Here’s the last part of my refutation (it’s a good thing midterms are over). This one will be shorter, since many of the points Stein tries to bring across are redundant. Here is Part I and Part II of my refutation.
1:00:52 - Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.
The Anti-Defamation League respectfully disagrees -
“The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.”
It’s sad that Stein resorts to Godwin’s Law to bring his points across. Persons of all walks of life supported the Nazi Regime because, like the fascist regime in Italy, it promised to get the economy back on track and the trains running on time. Genocide is not linked with atheism - in fact, the Bible details and supports the genocide of the Caananites in Deuteronomy of the Old Testament, and the arrogance and superiority complexes of many Christians played a major role in the near-genocide of the Native Americans. There have been so many genocides that have taken place since even before Darwin came up with his theory, and many of those have been committed by people claiming to be Christians as well as persons of other religions.
1:13:21 - Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.
James Watson is a racist, but one cannot discount his research on the double helix because he was, just as one cannot discount Martin Luther’s claims that the Catholic Church of the time needed to be reformed because he was an anti-Semite. That’s not to say that Darwin was even a eugenicist; Stein conveniently omits the next passage in the book (this taken from Expelled Exposed) -
“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.”
1:25:27 - Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…
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Here it is, Part II of my grand, time-wasting refutation. (Here’s Part I if you’re interested)
31:22 - A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.
That’s assuming that proteins have all-or-nothing function, which is COMPLETELY false. There are countless mutants of even just one protein and different mutants of different proteins have different catalytic efficiencies. Most mutations don’t even have an effect on fitness, and are silent due to the degeneracy of the genetic code (multiple codons encode for the same protein). And different cellular structures can be analogous but not homologous, meaning that they have different evolutionary bases but the same function, just as with the flagella of the archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes - demonstrating that there are multiple pathways to adaptations that essentially do the same thing.
Furthermore, the longer back a protein’s lineage is, the more conserved (unlikely to change over time) it is since said protein has undergone selective pressure and any new non-silent mutations would be even more likely to be catastrophic to function. This can lead to some very inefficient proteins, such as Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase (Rubisco), which has enzymatic activity of only 4 molecules per second (most enzymes have activities of hundreds or thousands per second) but is critical for the carbon fixation cycle. If everything were so intricate and intelligently designed, Rubisco would be far more efficient and not have to consist of 40% of total proteins in the cell NOR would it be sensitive to something as simple as oxygen.
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So somehow I made it my mission to refute every argument made by this piece of crap, per the notes I had taken down on my post “Liveblogging Expelled: NIA”. The horror!
00:42 - Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.
According to the Biological Society of Washington which had to bear the shame of that particular article being in their publication, Sternberg did not follow conventional procedure when deciding to publish the article, which was to have a board consisting of councilors, former and current presidents, and officers. But knowing that the Meyer article would not survive the rigors of peer review, Sternberg decided to personally fast-track the article to publication.
04:05 - Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDers are being persecuted.
I’ve already argued that Sternberg basically fell on his sword to look like a martyr.
05:11 - Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning - not promoting - intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.
Yes. She wasn’t promoting intelligent design. I’m sure some non-partisan independent source like… oh say the Washington Post will back her up…. right? The fact is that Crocker was pushing intelligent design in the classroom, and anything short of screaming at the top of your lungs “GOD DID IT” would be considered “neutral” in the eyes of Ben Stein.
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If you ever needed another case of an exemplar of the religious right engaging in depraved behavior that s/he has spent his/her life decrying and passing legislation against*, then look no further than GOP Congressman Vito Fossella of New York.
According to Ontheissues.org, Fossella is a “hard-core conservative” who voted for mandatory school prayer in public school, is a hard-liner on reproductive rights, and has the following ratings from the following advocacy groups:
Americans United For Separation of Church and State - 0%
Human Rights Campaign (Pro-LGBT) - 0%
NARAL Pro-Choice America - 0%
National Right to Life Committee (”Pro-Life”) - 82%
Christian Coalition (Pro-Theocracy) - 81%
But aside from Rush’s drug use or Larry Craig’s Minneapolis lavatory trysts, this story probably takes the cake. According to the New York Times, Fossella got drunk as hell at a local watering hole and got pulled over with a blood alcohol level of 0.17%, three times the legal limit.
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EDIT: It looks like Obama over performed in both North Carolina and Indiana by 10% over what most of the polls were claiming. All the pundits at this point say that the primary is basically over and that he won - so I was completely wrong about the first part.
Yes, ‘wrongness’ is an actual word; I looked it up. And unfortunately for the candidate who I hope to have the privilege to vote for in November, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Affair has again reared its ugly head and threatens Barack Obama’s chances of winning Indiana and even North Carolina in the primaries.
Granted, many of the comments were taken out of context, and I think that it is extremely important to have a long-overdue discussion about the many times the United States has committed wrong during its long history than the “we’re the best country in the world, cover your ears” crap that has become the mainstay of political commentary. On the other hand, Wright wasn’t very tactful in driving across any of his points, and other contentions such as “the government created AIDS to harm black people” simply have no basis and definitely are insulting.
It is clear that Reverend Wright’s radicalism stems mostly from his political rather than religious views; all his points are political and are not mired in the fundementalist rhetoric used by Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Unfortunately Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens took the bait and automatically attributed Reverend Wright’s political views as his religious views; in my opinion Jeremiah Wright would still hold such views regardless of his religion or even if he were a non-believer. But as I discuss below, religion may have played a role in his personal decision to come out last weekend and create even more controversy.
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Stay tuned for a comprehensive refutation (probably after midterms). Here is, minute by minute, basically all the arguments that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed makes. Please note that A) I’m simply stating what the movie is saying in the following in most of the entries, not that I actually believe this shit, and B) these are approximate times.
00:42 - Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.
04:05 - Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDer are being persecuted.
05:11 - Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning - not promoting - intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.
06:35 - Neurosurgeon Michael Egbert asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.
07:20 - Professor Marsh of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.
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