“No Intelligence Allowed” in the ID movement
I did it. I actually went out and saw Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the documentary that accuses scientists of silencing critics of evolution. I saw Expelled last Saturday, the day after it was released, and I was able to count five people in the theater.
I’m not going to go into much detail here; people with more time than myself have already answered each and every claim made in the film. However, I would like to point out my biggest complaint about Expelled: they never explained why intelligence design is science in the first place. In fact, this alleged science is presented to the audience as nothing but a clever intuition. The sequence of events literally goes as follows:
- A couple of scientists lost their jobs after mentioning intelligent design (a lie, by the way)
- The cell is really, really complex. Therefore we’ll never find a natural explanation. Cut to a long (possibly stolen) journey through the cell expected to sell blatant argument from incredulity.
- Scientists are suppressing and excluding people who think the complexity of the cell means there is some kind of supernatural power “out there,” kind of like Nazis.
- By the way, Hitler was inspired by the theory of natural selection. Cut to stock footage of Nazi concentration camps.
Perhaps as incoherent and intellectually vacuous as the entire ID movement. Scientists do not take intelligent design seriously because intelligent design doesn’t take science seriously. They’re going to have to do some research and create some relevant, repeatable experiments to establish their assertion – one that barely counts as a hypothesis – if they want any credibility.
Ben Stein would like you to think ID is the little guy getting pushed around by “big science.” However, in all its actions and lack thereof, the little guy shows no intention of even getting along with “big science.” Here the little guy puts up a thin facade – one the collapses with the slightest touch of investigation – all while his radical agenda of backwardness and social reconstruction is obvious for anyone with eyes.
Scientists do not take intelligent design seriously because intelligent design doesn’t take science seriously. They’re going to have to do some research…
You’re demanding research, yet stand with those who work to discriminate against those who would do it. For example, how is Robert Marks supposed to do research into evolutionary informatics with people such as yourself trying to get his computer labs shut down, funding withdrawn, etc.?
Your claims are disingenuous, if you wanted research then you’d allow researchers the freedom to research ID scientifically.
I hardly think funding is a problem for the like of the Discovery Institute. You’ll need to find a better excuse than that.
As a biochemist, I never understood why scientists accepted evolution as science either. It is all conjecture, based on some fraudulent mixed assemblies of ape and human bones.
Evolution is accepted as science because there is so much evidence supporting it. Judging but your comment, I doubt you know much about said evidence (or even the theory in general).
Go take a look at talkorigins.org which is chock full of scientific research, papers and experiments which fully support it.
As for ID research … plenty has been done. Behe for example, as discredited as he is, has done his fair share into it. Of course, he (or anyone else for that matter) has been able to produce any evidence to support their little hypotheses.
Needless to say, ID doesn’t even meet the criteria to be a scientific theory anyhow (no testable mechanism, predictions, etc) so why should universities and labs divert very limited funding? To allow ID, they’d have to change the definition of science itself (as established at the Dover trial).
Scientists attribute certain data to evolution when there is no logical connection. For example, just because there is species variation, does not mean the species is evolving. It was that way to begin with. Just because there is sequence similarity between species, does not mean one came from the other. It just means the original template was a good design, and could be modified to create different creatures.
No. There isn’t any mechanism to prevent species variation from turning two populations into unique species, therefore this is evidence for evolution.
That is just not a scientifically logical statement.
“It was that way to begin with”
Really. And what evidence do you have to support that?
Meanwhile the evidence for evolution is, once again, rather massive. Look at whale fossils, for example, where there is a clear line of changes in the blow holes and remission of legs.
It most certainly is.
Species mutate and adapt to their environments. What’s to stop them from separating into two unique groups and continuing to adapt until they can no longer interbreed? Nothing.
there is a difference between a species and a new genus. There has never been an observed change like this.
What makes you think the simple fact of descent with modification will stop at the level of species?
Please understand that I do not really believe in any of this, I just respond sometimes to the thoughts of others. If I can contribute some clarity, I do, then let people think what they like. The previous comment was about species variation. I am just saying that has not been observed, and if it did , it would result in a new genus.
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