Oh the irony… this is all over teh Interwebs now, so who am I to avoid jumping on the bandwagon?
PZ Myers was expelled from a screening of the Creationist propaganda movie Expelled. Some background: some time ago, Myers, Richard Dawkins and a number of other high-profile scientists were interviewed for a movie due to be called Crossroads. The movie, so it was claimed, was supposed to explain some of the principles of evolutionary biology. Alas, it seems to have been a ruse, because Crossroads turned into an anti-evolution polemic. Hardly the first time that Creationists have misrepresented themselves when filming scientists.
After Myers booked tickets for the screening — under his own name, via their web interface, just like all the other viewers — he was threatened with arrest and tossed out. And this is despite Myers being thanked profusely in the movie credits for his assistance!
Amusingly, the film-makers didn’t notice Richard Dawkins, who has written more about the incident and the movie itself:
Now, to the Good Friday Fiasco itself, Mathis’ extraordinary and costly lapse of judgment. Just think about it. His entire film is devoted to the notion that American scientists are being hounded and expelled from their jobs because of opinions that they hold. The film works hard at pressing (no, belabouring with a sledgehammer) all the favourite hot buttons of free speech, freedom of thought, the right of dissent, the right to be heard, the right to discuss issues rather than suppress argument. These are the topics that the film sets out to raise, with particular reference to evolution and ‘intelligent design’ (wittily described by someone as creationism in a cheap tuxedo). In the course of this film, Mathis tricked a number of scientists, including PZ Myers and me, into taking prominent parts in the film, and both of us are handsomely thanked in the closing credits.
Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn’t immediately leave the premises. [...]
More sinister than the artless Lord Privy Seals, and the self-indulgent and wholly illicit playing of the Nazi trump card, the film goes shamelessly for cheap laughs at the expense of scientists and scholars who are making honest attempts to explain difficult points. Cheap laughs that could only be raised in an audience of scientific ignoramuses (and here Mathis’ propaganda instincts cannot be faulted: he certainly knows his target audience). One example is the treatment of the philosopher Michael Ruse[...]
Asked to explain the origin of life, Ruse acknowledged that it was a difficult question, one that modern science has barely scratched the surface of, but suggested that a possible candidate might be something like the theory of Graham Cairns-Smith that modern organic life bootstrapped itself from replicating crystals on the surface of inorganic clays. Even if Cairns-Smith’s theory is wrong in detail — and it would be amazing if it were not — it demonstrates the critical properties of any successful theory for the origin of life: it must show how complex, complicated organic molecules can evolve from simple, robust, common inorganic molecules.
Dawkins continues:
Stein just loved it. Mud! MUD! The sarcasm in his grating, nasal voice was palpable. Maybe this was when Ruse realised that he had been had. Certainly it was at this point that he started to show signs of exasperation, although he may still have thought that Stein was merely stupid, rather than pursuing a malevolent and clandestine agenda.
Curiously, the mostly Christian Fundamentalist audience who finds nothing strange about the idea that God created mankind from clay and dust and ashes, finds it laughable that organic life might have its origin in… clay and dust and ashes. Go figure.
PZ Myers has more about the dishonesty of the Creationists involved, but the funniest comment comes from the jokers at the Landover Baptist Church:
Shocking information has reached us that PZ Myers trophy wife (paid for by the tax payers of state of Minnesota) was taking names of the movie goers to, and I quote her words, “be put first in line for the gas chambers once we overthrow the Constitution”. That is correct, this state funded mistress was making a list of local Christians for eventual extermination.
to which Myers simply replied:
All that money invested in her ninja training, wasted.
May 3, 2008 at 4:29 am
Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for ‘exaggerating’ or ‘going easy’ on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the ‘Politics-is-applied-biology’ Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of ‘agnostism’ was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany. Haeckel was also the first one to propose a systematic answer to the Judenfrage: To EXPEL all the Jews from their chairs at the universities.
‘Kampf’ was a direct translation of ’struggle’ from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.
Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary ‘PUS’, Haeckel’s 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium. This despite the fact that Haeckel’s crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). It was the second to most cross/scientific paradigm in the 20th century. Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS – and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it. Text book authors are making a mockery out of science.
Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. In England, they are fertilizing human embryos for research purposes and pipetting chimera embryos of humans and monkeys, ‘legally’. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.
More from conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
May 4, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Thanks Pauli for the comment.
I think you are seriously misinformed when it comes to Haeckel. Creationists have spent the last half century slandering the man, now that he’s dead and can’t defend himself. As an atheist with strong anti-religious views, he has been a target for Creationist mud-slinging for decades. I suggest you seek out some less dishonest sources of information about the man.
His theory is a perfectly good scientific hypothesis. As a drop-out biochemist, you of all people should know that scientific theories can still be useful and valuable even when wrong. Haeckel’s theory explaining embryo gill slits was wrong, but his observations of gills slits was correct. Biology books continue to show such gill slits because they are really there. To ignore their existence would be lying by omission. To imply that they don’t exist, as so many Creationists do, is fraud.
As for your suggestion that Haeckel was responsible not only for the rise of Nazism, but for World War One before it, that’s just laughable. Likewise your accusations regarding antisemitism don’t hold water. It simply isn’t credible that a liberal free-thinker like Haeckel, who repeatedly and publicly declared Jews the intellectual and cultural equal of the best of Germans, and who wrote (pdf):
“I hold these refined and noble Jews to be important elements in German culture. One should not forget that they have always stood bravely for
enlightenment and freedom against the forces of reaction, inexhaustible opponents, as often as needed, against the obscurantists.”
called for them to be expelled from universities. That is simply nonsense.