Wow. How much commentary does one need? We knew it would happen eventually, and it did… Rush has weighed in on Expelled and evolution. To see how Limbaugh misquotes “Hawkins,” read this transcript. And here, he fans the flames with his assessment that Stein theorizes in the movie about “Darwinism that led to Hitler and his Holocaust of the Jews.”
In other news, the other day I ran across a blogger’s idea to purchase “Truth Tickets” to offset boxoffice income from Expelled. The idea is to generate donations to the National Center for Science Education in an equal amount to ticket sales for the movie — sort of beefing up one warchest in opposition to the other. Since the idea didn’t actually originate with the NCSE, I decided to just sit on the idea for a few days to see if it would actually gain traction… and it has.
Here’s the original post at The Atheist Ethicist; here’s his follow-up, and here are links to Lippard’s blog, Panda’s Thumb, and Pharyngula, which have now all jumped on board.
And here’s a link to the NCSE site.
For those who don’t know, the NCSE is a partisan advocacy group, whose goal is not to promote good science in general, but which specifically “defends the teaching of evolution in public schools. We are a nationally-recognized clearinghouse for information and advice to keep evolution in the science classroom and ’scientific creationism’ out.”
So be aware of the biases involved with both the movie and the NCSE and spend your dollars in an educated fashion.
April 9th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
I’m not sure “partisan” is the right word for NCSE: biased is probably good enough: they have a particular mission (to promote good science in the specific area of biology), but they aren’t partisan in the sense of Democratic/Republican. And many of their members are explicitly religious.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Yes — that’s a good point. I didn’t mean politically partisan.
But the site itself doesn’t say its mission is to “promote good science” — it says its mission is to “defend the teaching of evolution in public schools.”
That’s a much narrower mission — which is fine. They’re very up front about it, though I think “National Center for Evolution Education” would be a much more accurate name. The name and the mission feel a little bait-and-switchy.
April 9th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Greg, evolution *is* good science. You can’t fault the NCSE for not considering “scientific creationism” and its various descendants as good science, because it clearly isn’t.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Of course it’s good science. I didn’t say it wasn’t. I was just pointing out that the NCSE isn’t devoted to a defense of ALL good science — just evolution.
Do I have something wrong?
April 9th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Greg wrote:
“Of course it?s good science.”
Is ID good science? Is it science at all, or just rhetoric?
“I was just pointing out that the NCSE isn?t devoted to a defense of ALL good science ? just evolution.”
Is there any area of science that is under a similar attack from pseudoscientists? There are some, I’m just trying to see if you understand this in any depth.
Also, did you notice that you implicitly adopted the film’s attempt to pretend that evolution = Darwin, which they used to pretend that when Hitler was talking about evolution in any way, he was referring to Darwin?
Evolution is an observable fact, not a science. The science is about the mechanisms underlying it. That’s why real scientists talk about evolutionARY theory. The theories are about mechanisms.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Greg: Of course it’s good science. I didn’t say it wasn’t. I was just pointing out that the NCSE isn’t devoted to a defense of ALL good science — just evolution.
Do I have something wrong?
****
Fortunately, other scientific disciplines don’t seem to be under attack in the classrooms from religiously motivated pseudoscience. There’s plenty of pseudoscience around, but I don’t see advocates of homeopathy or astrology trying to push their doctrines into the classroom through schoolboards or courtrooms. If they were, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the NCSE dabbling in those issues as well. I see your point about the name possibly being misleading, but when you consider the Evolution-ID controvery has larger implications for science education, it perhaps isn’t.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Regarding I.D. — if it were widely accepted by the scientific community, I would pretty much take it for granted that it was, in fact, good science. That’s about the only way I’d have to assess that question, just as I do the question of evolution (and I’ll stick with the vernacular, John, if that’s okay with you, since this is a pop culture site and not a scientific journal).
As to whether I.D. is bad science — I wholly leave that question to others to address. I certainly didn’t feel that the movie made any strong case about science one way or the other (and even if it did, I’d probably miss it).
I also couldn’t possibly address what’s up with other scientific disciples.
What I do know is what the NCSE site itself says, right there on the front page. That’s all.
I do imagine that they’d expand their mission statement if they found it warranted.