Blue Collar Scientist

We’ve all heard about Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a propaganda movie being promoted by radical religious extremists that claims Hitler was inspired by Darwin to kill millions of Jewish people.

I have been copied on the following letter, purportedly sent to a theater employee, concerning the movie. I’ve been unable to learn any further details about the sender or recipient, and consider the letter apochryphal - I might be getting hoaxed or scammed. But I still think it is a pretty admirable piece of work. I’ve edited it a little to remove a few grammatical errors and clumsy constructions.

As you are aware, the movie Expelled claims that Hitler, the dictator of Germany responsible for the Holocaust, was inspired by the English biologist Charles Darwin, whose explanation of the diversity of life has, the movie says, a corrupting influence on the morals and virtues of people.

Millions, if not billions, of people around the world understand and accept Charles Darwin’s theory, including many heads of state and people in other powerful positions. If it were true that this scientific idea was morally corrupting, it is inexplicable why they have failed to attempt to kill millions of people in gas chambers in every country in the world at all times during the last 150 years.

Linking Charles Darwin with the Holocaust is a trashy lie. The Holocaust was merely another pogrom - a big one, to be sure, but not different from any other pogrom in its motivation or result. Pogroms are religious riots that took place over many hundreds of years, before and after the time of Darwin. The first anti-Jewish pogrom I am aware of took place in 38 CE during the reign of the Roman emperor Caligula. Pogroms were characterized by the destruction of the victim groups’ homes, business, and religious buildings, and by killings. I have enclosed a photograph of some of the victims, all of them children, of a pogrom that took place in Russia in 1905, which was instigated and led by Christian ministers. Normally I would not mention that, but it has ironic implications for the message of this movie.

A variety of cultural and political forces made Germany particularly susceptible to anti-Semitic pogroms in the middle 20th century. Hitler is well documented to have been influenced by a variety of ideas, and he frequently searched for anything, from any source, which he could take out of context to support his views. His sources included Greek history and philosophy, Napoleon, Martin Luther, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the Bible, among many others. It should go without saying that Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust because he was evil, and not because he was influenced by any single, particular idea.

My uncle and aunt on my mother’s side were killed in the Holocaust. My father fought in the war, and was wounded by Nazi gunshots to his shoulder and hip. He remained crippled until his death twenty years ago. His brother, my uncle, was killed in the war, shot by Nazi soldiers.

As a daughter of Nazi victims, and the only person with a personal stake in preserving the memory and honoring the roles of my family during this dark period of history, I must speak out against this film’s abuse of history. By trivializing the very real tragedy of the Nazi killings, by depicting peaceful and gentle college professors as cheerleaders for killings, gas chambers, concentration camps, and other Nazi-style crimes against humanity, the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed fulfills no other function than excusing Nazi hatred. For who, if this movie’s abhorrent claims are true, could be held to account for their actions in support of the Nazi regime, when they had been inevitably corrupted by a dangerous and virulent idea to which people can have no immunity? By promoting this viewpoint, the film smears the most respected pillars of our American communities and attacks the foundation of American values and liberties.

Despite my opposition to and contempt for this film, I support your theater company’s right to screen the movie, if they choose to do so. Worse than the expression of Expelled’s disgusting morals would be the suppression of even such hateful speech as they peddle. I realize you will have little, if any control on a decision to screen it. Still, I cannot help but express my misgivings, as such an attack on civilization as Expelled represents should not go unanswered in civil society.

The photo that was included with the letter appears to be this one.

Nelly Vasquez-Salazar apparently had a traumatic experience early Monday morning. According to her story, a person wielding a knife came at her in the dead of night and attacked her. She fought back with her own knife, killing her assailant.

Legitimate case of self-defense? Proper use of deadly force in response to an imminent threat to life? Not quite. That was just the first story she told the authorities. The second story was a little bit different.

According to authorities, Nelly killed her six year old daughter by stabbing her eleven times. She did this because the six-year old was sleepwalking.

No, wait - that’s not quite right. It was because the six-year old was sleepwalking, and the mother thought she was possessed by the devil. Satan, Lucifer, or whatever name you give it. As reported by ABC:

“The first statement we received from the defendant was that it was an act of self-defense,” [Assistant State's Attorney Stephen] Scheller said. “After she made the statement to detectives, she later recanted it, made a second statement, which she admitted in fact she had stabbed her daughter multiple times about the body.”

Fortunately, the authorities aren’t granting her a free pass, as they do in so many religiously-motivated killings - they’re holding her in lieu of $5 million bond.

Sleepwalking is a sleep disorder, characterized by a lack of REM atonia, the component of sleep that normally prevents extensive and coordinated movement of the voluntary muscles during sleep. The treatments for the condition are pretty straightforward. For some people, antidepressants or benzodiazepines will do the trick, but the more typical response is to make the sleep environment safer - by using stair gates, practicing good sleep hygiene, and so forth.

Sleepwalking treated in this manner is not normally very dangerous - until you combine it with the toxic influence of religion, apparently. Anyone looking at this case objectively could not possibly conclude anything except that a mother has brutally killed her daughter because of her belief in a spirit - that has never been demonstrated to exist - that she also believes has powers - which have never been demonstrated to be possible - and that this not-known-to-exist spirit was inhabiting her daughter, and that this justified¹ the killing.

1. At least at the moment of the act, she must have believed this. [↩]

Michael Egnor, writing on the Discovery Institute blog, has said

Complexity can arise without intelligent design, but complexity is not the same thing as design.

I can’t explain the implications any better than Skeptico, so go over there if you want to learn what I think.

It looks like the producers of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed have won the triple crown if dishonesty. They lied about their movie to get interviews with Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, PZ Myers, and others. They have repeatedly cheated to keep people they don’t like out of screenings of the movie. And now, they’ve been accused of copyright infringement, of stealing and slightly altering a clip of cellular activity used in the movie.

XVIVO produced an elaborate, and much-watched movie depicting intracellular activity:

And now Peter Irons, XVIVO’s attorney, has sent a letter to the producers of expelled. Some highlights:

This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright.

It has come to our intention that Premise Media and Rampant Films has produced a film entitled “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” which is scheduled for commercial release and distribution on April 18, 2008. To our knowledge, this film includes a segment depicting biological cellular activity that was copied by computer-generated means from a video entitled “The Inner Life of a Cell.” XVIVO holds the copyright to all the models, processes, and depictions in this video, and has not authorized Premise Media or Rampant Films to make any use of this material.

We have obtained promotional material for the “Expelled” film, presented on a DVD, that clearly shows in the “cell segment” the virtually identical depiction of material from the “Inner Life” video. We particularly refer to the segment of the “Expelled” film purporting to show the “walking” models of kinesic activities in cellular mechanisms. The segments depicting these models in your film are clearly based upon, and copied from, material in the “Inner Life” video.

….

This letter will also serve as notice to you that XVIVO intends to vigorously and promptly pursue its legal remedies for your copyright infringement, unless and until Premise Media, Rampant Films, and their officers, employees, and agents comply with the following demands:

1. That Premise Media, Rampant Films, and its officers, employees, and agents remove the infringing segment from all copies of the “Expelled” film prior to its scheduled commercial release on or before April 18, 2008;

2. That all copies of the “Inner Life” video in your possession or under your control be returned to XVIVO;

3. That Premise Media notify XVIVO, on or before April 18, 2008, of its compliance with the above demands.

Well. Why is this so not a surprise?

I’d imagine complying with #2 would result in a heck of a lot of promo DVDs being shipped to XVIVO.

For more on Expelled, have a look at Scientific American’s reviews, especially the one from Michael Shermer.

Greg Laden reports on Louisiana’s recently-introduced pro-Creationism legislation.

The commentary in the Daily Advertiser points out that Lousiana was the original test case in which creationists forced the issue into the courts, and lost:

In the early 1980s, the Legislature passed a law requiring the teaching of creation science alongside evolution in our public schools. In its 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision, the U.S. Supreme Court smote down the Louisiana law, yea, even unto the dust. The justices cited the Establishment Clause.

Almost immediately, people calling themselves the Discovery Institute decided they could slip creationism into schools if they didn’t explicitly mention God.

The bill is a so-called “academic freedom” bill.

As usual, the religious community is split, with religious extremists favoring the bill, and sensible religious people opposing it:

There’s nothing stupid about believing that God created everything - at least not to me, since that’s what I believe. But intelligent design is an affront to both religion and science.

Another story in the Times-Picayune

The creationists are with us again, determined in the upcoming legislative session to make the whole of Louisiana like Ouachita Parish. Lord, have mercy upon us.

Ouachita Parish adopted an “academic freedom” policy (pdf) in 2006 which has since been used to harass and suppress science teachers teaching evolution in the district. The Louisiana bill is modeled on the Ouachita Parish policy, while “academic freedom” bills introduced in other states were written by, or based on an exemplar written by, the creationist Discovery Institute.

Back to the Times-Picayune:

Now [creationism] has painted on a new face and emerged on the arm of state Sen. Ben Nevers, D-Bogalusa, who is pushing what he humorously terms the “The Louisiana Academic Freedom Act” in the upcoming session.

Nevers has filed Senate Bill 561 with the spurious premise that evolution is a matter of serious scientific debate and that both sides are entitled to a hearing. A lot of people have fallen for that line, including Gov. Bobby Jindal, although, of course, scientists, save a few stray zealots, regard the evidence for evolution as overwhelming.

The acts seem to be consistent with the creationist strategy to get the government to force their religiously extreme views upon children, and also gain large tax subsidies for their “textbook” publishing businesses.

Is anyone else tired of the creationists’ political correctness? Let’s start calling these what they are: creationism acts, not academic freedom acts.

One of the common arguments trotted out by global warming denialists is that:

1. The sun emits cosmic rays
2. The number or energy of these cosmic rays varies with solar activity
3. The Earth’s magnetic field, and the solar wind, tend to divert cosmic rays away from the Earth
4. But when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays hit the Earth
5. Which creates more charged particles in the atmosphere
6. Which somehow causes more cloud formation
7. Which cools the climate
8. But when the solar wind is strong again, then the Earth warms up

This is based on the research hypothesis of Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, so this is not a lunatic idea. What is lunatic is the way that the denialists latched on to the idea before it was tested, and presented it as fact, used it to denigrate other scientists and suggest they are fools, and so on. In real science, you come to these conclusions after the experiments have been done, not before.

But now some experiments have been done, and the hypothesis has not held up very well in testing. Several experiments and analyses have called the hypothesis into serious question over the last couple years.

Now, there’s yet another scientific study which shows that things just don’t work like that. Or at least if they do, the differences between strong and weak solar wind periods are way to small to have a noticeable effect on clouds.

The abstract is not particularly difficult, but I want to make some remarks on it anyway, so here it is with my comments interspersed:

A decrease in the globally averaged low level cloud cover, deduced from the ISCCP infrared data, as the cosmic ray intensity decreased during the solar cycle 22 was observed by two groups.

So cloud cover was observed to decrease, and cosmic ray intensity decreased; this much is known.

The groups went on to hypothesize that the decrease in ionization due to cosmic rays causes the decrease in cloud cover, thereby explaining a large part of the currently observed global warming.

This hypothesis takes advantage of the fact that many times, correlation really does mean causation. Not always - but sometimes.

We have examined this hypothesis to look for evidence to corroborate it.

Yay science! That’s how it works. Someone comes up with an idea about how things might happen, and you get a bunch of interested scientists doing experiments to see if that idea is right.

None has been found and so our conclusions are to doubt it. From the absence of corroborative evidence, we estimate that less than 23%, at the 95% confidence level, of the 11 year cycle change in the globally averaged cloud cover observed in solar cycle 22 is due to the change in the rate of ionization from the solar modulation of cosmic rays.

How does this hurt the denialists’ cause? Well, it doesn’t, because they’re denialists. Mere facts won’t get in the way of their political agenda.

But if they did respect evidence, this analysis puts an upper limit on just how strong the cosmic ray/cloud cover correlation could possibly be. And that upper limit isn’t anywhere near what is required to account for the observed climate change.

The researchers are still arguing about things, with Svensmark basically calling Terry Sloan, the PI of this study, an idiot:

“Terry Sloan has simply failed to understand how cosmic rays work on clouds,” he told BBC News.

To me, saying that a highly-qualified researcher in the same field simply doesn’t understand is a strong sign that the person saying it is on weak ground, although we don’t really know what Svensmark said that didn’t get into the BBC story. But Slaon describes the very elegant experiment that he and his co-investigators did, and it is compelling:

Professor Sloan’s team investigated the link [between cosmic rays and cloud cover] by looking for periods in time and for places on the Earth which had documented weak or strong cosmic ray arrivals, and seeing if that affected the cloudiness observed in those locations or at those times.

“For example; sometimes the Sun ‘burps’ - it throws out a huge burst of charged particles,” he explained to BBC News.

“So we looked to see whether cloud cover increased after one of these bursts of rays from the Sun; we saw nothing.”

Dang, that is good science communication. That boils a really complex and difficult series of physical processes down to something that anybody will have enough attention span to listen to. Kudos to Terry Sloan.

The experiment makes a lot of sense to me. The Earth is not a point collector of cosmic rays; different locations on the Earth gather them unequally. Cosmic rays are highly localized. We see them all the time in CCD camera images of the night sky in my asteroid research¹, and occasionally some images have a striking abundance of cosmic ray strikes that hasn’t occurred at a nearby observatory. Dedicated cosmic ray detectors show that some parts of Earth can experience a veritable storm of cosmic rays, while other parts get the usual amount.

The fact that Sloan took advantage of this well-known localization of cosmic ray strikes, and found no evidence that cosmic rays were even correlated with clouds - let alone causative - is very strong evidence against the denialists’ position.

As I mentioned above, this is probably not going to penetrate the denialists’ understanding, and will make no difference to them in terms of aggressively pursuing their scorched-earth political agenda. They’ve irrevocably burned into their mind the false notion that believing in global warming means you are an enviro-communist. They don’t understand the research, and they don’t want to. But there’s something else they don’t understand: that people can accept the evidence for global warming, and yet still want to drive gasoline-powered automobiles that pollute less. And that pursuing a vigorous domestic and alternative energy policy would result in a strong economic stimulus.

Anyway - scientific evidence is cool², and we’ve got an interesting case here.

1. They are extremely annoying, not only because of the artifact it leaves in the image, but also because you then envision these things flying through your body, which is many times larger than the CCD detector…. [↩]
2. No pun intended. [↩]

The makers of the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, are well-known to lie early and often, even when there is no particular reason.

After kicking PZ Myers out of an Expelled screening, but letting Richard Dawkins in, the creationist cretins said:

• PZ was kicked out because he was screaming at people and causing trouble or something
• PZ was kicked out because he didn’t have an invitation
• PZ was kicked out because the producer of Expelled wanted to make him pay to see the movie
• Dawkins was let in because nobody recognized him
• Dawkins was let in because he used his confusing full name of Clinton Richard Dawkins (calling “Clinton” the surname), which is on his passport
• Dawkins was let in because he’s a kindly English gentleman
• …

Whatever. All those things can’t be true, so some of them are definitely lies.

But now the Expelled people are lying deliberately. When they have a showing, and people sign up, they are going through the sign-up list and vetting the attendees. (They are no doubt scared of an embarrassment similar to that of the Dawkins-Myers fiasco.) Once they’ve found out who the bad guys are - i.e., anyone interested in telling the truth, about science or anything - they tell them that the screening has been cancelled.

But it hasn’t actually been cancelled. They just reschedule it to an hour earlier. And tell the people they do want to come about the change.

Seriously, I’m not making this up - check it out.

About six months ago I had a situation with a person who wanted to come to a party I was throwing at my house. They had done something wrong that had caused a lot of pain to several of my guests, and I didn’t consider myself to be this person’s friend in any case. I had the moral fortitude to tell them that they were not welcome in my home and would not be admitted if they did come to the party. But what do the Expelled people do when faced with a vaguely similar situation? They lie and manipulate people.

Creationists just aren’t capable of telling the truth.

Ok, folks, click you way over to And Say We Did and read about the Orthodox Christians in Russia who have holed up in an underground shelter to await the end of the world.

The problem? Authorities are trying to get them to leave, because mudslides threaten to bury the, uhh, already technically buried shelter - you know what I’m getting at - people will die. Including four children.

Check it out.

Over on Panda’s Thumb, there is a posting about the case of Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian Philo