A Lot of Silliness Over Ben Stein's "Expelled" Movie

I haven't seen Ben Stein's film, "Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed" but I figure it must really have tweaked the big red noses of certain scientists and academics. Think of the sound an old-fashioned car horn makes: "Bee-Beep! Bee-Beep!"

Yes, getting your big red honker tweaked can be embarrassing, especially in front of all the students you are trying to indoctrinate, the ones who are supposed to think you are an infallible genius. Scientists aren't sitting still for these nose-tweakings and have launched a counterattack at a website set up by the National Center for Science Education. The website is called "Expelled Exposed," wherein the aggrieved scientists with the swollen snoots point out all the fallacies and mistakes of Ben Stein and other neanderthalls who believe (1) that evolution is far from a proven fact, (2) that it does not explain the origins of life on Earth and, in fact, science hasn't a clue as to those origins; and (3) evolutionary scientists have themselves evolved into a quasi-religion who view skeptics as heretics, fit only for derision and ostracism.

Well the NCSE recommended another website of British scientists who explain why evolution is, in fact, fact. The website is NewScientist. NewScientist says of evolution:

If you think you understand it, you don't know nearly enough about it

It will soon be 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book ever written. In it, Darwin outlined an idea that many still find shocking – that all life on Earth, including human life, evolved through natural selection.

Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. Countless fossil discoveries allow us to trace the evolution of today's organisms from earlier forms. DNA sequencing has confirmed beyond any doubt that all living creatures share a common origin. Innumerable examples of evolution in action can be seen all around us, from the pollution-matching pepper moth to fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu. Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.

Well there you have it folks, evolution is a proven scientific fact and no further discussion is needed or necessary. Sort of like the facts about Global Warming.

Anyone who would say something as transparently false as NewScientist's last sentence above has already utterly destroyed all of their own credibility. Objective they are not.

NewScientist then provides a list of misconceptions about evolution as well as a list of "creationist myths," followed by their rebuttals of these misconceptions and myths. They are hardly convincing as to the evolutionist point of view. See the following example.

One "myth" NS considers is the "creationist" assertion Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms. (It is intellectually dishonest to imply that only "creationists" believe that evolution is mathematically improbable, but that's another discussion.)

Here's their argument against mathematical improbability:

To understand evolution, you need to appreciate three things. Firstly, that
quadrillion-to-one chances actually happen all the time. Secondly that, while mutation is random, which mutations survive often is not. And thirdly, given enough time, the accumulation of one beneficial mutation after another can produce amazingly complex systems. Natural selection can be seen as a kind of improbability drive that – given enough time – makes the apparently impossible extremely likely.

If you pick even the simplest creatures alive today and calculate the odds of getting their genome by randomly shuffling DNA sequences, you'll find they are pretty astronomical. Even matching the sequence of the simplest virus is stupendously unlikely.

So there you have it, folks. Quadrillion to one chances actually happen all the time. This is their answer to the "unlikely" argument?? Sounds to me like they just refuted themselves.

Well, if they are correct, any day now we can expect a roomfull of chimpanzees with keyboards to retype the complete works of Shakespeare. Or a cyclone to blow through a junkyard and create a fully assembled Boeing 787. Given enough time, it could happen.

I do believe that some form of evolution might be possible and I don't completely discount the possibility. But the whole recent arguments and mobilization of scientists to refute and demean Ben Stein and other nay-sayers only proves the point of his film: scientists are close-minded in their own way and in support of their own prejudices, and sometimes downright intolerant of other opinions.

All of which raises the question: what the heck are you evolutionary scientists so afraid of anyway?