Blue Collar Scientist

The Discovery Institute has written more anti-semitic Holocaust revisionism, this time slandering a recently-passed resolution of the Methodist Church. The DI says:

The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler.

So the Discovery Institute says, among other things, that eugenics specifically comes from Charles Darwin.

Contrast this with what the Methodists’ well-researched resolution actually says:

The study of eugenics did not begin with Hitler or his German scientists, but rather was first promoted by Sir Francis Galton, in England.

Darwinian eugenics, huh?

Poor creationists. They can’t tell the difference between the name Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. No surprise, I guess; they seem to be unable to understand considerably simpler biological concepts.

Hat tip to Bay of Fundie, who has a more complete takedown.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has been out in the theaters now for two weeks, and we can revisit the question: how has it done?

Pretty crappy.

After making 2.9 million on its opening weekend, it has barely made that in the following two weeks, for a total of 5.9 million as of today.

After opening in an unprecedented 1,052 theaters, it has been dropped almost 400 of them; as of today it is in only 656 theaters.

The producers’ claims this would be as big as Fahrenheit 9-11, and indeed even as big as Galileo and Copernicus, continue to be unfulfilled.

I’ve been up to my elbows in telescopes for the last couple days and haven’t been reading my blogroll or news, so it is possible this is already all over the internet and everyone knows about it, but still, I feel like I have to post for the sake of completeness.

I’ve already published a letter from a descendant of holocaust survivors about why she thought that Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was a piece of anti-semitic propaganda. And some of the numerous commentators to our Expelled coverage here have made similar points.

Now, the Anti-Defamation League has made a statement denouncing Expelled (emphasis mine):

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

The Anti-Defamation League was founded to fight anti-Semitism “through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry,” and Expelled is certainly exhibits anti-Semitism, hatred, prejudice, and bigotry in abundance.

Hat tip to JimboB.

Despite my promise to be off the blog for a day and a half, I just had to jump on here and point you to this post, which contains just the right amount of scorn and contempt, and which I seriously wish I had written. Skeptico rocks.

I think I might have to join the fan club.

Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Second Congressional District, spoke to a Nazi party celebrating Hitler’s 119th birthday. For video, go here.

Zirkle claims to be a devoted Christian. That’s his excuse for speaking at a Nazi event:

This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

Zirkle is, as is consistent with his “faith,” a supporter of intelligent design creationism. He thinks that people who home school their children so as to avoid good science education should be refunded a third of their property taxes:

Two of the issue that have been flaming the controversies over public education are the evolution/creation debate and indoctrinating kindergarteners that homosexual domestic partners constitute merely one more acceptable, alternative lifestyle. Our public schools should not be exploiting our elementary school children to become pawns in these highly emotional, divisive debates.

Under the 1st and 14th Amendments, Congress has authority under the due process clause to ensure that states are not depriving citizens of their religious free exercise. Therefore, in any district where public schools take either position on these two issues and force their opinions on public school children, I will propose legislation that will entitle parent(s) to a refund of the approximately 1/3 of their property taxes (or percentage of rent that derives from property taxes) that go the public schools so that the parent(s) can either home school or send their children to a private school.

Now, I’ve not heard of even a single biologist who supports the Nazi cause. But here’s an ID creationist, and such a respectable one¹ that he’s a congressional candidate, who is speaking right there in front of a picture of Hitler and next to a Nazi flag.

What does that say about Expelled’s message that biologists are Nazis?

Orac has a more complete takedown.

1. I use the term loosely. [↩]

I’ve liked other videos put together by this guy, but this time he utterly outdoes himself - and merely by letting Ben Stein talk:

The producers of Expelled, having been notified by XVIVO (pdf) that their movie infringed on XVIVO’s copyright of an animation of the inner workings of a cell, responded to that by almost immediately filing a lawsuit against XVIVO. This, of course, is well known, since it happened more than a week ago.

Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Julian Lennon, and EMI Blackwood Music Inc, have apparently decided not to allow Expelled’s litigious, lawsuit-happy producers strike the first blow in their case. They have filed a lawsuit against Premise Media Corporation, C&S Production LP and Rocky Mountain Pictures, Expelled’s producers and distributors, seeking an injunction preventing them from continuing to use John Lennon’s song Imagine, and also seeking damages.

This story hits a little closer to home than most lawsuits involving big-ticket celebrities and movie distributors. BCS contributor Iatra Polygenos, back when she was a freshly-minted veterinarian, was part of a team that treated one of Yoko Ono’s cats. Iatra is loyal to her clients, even clients that really belonged to her clinicians at a time before she really had clients of her own, so the BCS family is rooting for the plaintiffs in this case, just out of sheer biased loyalty.

As many people have pointed out, plagiarists don’t steal from just one source. If you do it once, you are going to do it again, and again, and again. Plagiarists are serial offenders by nature.

I’m not sure what is going to happen next, but it seems likely that the next shoe to drop will involve Expelled’s alleged stealing of video from PBS. Or it might have something to do with Expelled’s use of the song All these Things That I Have Done, by The Killers, which has also been said to be a result of plagiarism.

What’s sad about these cases is that it is really simple to get rights to clips and music. For the most part, all you have to do is call up whoever owns the rights, and ask for a license to use the material. A fee is negotiated, usually off a fairly standard fee system, you pay it, and you get to use the material¹. The only reason someone wouldn’t do this if they were going to use three major pieces of other peoples’ work in a movie that opens in 1,052 theaters would be - well, that they are bad, evil little people.

1. Granted, the licensing fee for a song of the significance of Imagine would be very high. [↩]

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is out, and it looks pretty certain at this point as though it is only appealing to religious extremists. Predictions from the producers that the movie would make $12 to $15 million on opening weekend, and blow Fahrenheit 9-11 out of the water, have turned out to be no more than smoke from a wet campfire. And the self-satisfied predictions from the producers that this was going to be as big a deal to science as Galileo and Copernicus - well, that was all just silly.

But now that the movie is out, the fringe religious activists that are behind it are going to follow up with certain political action. I think that one of the political actions they are going to take is to try to get the movie screened in schools.

It isn’t a new idea - this was done with An Inconvenient Truth, for which a program was started to distribute free copies to science teachers. I’d expect a program like this to crop up for Expelled sometime soon, and I’m not the only one.

So, the question is - what do we do about it?

I’m of the opinion that the more widely that Expelled is seen the better - movies like this one, which are blatantly antisemitic, obviously misleading and condescending to the audience, and, by most accounts, overwhelmingly boring, really can’t hurt our cause as long as we are in a position to respond to what is happening.

At the moment we have no coherent response. I’m thinking of putting together (along with some of my friends) an information pack for Alaska school districts about the movie, utilizing some of the resources at Expelled Exposed, here, and elsewhere on the net. Perhaps I should seek the collaboration of other potentially interested organizations?

Let me know what you think.

Ron Britton over at Bay of Fundie today has a good post about peculiar (and as he points out, minority) Christian views of science. It is worth a read, and covers such topics as the necessity of science’s naturalistic approach, the strange way that some Christians become separatists (”They invent themselves out of the majority”), and the currently hot topic of how biologists are really Nazis and are conspiring to kill another six million people in the next holocaust.

One remark made in the post, though, caught my attention, and I couldn’t let it go. Eventually I felt it worthwhile to leave a comment. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not disagreeing with Ron in any way here. I’m just pointing out that evolution denialists are even stupider than he makes them out to be. After I wrote it, I decided it might be appropriate to publish it here as well. So here’s my comment in its entirety (quoting Ron first):

The only real connection between evolution and Nazi-ism is that a few people misunderstood evolution, and they misapplied their distorted knowledge to the social sciences. Darwin is not responsible for the misunderstanding and misuse of his theory….

I don’t mean to be contentious, but even though it is technically correct, this is too generous to the evolution-denying religious whackos who want to link Darwin and/or evolution to Hitler and Nazism. Let me explain….

By Darwin’s time, it was already understood that species could change with time. This knowledge was put into practice in selective breeding of crops, flowers, livestock, puppy dogs, and so on, which had been done for centuries by Darwin’s time.

Darwin’s great insight, his big innovation and contribution to biology, was showing that nature itself served as a selective breeding engine - that instead of a human breeder making the choices about which organisms got to reproduce, in the wild it was nature that made such “decisions,” whether this was a result of the size and hardness of seeds that birds were eating, or the influence of storms, or what have you.

So yes, these people misunderstood evolution, and applied their misunderstanding in an evil way. But they didn’t misunderstand Darwin - they were, and are today, too ignorant to even know what Darwin was talking about, and what his contribution to science entailed. The Nazis applied the principles of deliberate, human-controlled selective breeding programs to what they thought were the problems of their society. Stupid people who know less than nothing about evolution somehow decided this was related to Charles Darwin.

The point I’m trying to make is that the evolutionary denialists - who are demonstrably (and sickeningly) gleefully happy about Nazism and the killing of six million people because it shows evolution is evil - are actually ignorant at a profoundly more fundamental level than they are usually called out for.

Let’s be clear here: Six million Jews Gypsies, and unfortunate others weren’t killed in the Holocaust by natural causes. If the denialists are genuinely trying link Darwin to the Holocaust, that’s what they’re saying - in essence, they are claiming that Holocaust victims died, and deservedly so, because they were unfit. Which is remarkably similar to what Hitler claimed.

But it isn’t true. Holocaust victims were killed by people, not nature; and people already understood well before Darwin’s time the effect that killing off a population - of people, or cattle, or whatever else - would have.