Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists

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!

Here is Part II and Part III of my grand exercise in poor time management.

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.

“[…] this highly trained biologist wanted students to know what she herself deeply believed: that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science.”

She even resorts to Godwin’s Rule during the very lecture TO HER STUDENTS. No wonder she was disciplined; This was indoctrination and even if she wasn’t playing the victim card and crying “persecution!”, George Mason was completely justified in what it was doing. -

“The students sat stunned. But Crocker was not done. From this ill-conceived theory, she concluded, much harm had arisen. Nazi Germany had taken Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, the credo that only the fittest survive, and followed it to its extreme conclusions — anti-Semitism, eugenics and death camps. ‘What happened in Germany in World War II was based on science, that some genes and some people should be killed,’ Crocker said quietly. ‘My grandfather had a genetic problem and was put in the hospital and killed.’”

06:35 - Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

Right. The study of evolutionary biology in doctorates varies… and within that range is little or none at all. In any case, we’ve already shown in the case of Richard Sternberg how IDers love to play the victim card… and since Egnor still retains his post and cannot substantiate any of his claims, he’s probably just pissed off at a few bloggers.

07:20 - Professor Marks of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

First of all, Marks is a professor of electrical engineering, not evolutionary biology - just to make things clear. And Baylor University did offer to keep the site hosted on the university as long as Marks changed the title from “Evolutionary Informatics Lab” to something less deceiving and if he disassociated the site from being affiliated with the university; even this evangelical magazine lauded Baylor’s compromise. But Marks, determined to be a martyr, refused, and the site is now hosted on non-university servers.

08:53 - Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” - no pun intended.

[If there are any astronomy majors who would like to add to this, please e-mail me at robinrzhang@gmail.com - you can probably refute this better than I can]

“By assessing the elements that compose our planet, they argue, we can tell that it was designed for multicellular organic life. The presence of carbon, oxygen and water in the right proportions makes it possible for organic life to exist; and this combination of minerals and chemical elements exists only on Earth. […] our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery.”

So not only organisms now, but the Earth itself? So no chance through naturalistic properties a planet in the Goldilocks Zone and of the right size could have formed in the Sun’s accretion disc? And I suppose that stars are incapable of generating heavier elements that are later expelled via a supernova or that the proportion of chemical elements can change on this planet or on other planets has changed over these billions of years to one of more or less accommodation towards multicellular life? This guy deserves to get laughed out of the scientific community, not just potentially reprimanded.

By the way, there is a video version of The Privileged Planet on Google Video narrated by none other than John Rhys-Davies, AKA Gimli and Treebeard of Lord of the Rings. And just when I thought I couldn’t lose any more respected for him after his appearance in the Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie “Chupacabra: Dark Seas” -

Yes, it’s El Chupacabra. On a fucking cruise liner. It’s that bad.

15:02 - Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator.

I suppose posting the image of your organization’s former logo won’t exactly help -

20:17 - As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

On the contrary, Classical Darwinism was based on very flawed Lamarckian principles that basically assert that if a physical adaptation confers an advantage, an organism’s offspring will have that adaptation enlarged or lengthened. This of course is ridiculous and was supplanted as the “engine” of natural selection by genetic mutations caused by environmental hazards and errors by the cell’s DNA polymerases. This mechanism is far more plausible than Lamarck’s, and only serves to strengthen the Theory of Evolution.

21:50 - Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

That’s like saying that we should give the flat-earth “theory” equal time too… because the round-earthers have been monopolizing the science world, you know.

22:54 - Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

I wonder which group is going “hm, this looks too complex to undergo gradual genetic mutations, so I’m not going to attempt to try to find out how” and ignoring the scientific method.

25:15 - Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

There have been debates over the definition of species that lie well outside the realm of Darwinism; in fact, there are at least ELEVEN different ways to define and differentiate a species, and evolution directly involves only one of them. A straw-man argument… although this vagueness can allow for inter-species breeding can be a huge source of genetic variation which only works more to the detriment of ID/Creationism.

27:04 - Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

A low-blow character attack that I wouldn’t put past this movie - not to mention that Darwin observed finches and not humans. No matter Darwin’s supposed arrogance, scientists are allowed to make bold hypotheses IF they are grounded in reality, but the latter element would be missing from the Creationist’s mind.

28:13 - Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

Nonspontaneous, or thermodynamically unfavorable reactions such as the formation of the various compounds in the Miller-Urey Experiment (see below) NEED energy to work. Lightning is a perfectly good source, and Stein’s incredulousness stems from his own ignorance.

28:45 - The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

A visual representation of the Miller-Urey Experiment

This is such a common straw man argument used by many IDers/Creationists. The objective of the Miller-Urey Experiment was NOT to create life, but to see if a simulation of Earth’s early atmosphere consisting of simply inorganic compounds along with an energy source (lightning) could generate organic compounds. It was NOT a failure, and in fact after just one week, amino acids along with sugars, lipids, and nucleic acid precursors formed. It is impossible to have this happen in today’s atmosphere because oxygen turns the atmosphere from neutral to reducing - of course, oxygen was nonexistent due to the lack of photosynthetic organisms on the early Earth.

The many simple organic molecules formed by the Miller-Urey Experiment in just a week

29:35 - Ben Stein mocks Michael Ruse’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).

First of all, Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science, not a scientist. To imply that he is some sort of paragon of the Darwinist research scientist who is always up-to-date and completely knowledgeable about evolution, as Ben Stein strongly implies, is both disingenuous and intellectually lazy. But back to the argument - at first it looks inane and I admit I was bemused by his claims of “evolution jumpstarting on the backs of crystals”. However, while Ruse described his claim inartfully and the film probably took him out of context, he does actually make a valid point.

According to this article, reordering of liquid crystals into different mesophases can induce changes in embryonic development. Some biologists have even proposed that the protoplasm and contained mesophiles are the base determiner for metabolic activity while others have argued that a living system is simply a collection of mesophiles wrapped around by a membrane. If this is what Michael Ruse was referring to, the aforementioned evidence shown by various researchers and the implications it has on genetics possibly on a molecular level makes his claim much more auditable than “Ok, God did it”.