Expelled, part II

I guess now it's time to review the rest of the movie Expelled. Plenty has been said before about its tactics. It is a propaganda piece, so one sided that only the truly committed would be swayed. I probably have never seen a documentary before for which I had so much knowledge about the details, so I could see exactly what lies or deceptions were occurring and how I was being manipulated at each step. I tried to keep mental notes, but there is no way to remember all of the distortions.

The most annoying tactic throughout the movie was the constant cuts to black and white footage, usually for an attempt at comic effect. It was often material from the 50s of square looking people, expressing the emotions you are supposed to feel. At first it wasn't that big of a deal, but by the end I was dreading each and every black and white clip. When PZ Myers compares religion to knitting, they cut to a woman knitting, for what reason I can't fathom. The cuts were endless and always meant to mock or induce emotion, never to make an actual point.

There are three parts to the movie. In the first part, they trot out examples of academics who have supposedly been oppressed by the "Darwinian establishment." These cases have been thoroughly refuted and documented at Expelled Exposed and other places, so I won't belabor it here. It is still astonishing to see the way they lie. Richard Sternberg is their biggest case. They claim he was fired for allowing an ID paper to be published. In fact, he never had a job at the Smithsonian, just an unpaid position, which he kept and still has if he wants it. At one point, Sternberg points to the Smithsonian and says "that's where my office used to be". The viewer would assume he was kicked out of that office. Sternberg doesn't point to the window of his new office, which he was moved to when 20 people were assigned new offices as part of an institution wide reassignment. Sternberg's indignant martyr act was played too strongly and he got cloying.

As I was watching this part, all I could think of is the many examples in which evolution has been attacked and the attackers made into heroes. Lynn Marguilus and the endosymbiont hypothesis was resisted, but she did the work, she was right, and she is a member of NAS. I think many of her views are actually on the lunatic fringe, and plenty of people will say that, yet for the part she got right, she is brilliant. Kimura suggested most change is neutral, not the result of selection and overthrew the establishment. Eldridge and Gould and Gould and Lewontin proposed puncuated equilibrium and attacked adaptationists. The acrimony over sociobiology in the 70s would make the polite way that Sternberg or Gonzalez were treated seem like child's play. But Gould or EO Wilson are still heroes.

The only difference between them and ID is that they did the work. They published, even when the establishment was against them. They argued with data, and against real theories, not strawmen. It also helps that they might have been right. The fact is, ID is wrong. It has been well-considered by the establishment. Most of its arguments are 100 years old and were rejected a century ago, yet the arguments are still dealt with freshly and patiently in dozens of books. For all of this, the only real persecution that the proponents actually suffered is they were told they are fools or wrong. Does academic freedom mean we are not allowed to criticize others and every idea deserves respect? If you can't handle criticism, you have no business in science.

The target audience of this film doesn't understand the status of evolution, and they certainly won't learn it from this movie. It is as well established as the atomic theory. Imagine if people were trying to teach that the atomic theory was wrong in chemistry classes. Would we be suppressing academic freedom by failing to renew their contracts, or would we simply be enforcing reasonable academic standards? If one of my colleagues was teaching that germs don't cause disease, I would want them out of the classroom, not because I want to suppress their freedom, but because we need a minimal level of competence.

I know it seems rude or arrogant to say that ID is the same as teaching a flat earth, but that is the reality, and that is the amount of respect it deserves. Yet for all of that, if they do the work, it will be published. They will take the mantle of martyr and say they can't publish because they are discriminated against, rather than because they have nothing worth publishing. However, the Templeton foundation, with its millions of dollars that it was willing to throw at ID, could not find anyone with a research program worth funding. Templeton is a religious foundation, sympathetic to finding God in science. They no longer are interested in ID, not because or bias, but because they saw that ID is empty.

This is long enough. I will cover the other two parts of the film later.