Live Long and Prosper

California's Supreme Court overturned bans on gay marriage last week, and the fundies aren't happy - but George Takei is.

Sulu's getting married!

Shimmies to Sulu and his partner, Brad Altman! Does anyone have any anti-matter birdseed?

Seriously, it's about time. Maybe Minnesota will be next.

Now They Can Quit Pretending

The Discovery Institute does believe in eugenics after all.

Michael Medved claims that Americans are genetically superior to other human beings.

The radical notion that our national character stems from genetics as well as culture has always inspired angry controversy; many observers scoff at the whole idea of a unifying hereditary component in our multi-racial, multi-cultural society. Aside from the varied immigrants who now make up nearly 15% of the population, the forebears of today’s Americans journeyed to this continent from Asia, Africa, Latin America and every nation of Europe. Our stark differences in appearance, if nothing else, argue against the concept of common DNA connecting contemporary citizens of wildly divergent ancestry.

Gee, I guess different colors of paper also show that it can't all be made from trees. (I suppose that God made the nice colors - pink, blue, yellow - and Satan the colors that I like, like black, red, and hot pink.)

Nevertheless, two respected professors of psychiatry have recently come out with challenging books that contend that those who chose to settle this country in every generation possessed crucial common traits that they passed on to their descendents. In “American Mania,” Peter C. Whybrow of U.C.L.A. argues that even in grim epochs of starvation and persecution, only a small minority ever chooses to abandon its native land and to venture across forbidding oceans to pursue the elusive dream of a better life. The tiny percentage making that choice (perhaps only 2%, even in most periods of mass immigration) represents the very essence of a self-selecting group. Compared to the Irish or Germans or Italians or Chinese or Mexicans who remained behind in the “Old Country,” the newcomers to America would naturally display a propensity for risk-taking, for restlessness, for exuberance and self-confidence – traits readily passed down to subsequent generations. Whybrow explained to the New York Times Magazine that immigrants to the United States and their descendents seemed to possess a distinctive makeup of their “dopamine receptor system – the pathway in the brain that figures centrally in boldness and novelty seeking.”

John D. Gartner of Johns Hopkins University Medical School makes a similar case for an American-specific genotype in “The Hypomanic Edge”—celebrating the frenzied energy of American life that’s impressed every visitor since Tocqueville. The United States also benefited from our tradition of limited government, with only intermittent and ineffective efforts to suppress the competitive, entrepreneurial instincts of the populace. Professor Whybrow says: “Here you have the genes and the completely unrestricted marketplace. That’s what gives us our peculiar edge.” In other words, “anything goes capitalism” reflects and sustains the influence of immigrant genetics.

The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits. Among contemporary African-Americans, however, this very different historical background exerts a less decisive influence, because of vast waves of post-slavery black immigration. Some three million black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean arrived since 1980 alone and in big cities like New York, Boston and Miami close to half of the African-American population consists of immigrants, their children or grandchildren. The entrepreneurial energy of these newcomer communities indicates that their members display the same adventurous instincts associated with American DNA.

In other words, "Oh, we're not saying that white people are genetically superior to black people - we're just saying that white Americans are genetically superior to black Americans!" What a pig Medved is!

Naturally, PZ Myers takes down Medved's pseudo-genetics.

What utter nonsense! I've been to "command and control" Europe several times, and then had the shock of returning here. Europeans are lively - walking everywhere, meeting friends at the cafe instead of watching television, going out at night (without the kids, because they actually leave them with a babysitter or a nanny, whereas American parents drag their little darlings everywhere, even into bars and nightclubs, and then complain about the skimpy dress, raucous behavior, and unchurched language of child-free people like me who think that bars and nightclubs are for adults). I don't know how to put the difference more clearly than this photo:

And I wish this was an exaggeration.

As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than West Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: the US ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia's, and only just ahead of Lithuania's—and this despite spending 15 percent of US gross domestic product on "health care" (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the US spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.

Very well, you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at distributing social goods. This is not news. But there can be no goods or services without wealth, and surely the one thing American capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent Europeans need to improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But this is by no means obvious today. Europeans work less: but when they do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the US; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the US is now distinctly outperformed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, ...and France.

...Indeed, Europe is facing real problems. But they are not the ones that American free-market critics recount with such grim glee. Yes, the European Commission periodically makes an ass of itself, aspiring to regulate the size of condoms and the curvature of cucumbers. The much-vaunted Stability Pact to constrain national expenditure and debt has broken down in acrimony, though with no discernible damage to the euro it was designed to protect. And pensions and other social provisions will be seriously underfunded in decades to come unless Europeans have more children, welcome more immigrants, work a few more years before retiring, take somewhat less generous unemployment compensation, and make it easier for businesses to employ young people. But these are not deep structural failings of the European way of life: they are difficult policy choices with political consequences. None of them implies the dismantling of the welfare state.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't more and more Americans facing foreclosure on their homes and mountains of debt? Didn't we have another serious recession after eight years of another moron in the White House? Didn't we have a major Depression in the 1930s? So how many Americans, showing their natural grit and "risk taking" behavior, fled their country to seek adventure and fortune elsewhere? How many Americans even go abroad anymore? How many speak a second language, even?

Medved is just riffing on the tired old "How-come-it's-always-the-black-folk-who-win-all-the-racing-medals-at-the-Olympics" argument, conveniently forgetting that appearance doesn't indicate race. As a matter of fact, it's mostly black Americans who win those medals, not Africans, a fact resulting from a miriad of causes including mixed heritage with whites, Native Americans, and other ethnicities, nutrition, socio-economic status, individual talent, and personal choices. And that holds true for everyone.

That's why Americans, who used to be risk-takers, adventurers, and creative inventors, are now largely superstitious, fatalistic, consumerist couch-potatoes. (I don't think the Founding Fathers and Mothers would recognize us.) It's due to the choices we've made. And that doesn't have to be our future. Strict genetic determinism has never been the consequence of evolution. Strict genetic determinism is just a cartoon vision of those who don't know (again) what the hell they're talking about. (But then again, the concept of strict determinism, or "cause and effect," is what convinces many people that intelligent design is persuasive.)

Human beings belong to only one race. "Race" is a social construct. It's a relatively recent idea that has no genetic basis and is literally skin deep.

But it doesn't surprise me at all to find out how racist, provincial-minded, and hate-filled the Discovery Institute minions are. Their yawping about how Darwin "caused the Holocaust" is filled with more envy than alarm. Like most revisionists, what they truly want is to purify the nation - their way.

While crying "Censorship! Tyranny! I was expelled!" they seek to censor, to expel, and to impose their own tyranny - their way. What they are "rebelling" against is the perceived weaknesses, not the "tyranny" of the scientific community. They want an umbrella of certainty held above their whole lives, and science can't give anyone that.

"Freedom" and "academic inquiry" to them mean conformity and unquestioning obedience. They are guilty of those very crimes which they see in others, everywhere.

Rust Belt Philosophy also takes Medved to task for his unwarranted genetic generalizations.

UPDATED: Our President George W. Bush has funded with our tax a "study" (being that they're so sciency and all) on "human dignity," chaired by a crank named Leon Kass, who is the President's advisor and bioethics. In that capacity, Mr. Kass warns the President about grave dangers to our human "dignity," and in this capacity he is deeply troubled by the social adoption of "animal behavior" such as licking ice cream cones and eating hot dogs on the street:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone - a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street - even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat - displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if we feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

But he has no problem shaking his finger at "aging bachelors" and advocating that all women welp like bunnies in the backyard.

Call me catty, but I think the next round of "no new human-animal hybrids" is going to be something else. They just want to protect us! Keep repeating the word "Freedom!"

UPDATED: Ben Stein says, "Scotland is the most intelligent race in the world." And I thought Scotland was a country.

Of Hedges, Hot Dish, and Hogwash

Really, I’ve had it.

[UPDATED: I thought I had it until Ben Stein went on the "George Stroumboulopoulos Show" and said "Darwinism can't explain where physics come from." At this point, Stein must be pretending. Nobody can be that stupid! Art criticism can't explain where pigments come from! Science can't explain why 1/7 of all days are Mondays! You know what? This is my last post on Ben Stein. I think I'm going to have an irony hemorrhage.]

Ben Stein can diss Darwin and make his little equations to Nazism all he wants (does anyone remember that the flipping Nazis started that stupid Olympic Torch Relay? I don't see him protesting with the Tibetans, and by the way, Free Tibet!). He's not a scientist, after all - but when he fucks up economics in the New York Times again, I have to ask – nay, demand – why the hell is this snake-handler allowed to have a column in the first place? Writing about economics? And simply being wrong, wrong, wrong? About economics, for which he went to Columbia University?

How does one merit a column in a major newspaper when he is so grossly discombobulated about his own alleged subject? He's either going insane, or a smarmy liar.

Well, I fired off this letter to the New York Times:

Why is Ben Stein allowed to publish his glossolalia in the New York Times with little context supplied from those he regularly accuses of global conspiracies, namely traders and "Darwinists" and all the other assorted evil leprechauns that populate his fantasy world? Why when you publish articles on science you deliberately seek out some obscure crank "dissenter" from evolution, the age of the earth, or global climate change, but allow this increasingly deluded, middling (and fading) celebrity to rant unfettered in print like some homeless man in a park? If you must humor this self-styled "voice in the wilderness," shouldn't you at least offer a counter column in the name of "balance," which is otherwise fanatically, and annoyingly, pursued by your reporters who managed to tease out some pseudoscientific riposte whenever the article in question states, you know, facts?

If you're going to have a columnist speak in tongues at least publish one that can find his. Stein's pious braying, followed by his pathetic attempts at sex appeal and vainglory ("Dog fancier at night"? Well, at least it spares the goats), is simply embarrassing. I don't enjoy finding myself in the distateful position of feeling sorry for him, which I increasingly am. That sentiment does not extend to the New York Times, however.

Why would the New York Times print paranoiac drivel such as his? Here's his latest column, and a sight to behold it is:

My son is just now finishing his first year of college. People ask me what I would like for him to do. I always say, “Whatever the dear boy would like to do.” But in my heart, I would like for him to be a real-life counterpart of a character on my latest imaginary TV series brainchild: “The Hedges of Greenwich, Conn.” (It sounds a bit like “The Bridges of Madison County,” no?)

No duh it sounds like that. Does this man have any identity? “Hey, I’m just like Mel Gibson! I’m the right-wing Michael Moore! I’m Robert James Waller! I’m Moses! I’m Galileo!” (Yeah, and I’m Glenda, the good witch.) Read on:

This is my hypothetical series [sounds like somebody didn't enjoy a lot of royalties from a certain documentary] about powerful hedge fund traders and private equity players in Greenwich, whose wealth is so immense that they can live like maharajahs. But far more important, they have so much money — put up by Harvard and Yale endowments, among others, and then magnified by leverage — that they can plunge world markets into turmoil.

In my first episode, a cagey old trader and wheeler-dealer [played by himself, perhaps?] who lives in splendor surrounded by his German short-haired pointers and his cats, is about to be visited by his mysterious young mistress. [Yep - played by himself, the little devil!] Little does he know [well, that fits], she is about to give him a shot of lead because his private equity fund bought, ripped, stripped and flipped her father’s company in Lima, Ohio, putting her father out of a job and driving her mother to suicide. His son, meanwhile, is plotting to sell short the bonds his father issued, putting his father’s whole empire in jeopardy.

By the way, is anyone else sick of Ben Stein’s incessant characterization of women as whores, nurses, mistresses, models, and selfish money-grubbers?

Well, to be fair, he did bleat a tribute to our soldiers, in which he woodenly acknowledged female “true heroes” (be careful, the version being passed around the Net is not accurate), but I notice that this hypocrite didn’t love the military enough as a young man to interrupt his studies at Columbia and Yale and actually sign up. (Sound familiar?)

It’s all very well to claim to hate celebrities and love Middle America when you yourself are a celebrity (albeit a struggling one) who is safe from tractor-pull/high-school-bullies/McGlynn’s-doughnuts-and-Folger’s-coffee culture. I doubt this poseur Stein has ever eaten an elementary school pizzaburger (we simple folk call it “Barf on a Bun”) in his mincing, privileged life. And it’s so easy to “celebrate our heroes” as long as you don’t personally know anyone who is or ever was in the military, and weren’t in it yourself.

And what’s this “I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are” in his other ode to the virtues of the simple folk? Sorry, I don't believe that. In order to write that sentence, you (and your audience) have to know who Nick and Jessica are. What a phony.

But I digress. (That’s easy to do when talking about Stein, whose idea of an argument is akin to buckshot fired at a clay pigeon.) Here we get into the meat of what’s ailing the economy, and guess what, it’s those dastardly Darwinist traders!

You see the many directions in which my febrile brain goes, and all because nice people have asked me why the high price of oil does not act the way that Econ 101 says it should: by suppressing consumption, bringing on new supplies and lowering the price. Here’s why: the Hedges of Greenwich.

Look at oil and gasoline and natural gas. They have immense uses as consumer products. They power our cars. They heat our homes and our swimming pools. When their prices rise here in the United States, drivers, homeowners and swimmers cut back on the use of these fuels.

But there is much more to the story than that. First, the price we pay is denominated in dollars, and as the dollar falls, the price in dollars rises. Buyers who pay in euros or won do not see the same price appreciation because their currencies have been rising against the dollar. Hence, the commodity in question may be higher in dollars — suppressing demand here — but may be barely changed in euros day to day. This is one reason that worldwide demand is not much affected.

In fact, demand for some energy sources is softening ever so slightly in the United States, but world demand continues strongly upward.

This has little to do with the oil companies — usually called the “big” oil companies to distinguish them from the small oil companies we all have in our backyards. [So don't get any ideas about comparing them to the wicked "Big Science" monster, my fellow Americans.] They just float along with the tide, the way we consumers do. They are at the mercy of the traders, as we all are. [See? You can pet the nice lions!]

That’s just hogwash. The day that you get traders, of hedge funds or whatever, coordinated enough to manipulate prices more than a very short period is the day you get gnats to fly in formation at the Minnesota State Fair. It just simply can’t be done. The truth about conspiracies is, 1) yes, they do exist, but 2) their success rate is terrible. (Just look at how well the Wedge Strategy has turned out, for example.)

Felix Salmon ponders what on earth Stein means by his “febrile” mind.

Perhaps he meant “fertile.” That sounds like him. Or “ferial,” although that wouldn’t be my word for it. He seems to really be into feast-days, at least in terms of dishing up bullshit. Or “feral.” Again, that I wouldn’t choose. When we were kids, our idea of fun was whipping little hard green apples at each other – and I’m talking about the girls. I really can’t see Stein handling that, despite his tennis-shoes-with-suit gangsta-paint-can “rebel” attitude.

No, “febrile” seems to be another one of his unfunny attempts at self-depreciation (the man does nothing but seek approval), rather like the back-scratcher moment in Expelled – all it did was made me think of Stein’s flabby, whale-white flesh. Yuck.

The only time I’ve seen this man have an honest moment was when he lost Disney’s money on “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” (You didn't think he actually gambled with his own money, did you? By the stars, this genius couldn’t even get the date for the millennium right, but it gave us a look at him in a truly unscripted moment. His jaw dropped. He argued the results. He fretted and sweated. And there I was singing “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Neinstein may be Michael Moore’s shadow, but he sure is no Tycho Brahe.)

Pardon. Another digression.

As from the fact that the market shows no indication of malicious manipulation, Ben Stein acts like an astrologer in a small town newspaper, forging ahead with his predictions despite the fact that he has been wrong, wrong, wrong all this time. In fact, he’s been wrong more often than many astrologers. He predicted that foreign stock would fall. Wrong. He predicted that the collapse of the housing bubble would be short, and temporary. Wrong. Now he’s essentially claiming that hedge fund traders can stage a sweeping and sustained price fall on securities. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

But there is another hugely important factor now in world energy markets: the pricing of energy as a speculative item. Traders can and do buy vast amounts of energy futures. Right now, there is a worldwide mania to invest in them. In this situation, when investors and traders are pouring buckets of money into thimbles of energy quanta, to use a phrase from my pal Tobias M. Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist at Citigroup, the price is bid higher and higher.

And, as the price goes up, demand does not fall. It rises, because investors and traders think that it will keep rising and they will make money on it in the future. (Oil, gasoline and natural gas can be stored indefinitely.)

It’s like the bubble in Miami Beach condominiums. As the price of them soared, traders did not stay away. Instead, they kept buying, anticipating more or less endless gains.

Gee, there’s speculation in the pricing of energy, my gosh. There’s speculation in financial markets? Call out the army! Off with traders’ heads! Try them for treason!

Honestly, is this news to Ben Stein (or does he think it’s news to Middle America, whom he loves so much, making us loveable morons - or petable lions, like his friends the oil companies)? Does he think that his readers will believe that speculation equals market manipulation? Does he think we're fucking stupid? Speculation is temporary – it has to be – and manipulation, even if it happens, can also only last so long and will be localized. How in hell can one have a market without speculation, anyway?

Yet Stein denies that the economy is faltering (he thinks it’s hunky-dory – just all the manipulation throwing things awry), that unemployment is not really climbing, and that there is no real danger of widespread default on loans (which he is right to say hasn’t happened yet). Ben Stein prefers to wave his “foreign-market-investments-are-bad” flag like it’s his last soggy sheet of salvageable toilet tissue in the woods two hours after bingeing on chipped beef with toast (we simple folk call it "Shit on a Shingle") on Randolph and Mortimer's yacht just before it sank.

Right now, the Hedges of Greenwich are bidding up the prices of hydrocarbons into the stratosphere by buying energy futures. Your switching from a Cadillac to a Prius won’t tilt the balance back to falling energy prices. Your earnest little efforts at conservation mean nothing when compared with the upward push coming from the speculative bubble.

And now the big boys have been joined by you and me. Little folks like us can buy our very own energy baskets of exchange-traded funds and the like, and are doing so in big numbers.

Oh, “you and me.” Pity poor little rich boy Ben Stein. He’s one of us! Yeah, right.

I'm sorry, but manipulating the market works in movies such as Trading Places and Wall Street, but it's not exactly business as usual. (Would it were that easy to stick it to an unscrupulous boss!)

If I were to place this wretched excuse for a commentator (no common tater he, Ben Stein, despite all his efforts) into a mythological pantheon, I’d call him a Trickster, a shape-shifter, fashioning himself as a “superstar” when he wants to be, then “one of us” when it’s convenient for him, a “godly man” when it suits him, a dashing womanizer when he’s feeling really insecure. And people said that Madonna’s image was fragmented! She’s a paragon of psychological centeredness compared to Benjamin (Nein)Stein.

Don’t conserve gas, people! It won’t do you any good – the traders control everything! Don’t switch “from a Cadillac to a Prius,” Middle America! (Somehow I don’t think there’ much danger of many working-class people doing that, Ben. Hello?) And whatever you do, don’t invest in faaarrrn stocks! Gee, that’s great advice, Neinstein. Really responsible, asshole, while the dollar is in free-fall in the void just like Venus, Jupiter, and Mars. (Of course, since "Darwinism can't explain what keeps the planets from falling down," I guess Darwinism can't explain how angels keep the dollar from falling against the Euro in Ben Stein's universe, either.)

(I confess that I still cannot watch this shameless queave of a press conference all the way through. Darwinism can't explain what makes yellow yellow! Uuuggghhhh!)

What else should we simple folk do to make ends meet besides not sell our Cadillacs, Ben? Cut back on caviar twice a month? Great idea. Stay at a friend’s house in the Hamptons instead of booking a hotel room in Stockholm over the summer? I'll consider that. Rough it alongside the other Cadillac owners and stage a tailgating party on Cape Cod every Saturday night, instead of eating at Spago? Stick it to the man, Middle America! Charter a private plane to Disneyworld and thumb your nose at the Northwest-Delta merger! Be a rebel! Wear sneakers and shorts with your suit and see how long you can keep your $9/hour data entry job!

What the fuck is this man’s problem? I really can’t believe how anyone buys his “just folks” posturing, but they do – they must want to, at least when he’s yawping about creationism (excuse me, intelligent divine), but when he deliberately dispenses bad advice, it’s time to cut his publicity umbilicus. The Unabomber was allowed to shoot his wad in a major newspaper once, in order to aid his capture, but Ben Stein is given a free outlet to repeatedly make unsubstantiated claims that, along with his bad advice, stretch that worse-than-Hillary whiney drone around the globe and up my spine, and then he's allowed to run free. Hillary has handlers. Doesn't he?

If Ben Stein wants to find a real conspiracy, here's a true Darwinian horror story staring him right in the face: predatory lending practices and the subsequent sale of these risky loans, which allowed the lenders to skip away after making gobs of money by splitting the high risk loans and packaging them with the high-quality debt for sell-off. That’s how those who were selfish and dishonest enough to grant these loans to the gullible will never have to face the consequences of foreclosures en masse.

The truth is, Middle America, we have lived an inflated life for a very long time, and now this is the new normal. But it’s also true that regulators have been asleep at the wheel while lenders offered crap loans and also made sure that artificially inflated housing values widened the balloon. Yes, regulators were asleep at the wheel and crooks bilked vulnerable people who were a bad financial risk, who to their credit believed in the value of home ownership, and who in order to make what they thought was a responsible investment in a home, signed papers that they didn't understand at all. (Sadly enough, this particular demographic is also prone to buying Cadillas that they really can't afford in the mistaken idea that they also represent an investment.)

In fact, the blame for this is shared (and at some point we have to take a good look at ourselves, too, Middle America, for not understanding more about how money works), and responsibility in a free market is decentralized. Funny how Ben Stein doesn’t talk about that, when heretofore (before he became Mr. Creationism) he had dispensed sound advice about proper handling of credit cards and saving for retirement.

Maybe that's because it would simultaneously sound too much like natural selection and like the “invisible hand of the market” of Adam Smith that he admires so much. That's another inconvenient truth. And shit, man, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Benjamin “America First” Stein has a lot of stocks in Canada, as many smart investors do right now.

We simple folk call this being a “snake in the grass,” Ben Stein.

Crimes and Misdemeanors, A Discussion

I don't have a lot of time for blogging these days, so until things slow down I'll post this gem from You Tube, the first part of a commentary on one of my favorite films (starring one of my favorite actors, Martin Landau) by one of my not-favorite directors, Woody Allen.

Expelled: Imagine!

FINAL UPDATE: Heddle has a great post on this whole thingie.

I'm entering the countdown to finals, so have fun here.
-----
Well, folks, where do I begin?

Since all the excitement about PZ’s expulsion from a free screening of Expelled, a lot of things have happened. It's almost too much to recount.

The free screenings and RSVP links disappeared from the website – and only certain people (atheists, skeptics, scientists, etc.) who had already RSVPed to see the movie started receiving e-mails saying that their upcoming screening were “cancelled” when they weren’t. The goal was obviously to have only sympathetic audience members at these advance screenings. (In some cases, the screening times were abruptly moved one hour earlier, angering the sympathetic members of the audience who naturally did not get a cancellation e-mail and thus showed up at the original run time.)

A Scientist and skeptic who received these apparently fraudulent e-mail “cancellations” of Expelled was Evolutionary Biologist John Lynch. (This blog post includes “before and after” screengrabs of the official Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed website showing the screenings “disappear”)

A couple of the commenters on his blog managed to attend the screenings anyway:

Commenter Brad on his experience:

Commenter Ken McKnight on his experience:

More on this story from Troy Britain:
"Expelled Promoters Just Can’t Stop Lying"

Mark in Santa Clara on his experience:
"Expelled Has Gone Truant in Santa Clara"

Meanwhile, this is what happens when you are invited to pay $10 to see an advanced screening of Expelled: you don’t get to see Expelled. You have the "privilege" of getting to see film clips already available all over the internet, and to watch Ben Stein win an award. This is what happened to Troy Britain.

"Expelled! The Movie Rip-off and the Event at Biola", again at Troy Britain's blog.

The producers of Expelled plead for a grassroots effort from its sympathetic audience to “adopt-a-theatre” on opening day, April 18, 2008. How pathetic. Do people really want to [I]rent a theatre[/I] in order to see a movie? (Just like Michael Moore, eh?)

This account is at James F. McGrath’s blog: "Freedom Friday"

Blogger Troy Britain contacted me to learn where I got the Expelled RSVP link to forward to PZ Myers. I told him that I got the link from Glen Davidson’s comment at After the Bar Closes, but that the source for Glen was a Christian blog promoting the film Expelled and exhorting the general public to sign up for these advanced screenings! That’s right, folks, we got this “top secret” URL from a Christian blog on blogger, a public site.

Troy’s blog: "The Expelled RSVP Sites: Getting to the Facts"

Of all the media outlets that have reviewed this flick (despite the producers’ Soviet-style blackout on advanced reviews of Expelled, would you have expected Fox News to pan it? Well, they did. In fact, they tore it to shreds!

Fox News (!) pans Expelled: "Ben Stein: Win His Career"

Man, it must suck to be a conservative when even the conservatives think you suck.

But it gets worse:

Those opening and closing scenes of the movie? In which Ben Stein seemingly addresses an audience of Pepperdine University students in a full auditorium? Where they cheer him at the end? Looks like a real bunch of students think NeinStein is hip and that his message was well-received, right?

It turns out that Pepperdine University students accept evolution, so the filmmakers had to rent the auditorium (it was not an event sponsored by the university), and hired actors to play "the students."

It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein's antievolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with the actor, game show host and speechwriter for Richard Nixon addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did [creationism].

Actually they didn't. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein's screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, "the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus" but that "the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein's lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university." And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

The producers/promoters of Expelled, Premise Media, have been served with a cease-and-desist letter, alleging plagiarism of an animation of the inner workings of a cell produced by Harvard University.

ERV’s blog:
"Expelled: Expelled for Plagiarism"

and

"I Love the Smell of Roasted Creationists in the Morning" (ERV again)

Wesley Elsberry’s blog:
"Okay, Expelled, but Plagiarism Will Do That for You"

PZ Myers’ blog:
"Peter Irons Drafts a Letter"

Panda’s Thumb:
"Will the Public See Expelled?"

The producers of this turdfest that is Expelled have also admitted that they never sought permission to use the John Lennon song, “Imagine”, which is played if the film over some archival footage of Josef Stalin, while Ben Stein screams that liberals want to turn our country into what Lennon (or Lenin?) envisioned, from the administrator of John Lennon’s (not Lenin’s) estate – namely his widow, Yoko Ono.

The Wall Street Journal's article.
(requires subscription)

Entire article available here:
Yoko Ono, Filmmakers Caught in 'Expelled' Flap

At this point, the scandal is growing heads like a hydra. Already everything I posted here is old news, because new news is still coming out. Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable!

Excuse me, but it’s normal procedure to expell a student for plagiarism, and this is now plagiarism plus stealing.

To add the cherry on the top of this frosted cherry-picking cupcake, the producers sent me a spam e-mail to my school account exhorting the “friends of Expelled to "help the film" in its hate speech against atheists, skeptics, legitimate scientists, and anyone else who doesn’t pass their moral purity test. I informed them that spam was unprofessional and that the only reason they had my address was that they had required it – first for me to RSVP, and then again in the theatre, where I was told that I had to give it again on an “agreement form” not to illegally videotape and distribute the film.

And, being that I was required to give them this information, that should have ended their use of my e-mail address. (I did not give them my snail mail address, though the form asked for it – and interestingly enough, this “agreement form” had no place for a signature, just for my printed name.)

Very, very unprofessional, I must say. Just astonishingly stupid, clumsy, and unethical. Boy oh boy, what an example to the upcoming class of students entering college. These guys have some nerve to preach to the rest of the nation about the state of our educational system.

All I can do is sincerely thank the makers of Expelled for exposing the methods of creationists to the nation at large. For years, these people have operated in secret, allowing only the most controlled speeches and presentations to the public, so that everyone remains on message. Now in complete disarray, their publicity machine has done more to destroy the concept of intelligent design as “science” in the public mind that anything I could have done or said. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for this high-publicity disaster.

At Rotten Tomatoes, the rating for Expelled is 10% (less than Ishtar and Howard the Duck) and falling.

Now, it is evident to all why intelligent design has no place in science classrooms or in academia at large: it is a cheat, and its advocates are cheaters. And cheaters don’t belong in class – let alone teaching in our nation’s classrooms.

But one thing that you don't do - you don't piss off Yoko Ono.

UPDATED: Well, there I was, about to add a comment that I don’t really need to hear “Imagine” one more time in my life, either, because the song has become banal, kitch, the atheist’s equivalent of “Kum-bay-ya” (another song that I wish I could never hear again) – and then Corrente goes and rewrites John Lennon’s famous anthem especially for Ben Neinstein. And it’s hilarious.


Imagine there’s no science
So many people do
Nothing to study or wonder
The end of seeking truth
Imagine all the country
Dumber than a post…

You may say Ben Stein’s a schemer
But he’s not the only one
Many a fool would destroy us
A new Dark Age will have begun

Imagine no progression
Evolution canned
No need for artful discussions
A devaluing of man
Imagine all the children
Burning all the books…

You may say I’m a boomer
And my time will fade away
I hope someday you’ll stand up
And keep ignorance at bay

SECOND UPDATE: Oh for the love of Darwin, now someone over at John Lynch’s site has written “Bensteinian Rhapsody.” (One of my favorites!)

Anyone? I just filmed a sham,
Put some lies into your head,
Libelled Darwin, coz’ he’s dead,
Honor, you know I once had some,
But now I’ve gone and blown it all away-
Anyone? ooooohhhhh
Was it mean to tell those lies?
You’d learn more science by watching Rocky Horror-
Anyone? Anyone? My reputations now in tatters-

Too late, my crime is done,
Dembski told me I did fine-
Behe’s squirming, (he’ll be fine),
Goodbye science lessons-you’ve got to go
Gonna leave your kids behind and hide the truth
Adolf, oooooh (a shame he wasn’t atheist)
I’ll just have to lie,
I’ll just pretend that he wasn’t Christian at all--

guitar solo -

THIRD UPDATE: Ed Brayton weighs in on Expelled. And I notice that anonymous trolls who come here and criticize me (a woman) for speaking up don't have a complaint about them speaking up.

Don't come here and tell me what to say. If you don't like what you see here, leave.

FOURTH UPDATE: I told you it was a hydra. Premise Media, which produced Expelled, is now countersuing XVIVO (which produced the Harvard animation). In other words, it's a SLAPP. And ERV is totally convinced that the fact that Premise, based in Canada, filed its bogus lawsuit in Texas, not in Canada nor in Connecticut, where XVIVO is based, has nothing at all to do with the fact that Texas has no anti-SLAPP laws. ;-) She has issued a challenge to Premise Media.

Lab-lit-a!

It has surprised a lot of people who know me to find out the extent of my interest in science – in particular astronomy, geology, and evolutionary theory – and the depth of my involvement in the evolution vs. creationism/ID debate. This is due to the fact that there has long been a split between the humanities and science. It is a split that has troubled me for a long time.

Literary theory has become rife with talk of “oppressive narratives” and the like, a rootless orientation that views not only literature but life itself as a collection of “stories,” either “oppressive and from the dominant culture,” or as an act of resistance against said oppression, without any consideration as to how stories get to be told in the first place.

In order to tell these stories we must have more than just human culture and language – we must have brains, we must have mouths, and in fact I would argue that perhaps we can tell stories because we have opposable thumbs – and yet, I have rarely come across anyone who wants to talk about the scientific realities that underlie our storytelling.

Science is seen as “dehumanizing,” as a “white male oppressive narrative,” just another viewpoint, with no privileged position, and therefore literature just floats along, disembodied, disconnected from the factual and the real. And so we have the ultimate degradation of literature, literature as “spiritually uplifting” Wonder Bread, nice narratives meant more to comfort than confront. Even the rape and murder of a young girl is portrayed with all the sentimental mush (and kitsch) of an angel pendant:

Generally speaking, the sex-murder of an adolescent offers little that’s good. But in The Lovely Bones, mom and pop hook up and so do Ray and Ruth, whose body Susie is allowed to occupy just long enough to have real, true, beautiful sex for once in her afterlife. “I had never been touched like this,” she tells us. “I had only been hurt by hands past all tenderness. But spreading out into my heaven after death had been a moonbeam that swirled and blinked on and off. . . . Inside my head I said the word gentle.” The book ends with a glow.

Every impulse in every sane reader must shriek No! at this pabulum. It’s not lovely that Susie’s been slaughtered, hacked, and dumped in a pit. It’s not lovely that icy Mr. Harvey gets his comeuppance by a conveniently dropped icicle as the pit containing Susie’s body parts is being drained, leading us to assume that her remains will be found and that she will finally get a lovely stone.

Nice thought if you can abide it. Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

According to Jeffrey Sharlet, a journalist/provocateur who helped inspire this essay, and Andi Mudd, a spectacularly unwondrous college student who assisted in researching it, The Lovely Bones and its ilk “deserve a public shaming.” That’s because BBoWs [“Brooklyn Books of Wonder”] are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.” [Emphasis mine]

It’s no surprise to me that I have avoided such novels as The Lovely Bones, The History of Love, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of which are mentioned in the above article by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Their titles alone shriek their sentimentality and sugar-coating of the realities of life.

But there is something else: science is missing in literature. I am not talking about science fiction – I am talking about scientific fact. Whereas television courtroom dramas detail the plodding methods of lawyers (though also made melodramatic through highly unlikely twists and turns), it seems that the only genre dealing with scientific fact is the forensic science drama – and those are extremely inaccurate.

Melvin Jules Bukiet goes on to say:

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue.

Surely that is the kind of “rescue” that those who argue that science is just “another narrative” dream of – an escape from reality, from pain and necessity. I remember, in one of my college lit classes, getting into an argument with someone of this opinion, that science was “nonsense”; it culminated with me asking her if she believed in the science that had manufactured the car that had brought her to class that morning. She said nothing after that, but her glare was palpable. I had transgressed the role assigned to women, ostensibly by feminists – victim, empath, and right-brained child-hugger. If I wanted to write, why didn't I write what "women [should] write about" - having my period, feeling "connected" with other women (sometimes I do, sometimes I don't), or wanting or raising a child?

Hoo, boy. Talk about an oppressive narrative, talk about taking a privileged position, this reassumption of helplessness, collectivity, and irrationality by women.

While these people are celebrating their newly-found liberation of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, I discovered another article in American Scholar that brought together three of my favorite subjects: literature, science, and Valdimir Nabokov (Lolita! My favorite novel!) in an elegant call for the reintegration of scientific fact into art and literature – and for seeing literature as a creative and intellectual act, beyond narratives of race or gender oppression.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

[Interestingly enough, this mirror’s Dennis Prager’s complaint about boys and girls being taught to completely escape gender roles, but in a more reasoned and informed manner than Prager displayed.]

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class, but in terms, for instance, of the human life history cycle, or social cognition, or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, and for the local in culture and history, and for individuality, in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

One way to use science to approach literature (and art in general) is to view it as a behavior in evolutionary terms. Why do art in general and storytelling in particular exist as cross-species behaviors? Asking the question in these terms makes possible a genuinely theoretical literary theory, one that depends not on the citation of purportedly antiauthoritarian authorities, but on the presence of evidence and the absence of counterevidence, on examining human behavior across time and space and in the context of many cultures and even many species.

The humanities have always accepted the maxim that biologist D’Arcy Thompson stated with sublime simplicity: “Everything is what it is because it got that way.” How it got that way starts not with the Epic of Gilgamesh but much further back: with our evolving into art-making and storytelling animals. How did our capacities for art and story build and become ingrained in us over time? How do we now produce and process stories so effortlessly: what aspects of the mind do we engage, and how?

Contrary to the populist propaganda about “Big Science” (right-wing propaganda that is ironically heir to the post-modernist/literary solipsist and extreme-left feminists movements) as a sterile and dehumanizing force, threatening our values and our emotional lives, science is a profoundly human act. It demystifies that which scares us. It makes new questions and new mysteries possible.

Science does not have the freedom that art and literature do – it cannot. Scientists are not and should not be “free to ask any question” if the question is skewed to advance an agenda, or is irrelevant, or is simply not sensible to ask at this point. That may mean that many questions appropriate to be asked tomorrow will not be asked today, which is unfortunate, but that also means that tomorrow, when we do ask the question, we will have a trail of research showing us why the question is now possible to be asked.

Art and literature do not need to supply that paper trail, but science must. However, art and literature do need to have their questions grounded, at some point, in reality, in scientific fact, or they will become floating bubbles, self-contained, beautiful but useless, and subject to the wind.

Some years ago I went to a friend’s art opening, and he started gushing about his latest idea – a sculpture, to scale, of the solar system. “Um,” I said with a smile, and went on to tell him how I, as a teen-ager, simply tried to draw the moon in orbit around the earth to scale, and ended up taping sheets of paper together until I at last had a scroll that reached a length of about 40 feet.
“Oh,” said my friend, disappointed, but simultaneously fascinated. “Well, maybe I’ll just do a surrealist ‘found object’ installation, then: ‘UNIVERSE (ACTUAL SIZE).’”

When I raised this issue at After the Bar Closes, Louis supplied this link to Lab Lit, which I hope to explore further. Thanks, Louis!

This Theory Will Self-Destruct in Eight Years!

Everyone remembers what anniversary we celebrate on April 2, right? A certain interview appearing in a Kentucky newspaper?

I remember.

To William Dembski, all the debate in this country over evolution won't matter in a decade.
By then, he says, the theory of evolution put forth by Charles Darwin 150 years ago will be dead.
The mathematician turned Darwin critic says there is much to be learned about how life evolved on this planet. And he thinks the model of evolution accepted by the scientific community won't be able to supply the answers.

"I see this all disintegrating very quickly," he said.

Uh-huh. Sure.

We'll just see about that.