Blue Collar Scientist

(The title of this post is best explained here.)

The box-office results for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed were pretty mixed. The opening weekend was far lower than producers’ expectations, but still pretty high. Yet the high earnings were mainly a result of the number of theaters the movie opened in - the per-theater earnings were pretty low. I’ve covered all this here, and concluded that Expelled is bad news, but not anywhere near as bad as it could be, and not nearly the success the creationists are making it out to be.

This balanced assessment is not what you would get if you were reading science framist Chris Mooney’s blog. He leads with:

Expelled a Box Office Success

I merely report the facts: Expelled, opening at over 1,000 theaters this weekend, has raked in $ 3.15 million, placing it ninth at the box office. In terms of political documentaries, it is already the eighth highest grossing of all time.

This does a lot to show that for Chris, “framing” means “misleading people with data and statistics.” First, it isn’t clear to me that this documentary should be categorized as a political one - it’s a religious documentary, if you ask me (though it could also be considered science fiction and fantasy). Second, he says nothing about the demographics of where the movie is screening. Third, he says nothing about the per-theater receipts, which are dismal. Despite having all that information available to him, he says “I merely report the facts.” Not so, Chris, you report a carefully selected and edited set of facts. And isn’t it funny - that’s just what the makers of Expelled did.

In any case, the figures Mooney apparently cites (but neglects to link to) can be compared to figures for documentaries in general (the only two categories available), where Expelled is currently number 26.

Another weird voice about the impact of the movie is that of Randy Olson, maker of A Flock of Dodos, a documentary about evolution and creationism that took a neutral point of view. Despite having previously said that Expelled was no problem…

I had heard about “the Ben Stein movie,” over a year ago when a friend in Toronto told me her best friend’s boyfriend was a cameraman on the movie. I had tried to warn everyone, “if this thing turns out to be entertaining, the evolution world is in trouble.”

It isn’t. Crisis averted. Thanks to Ben Stein. We can now throw this on the scrap heap alongside the growing mountain of boring global warming documentaries. And folks, warn your children, don’t use film to try and educate people. It’s an entertainment medium.

…he now says that Expelled is a massive problem and a huge success for the creationists:

This weekend Ben Stein’s anti-evolution movie, “Expelled,” had a HUGE opening, estimated to rake in over $3 million dollars.

Again, no mention of the number of screens the movie was on, or the low per-theater receipts. He goes on in condescending fashion:

To counter the blockbuster power of “Expelled,” the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.

That should probably take care of the problem.

You know what? I’m really fed up with the bureaucratic approach to communicating science. So much so that the International Year of Astronomy still strikes me as a potentially pointless exercise (but I have an open mind, and am heartened by Pamela Gay’s involvement - we’ll see how it goes). And I’m a frequent vocal critic of activism by institutional committee, which is what Olson describes here.

But really, this is a bit over the top, even for me. Olson is criticizing institutions that are sharply limited by their funding sources over what they are allowed to do. It’s an unfair slur. He should be agitating to change the rules, not condemning these institutions for following them.

Moving into the comments, Olson tells us who to blame:

You should focus your anger on the people who are paid to communicate evolution broadly. They should have created a voice for evolution so loud and powerful that disinformers like Ben Stein are drowned out. There should be five popular pro-evolution movies at the box office right now, instead of none.

Does anyone else find it funny that a filmmaker, who has never made a pro-evolution film, is criticizing those of us who aren’t filmmakers for not having made a bunch of pro-evolution films?

Having gotten the matter of blame out of the way, he then tells us what to do:

why doesn’t somebody run a film festival for pro-evolution films?

I suppose because doing that is expensive, and the people paid to do science communication work on shoestring budgets. I also suppose it is because people who know evolutionary biology don’t generally know how to run a film festival. But I’m only guessing. A commenter to the blog makes another cogent point, responding to Olson’s suggestion that a high-school kid who made an evolution movie would have nowhere to send it to:

A high-school kid? Youtube of course. And that has the potential to reach an audience larger than Flock of Dodos and Expelled combined.

I find the idea of a “film festival of pro-evolution films” as outreach hopelessly naive, if not just self-important. 99.9% of the public couldn’t name a single major international documentary film festival (let alone a specialized one), and a vast majority probably don’t even know documentary film festivals exist at all.

Olson then goes on to piss all over people like me:

It’s called supporting innovation. It DOES NOT HAPPEN in the world of science communication right now.

Right, Randy. I go into the schools 60-70 times a year and communicate science. Half the time I’m linking up to a school above the Arctic circle while I’m in southcentral Alaska using my broadband internet and a camera on my computer. I’m using 3-D models in my presentations. I teach in a roundtable format. I get funding for supplies and models for the classrooms I support by hook or by crook. Everything I do is based on how we know various scientific facts, and everything I do has students design an experiment so we can learn more about the subject. Everything I do can be part of at least two, sometimes three or four areas of study (astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology).

This is not the science classroom you attended if you were raised in the United States at any time prior to about 2003. I’m so innovative that the teacher’s union isn’t sure they love me or hate me. Half the time I’m teaching a subject in a classroom that the teacher isn’t rated “highly qualified” to teach. Half the teachers interested in having me in their classrooms can’t figure out how to get the job done with the resources they have to hand. What I teach is way beyond the curricular requirements of the districts I teach in.

And I do this all for free, not necessarily because I’m a good guy and generous with my time - but because there is no money to get subject matter experts to bring this kind of innovative science communication into the classroom. What could I do if I could spend even the meager salary of a classroom teacher on my efforts each year? Probably quite a lot - the problem being, of course, that if you have that much money to spend, you are going to spend it on a teacher, not on me. And I perfectly understand why that is the case - so I go on doing what I do pro bono.

But all this isn’t good enough for Randy Olsen. I’m guessing he’s never heard of me¹, and doesn’t have the first idea about what I do.

Perhaps we science communicators could get some constructive criticism from supposedly expert pro-science communicators for a change? Eh? Please?

1. Yes, I’m calling him ignorant. Anyone who doesn’t understand what grassroots activists do, and how many of us there are, and still says the kinds of things Olson says, is profoundly ignorant. [↩]