstantiated claims about Liberal Oppression.

She continues:

Stein, who serves as his own narrator in the movie, is very deadpan about it all. He doesn’t try to convince the audience that Darwinism is a fraud, or that God created the world, or even that some unidentified intelligent design might have started life on Earth.

Stein merely shows the intolerance of the universities, the government, the courts, the grant-making foundations and the media, and their determination to suppress any mention of intelligent design.

Apparently Schlafly thinks there is a difference between “the government” and “the courts.” And I can’t help but find hilarious her treating all of these entities as a monolithic block determined to silence ID. As with every good conspiracy, most anyone is a part of it, and all groups are thought to operate in complete unity.

And apparently Schlafly is unaware of the irony in arguing that ID isn’t being treated fairly while admitting that Expelled doesn’t even attempt to demonstrate ID is a credible idea. You see, Ms Schlafly, in science and in the academy in general, ideas aren’t given credence just because they exist–they have to be supported. If ID actually made predictions, and if those predictions turned out to be useful and true (indeed, if ID was anything but a god-of-the-gaps argument), it would be welcomed by scientists in the same way other once-controversial ideas–like evolutionary theory–have been. But instead of actually doing the science, Stein and Schlafly want to run a PR campaign. And this explains exactly why they’re not taken seriously by mean old “liberal” scientists.

The only question posed by the movie is why, oh why, is there such a deliberate, consistent, widespread, vindictive effort to silence all criticism of dogmatic Darwinism or discussion of alternate theories of the origin of life? Stein interviews scientists who were blacklisted, denied grants and ostracized in the academic community because they dared to write or speak the forbidden words.

Notice that she’s still very vague. Now, she’s just recapping Stein, so some of that can be forgiven, but if she really wants us to believe there is a Vast Darwinist Conspiracy out there, she’s going to have to do better than this. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Liberals are particularly upset because the movie identifies Darwinism, rather than evolution, as the sacred word that must be isolated from criticism. But that semantic choice makes good sense because Darwinism is easily defined by Darwin’s own writings, whereas the word evolution is subject to different and even contrary definitions.

Since this is Schlafly, no definition of Darwinism, “easily defined” though it may be, is forthcoming. Neither is an example of the “different and even contrary definitions” or evolution. This defense of Expelled is laughable: Darwinism isn’t what is being taught, largely because Darwin didn’t know about such important things as genes. That’s why we have evolutionary theory, with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Someone with even cursory knowledge of the topic would know that, so it’s clear that Schlafly is less than credible here.

The truly funny part of the movie is Stein’s interview with Richard Dawkins, whose best-selling book “The God Delusion” (Mariner Books) established this Englishman as the world’s premier atheist. Dawkins is a leading advocate of the theory that all life evolved from a single beginning in an ancient mud puddle, perhaps after being struck by lightning.

Putting aside the issue of evolving, how did life begin in the first place? Under Stein’s questioning, Dawkins finally said it is possible that life might have evolved on Earth after the arrival of a more highly developed being from another planet.

Aren’t aliens from outer space the stuff of science fiction? And how was the other-planet alien created? According to Dawkins, life must have just spontaneously evolved on another planet, of course without God.

So after just saying this movie is about “Darwinism,” Schlafly has moved on to complaining about the origin of life, something that most certainly is not part of evolutionary theory or “Darwinism.” But by conflating the two, Schlafly ably demonstrates her own lack of knowledge on her subject matter.

Stein spent two years traveling the world to gather material for this movie. He interviewed scores of scientists and academics who say they were retaliated against because of questioning Darwin’s theories.

Stein interviewed Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist who lost his position at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution after he published a peer-reviewed article that mentioned intelligent design. Other academics who said they were victims of the anti-intelligent design campus police included astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, denied tenure at Iowa State University, and Caroline Crocker, who lost her professorship at George Mason University.

This would be very damning if it were true, but Sternberg never worked for the Smithsonian and didn’t lose his position there; Gonzalez was denied tenure not because he liked ID but because of serious problems with his time at Iowa State, including a lack of publications, grant money, and grad student work; and Crocker was not fired, though her contract was not renewed–something that is common with non-tenure track positions such as the one she held.

Simply put, none of these people were fired or oppressed due to their support of ID. Sternberg faced nothing harsher than criticism for sneaking an insufficiently-vetted paper into a journal, Gonzalez simply didn’t live up to the scholarly demands of his department, and Crocker was not fired. Hardly a Vast Darwinist Conspiracy after all.

But, undaunted by the facts, Schlafly presses on:

Stein dares to include some filming at the death camps in Nazi Germany as a backdrop for interviews that explain Darwin’s considerable influence on Adolf Hitler and his well-known atrocities. The Darwin-Hitler connection was not a Stein discovery; Darwin’s influence on Hitler’s political worldview, and Hitler’s rejection of the sacredness of human life, is acknowledged in standard biographies of Hitler.

Naturally, she provides no examples or support for her claim. But it turns out that Darwin wasn’t a “considerable influence” on Hitler, and that Hitler used a jumble of whatever he could find–often radically misused–to justify his evil. He relied heavily upon Christian doctrine and anti-semitism that traced back to Martin Luther and beyond; blaming Darwin for the holocaust makes no more sense than blaming the Apostle Paul.

Stein also addresses how Darwin’s theories influenced one of the U.S.’s most embarrassing periods, the eugenics fad of the early 20th century. Thousands of Americans were legally sterilized as physically or mentally unfit.

“Embarrassing” is certainly an understated word choice for Schlafly, especially given the criticism above. The tragedy of such policies were well-known, and they relied not on Darwin, but on a radical misuse of his work: social Darwinism, a theory which Darwin’s writings show he would have found represensible.

And, of course, none of these criticisms mean a thing anyway. They’re not true, but even if they were, they would not demonstrate any flaw in evolutionary theory, any more than relativity is to blame for Truman using the Bomb.

Mandatory sterilization based on Darwin’s theories was even approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing his famous line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Stein also reminds us that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who wanted to eliminate the races she believed were inferior.

Oh! A non sequitor and a shot at Planned Parenthood. How deeply relevant. Schlafly is merely demonstrating that she doesn’t really want to get at the facts–she just wants to preach to the choir. Her readers hate Planned Parenthood, and so won’t stop to question what Sanger has to do with “Darwinism.”

Stein’s message is that the attack on freedom of inquiry is anti-science, anti-American and anti-the whole concept of learning. His dramatization should force the public, and maybe even academia, to address this extraordinary intolerance of diversity.

Given that Schlafly’s lies and distortions continue her routine attacks on education, science and rationality, this claim is ironic in the extreme. And for someone who is so routinely intolerant as Schlafly to make such a claim is nothing short of hilarious.

Diversity is not threatened when ID is correctly identified as “not science.” There is no Vast Darwinist Conspiracy to silence ID, and neither Schlafly or Stein have provided a single credible reason to believe otherwise. What they have done is defend ignorance by assaulting knowledge, and defend pseudo-science by calling it fact. Schlafly lacks evidence, lies, and misrepresents with almost every word she writes. And for this meaningless and dishonest string of distortions, she wins the 2nd Phyllis Schlafly Wouldn’t Pass Freshmen Composition Award.