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April 30, 2008 at 12:44pm
by thecodepounder Alan Boyle writing in MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, How Science Gets Swiftboated:
Ben Stein has done good things and funny things during his more than three decades as an actor, economist and writer (going back to his days as a Nixon speechwriter). His latest work, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is not that good and not that funny. There’s something creepy about the documentary, which blends a no-holds-barred assault on evolutionary theory with what sounds like a high-minded cry for academic freedom. It’s a 90-minute campaign ad, aimed at swiftboating science.
Hmmm… “Swiftboating”- how appropriate.
“If you have a losing hand, you’re going to use every amount of rhetoric you can to distract people from the fact that you don’t have any facts,” Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his lab last week. “And that’s what ‘Expelled’ is all about.”
In legal circles this concept is stated in a time-honored legal maxim: “If the facts are on your side, pound the facts; if the law is on your side, pound the law; if neither is on your side, pound the table.”
Even at the time of 2005’s Kitzmiller v. Dover court decision, it was clear that an argument based on academic freedom would be the next frontier for the intelligent-design debate. But the freedom to teach isn’t absolute. It’s subject to the usual checks and balances of academic institutions, plus the constitutional ban on state establishment of religion - and the idea that the content of a science class should be, well, based on science.
Despite what “Expelled” claims, modern-day biologists aren’t afraid of pointing out where Darwin went wrong. As examples, Carroll cited the current understanding of genetic drift - a type of change over time that is not driven by natural selection - and the discovery that different species of bacteria are swapping genes all the time.
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“In nature, viruses that infect bacteria are carting around cargoes full of genes and moving them around the whole microbial world,” he said. “We better know about that - or we’re gonna die. It’s in our self-interest to understand this phenomenon. And that makes these people … well, the kindest thing we can say is that they’re irresponsible.”
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