Like other types of “junk” DNA, Darwinists have almost universally considered pseudogenes to be evolutionary garbage--once-functional genes that were rendered functionless by random mutations. But a recent article in Nature concludes the following:

“Our findings indicate a function for pseudogenes in regulating gene expression by means of the RNA interference pathway.”

Dr. Egnor must be tired of always being wrong - or at least he would be if he had the insight and intellectual honesty to see how persistently wrong he is. Alas, so far he has not demonstrated such insight. I have been engaged in an ongoing blog debate with Dr. Michael Egnor, who writes for the propaganda blog…Egnor has mangled most of his arguments, has misrepresented my opinions, has cruelly assaulted logic (as you can see he has a proper home at the Discovery Institute) - but now he demonstrates that he is incapable of reading a simple sentence and comprehending its meaning…His arguments are persistently wrong. He has not acknowledged his prior egregious errors - which is evidence for lack of insight and/or intellectual dishonesty. He completely misrepresented what I wrote -so either he did not understand it, or didn’t care. Egnor has mangled his arguments and abused logic. These are NOT personal attacks - these are legitimate criticisms of his behavior.

My "cruel assault on logic" and "incapability of reading a simple sentence" have seduced me into very bad behavior…denialism:

When it comes to materialism, I’m a denialist to the bone. But what is it about my denialism that so infuriates Dr. Novella? He deigns to inform:

Dr. Egnor…forced me to spell out in detail the logic behind my statement.

In a paper published in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience — "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain" — Chun Siong Soon and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Germany show that brain activity may precede conscious decision-making by as much as ten seconds. Subjects were asked to push a button with either the right hand or the left hand, which they were free to choose. Seven to ten seconds before the conscious decision, brain activity sometimes appeared that appeared to correlate with unconscious decision making. The correlation was slight. The specific hemisphere in which the brain activity occurred correlated with the hand used sixty percent of the time (no correlation at all would be fifty percent).

Dr. Novella sees clear evidence…to support his own materialist ideology! He writes:

Given my recent posts concerning materialism vs dualism (does the brain cause mind), I also want to point out that this research falls squarely in the materialism camp. Causes precede their effects - brain activity precedes conscious awareness and action - the brain causes mind. That much seems pretty clear.

I disagreed. I pointed out that Chun’s study merely demonstrated that an unconscious mental state may (weakly) correlate with a simultaneous unconscious brain state. That correlation wasn’t evidence either way for causation, which is the issue in the materialism/dualism debate. Perhaps the unconscious mind caused the brain state, or perhaps the brain state caused the unconscious mind. Perhaps the causation is more complex. Chun’s study didn’t address these issues.

This observation led to Dr. Novella’s pique:

Dr. Michael Egnor…has cruelly assaulted logic…he is incapable of reading a simple sentence and comprehending its meaning…His arguments are persistently wrong. He has not acknowledged his prior egregious errors - which is evidence for lack of insight and/or intellectual dishonesty.

Correcting my "cruel assault on logic" and my "intellectual dishonesty," Dr. Novella sets me straight:

Further - there are two types of correlation to consider in this study, and Egnor is choosing the one that he feels makes his point without ever acknowledging that he is doing so. One correlation is the correlation between brain activity and the decision-making process. This correlation in the study is very strong. The other correlation is between the particular pattern of brain activity and the specific choice that is made - this correlation is weak in the study: only 60%.

There are indeed two types of correlation in Chun's study. The first type is the correlation involving general brain activity recorded 7-10 seconds before the subjects made the conscious decision to use a specific hand to press the button. However, the recording of "brain activity" 10 seconds prior to the decision merely means that the subjects were thinking 10 seconds before the decision — it provides no evidence as to what they were thinking about. The regions of the brain that were activated are known to be associated in some circumstances with planning, but the association is often nebulous, and activation of these regions provides little in the way of information about the content of the thought. Perhaps they were thinking, "What if I don’t feel like pressing the button at all," or "what shall I get for lunch?" or "how much are they going to pay me for doing this?" The mere recording of generic brain activity during the study is meaningless, because the subjects were continuously conscious, and there’s no clear evidence, without hemispheric localization, to infer that the brain activity involved an unconscious decision about hand selection, which was the whole point of the study. So Dr. Novella’s assertion that the first brain activity correlation was "very strong" suggests that Dr. Novella didn’t understand the study. Ten seconds before subjects pressed the button there’s no doubt they were thinking about something.

It’s what they were thinking about — subconsciously — that matters and that was the point of the study. And it’s the side of the brain activity — the laterality and its correspondence to hand selection — that matters. It is only this second correlation that pertains to this question of hand choice. Yet this correlation is very weak. Forty percent of the time the brain activity was on the wrong side of the brain, and this would contradict the hypothesis that the activity represented lateralized planning. And of course 50% correlation — a shift of only 10% of the data from the correct to the incorrect hemisphere — would lead to a conclusion of mere chance, with no correlation at all with planning.

So Dr. Novella describes as "very strong" a correlation that means nothing (brain activity occurs in conscious subjects), and claims as vindication for his materialist ideology a marginal correlation between brain and hand lateralization that is barely greater than chance.

Furthermore, even if one accepts this weak correlation, the correlation does little to advance the materialist theory of causation of the unconscious mental process. Both materialists and dualists believe that brain activity often correlates with mental activity. It's causation that we disagree about, and as we'll see, careful consideration of the results of Chun's experiment cast doubt on the strict materialist theory of brain-mind causation.

Do Chun’s results (60% correlation with hand choice; 40% lack of correlation with hand choice) really mitigate in favor of the materialist hypothesis? Consider Dr. Novella’s own criterion for this debate:

"If the mind is completely a product of the material function of the brain, then we will be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity – no matter how we choose to look at it."

Dualism predicts the inverse:

If dualism is true and the mind is partly the product of the material function of the brain and partly the product of something else, then we will not always be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity – no matter how we choose to look at it

Keep in mind that materialism posits that mind states are always identical to brain states, because mind states are brain states, entirely. The materialist prediction is that the correlation between mind state and brain state must be 100%, minus experimental error. Dualism posits that the correspondence between mind states and brain states is not exact, because there are aspects of mind states that are not identical to brain states. Dualism predicts that the correlation is less than 100%, and that this lack of correlation cannot be explained away entirely as experimental error.

Chun’s research shows that 40% of the time there is no unique brain function lateralized to the hemisphere involved in the hand choice, despite the presumption that an unconscious mental state is active at that time. Their research reveals very poor correlation between mind states and brain states. Is the correlation very poor — not much more than no correlation — entirely because of experimental error (if materialism is true), or is the correlation very poor because... part of the mind state isn't caused by the brain state (if dualism is true)? If materialism is true, and the actual correlation is 100%, then the experimental error of Chun's experiment is so high as to render the results virtually worthless. If that's true, why would Dr. Novella choose this research to lend support to his theory? And why would the experimental error be so high? fMRI is one of the most sensitive methods we have of non-invasively measuring local neuronal activity. Its spatial resolution is excellent (3 to 6 millimeters), and it is so precise and so reliable that we use it to plan surgical resection of tumors and epileptic foci very close to critical brain regions. Was the failure of fMRI to detect any lateralizing activity in 40% of patients entirely due to error inherent in the technique? Is Dr. Novella claiming that those subjects had no unconscious processing? If Dr. Novella is claiming that the experimental error is genuinely 40% (which it must be if materialism is true), what evidence can he provide that all of the lack of correlation is mere error? Can Dr. Novella cite any other fMRI studies that have demonstrated such astonishingly high experimental error? Does he even understand that there is a problem with his claims about the research?

Then of course there's the most parsimonious explanation: there is poor correlation between mind state and brain state measured by fMRI because the mind state isn't entirely caused by the brain state. What if the failure to detect lateralized brain activity in 40% of subjects were not caused entirely by experimental error, but was partly the result of an absence of specific brain activity synchronous with unconscious planning? With lack of correlation at 40%, most researchers (without an ideological bias) would conclude that the processes — the mind state and the brain state — were obviously not identical. That would be clear evidence for dualism — the theory that the mind is not entirely reducible to the brain.

Dr. Novella seems unaware of the implications of the very research that he cites. By his own criteria, the evidence of very poor correlation between brain state and mind state mitigates in favor of the dualist view, not the materialist view.

Ironically, Dr. Novella asserts that this evidence — evidence that by his own criteria mitigates against materialism and for dualism — falls clearly into the materialist camp. No doubt it does. Weak and misinterpreted evidence seems to pile up in the materialist camp.

Dr. Novella is a materialist ideologue. He has difficulty drawing coherent scientific inferences, and his rhetorical style is little more than condescension and contempt. He brooks no questions. When it comes to challenges to his personal materialistic ideology, Dr. Novella sneers, dissembles, and ultimately invokes parsimony:

The problem with [dualism] is that it is unnecessary - it is adding an unnecessary step and violates Occam’s razor.

William of Occam was a 14th Century English scholastic philosopher and a father of modern epistemology. He was also a Franciscan friar, and by his vows (…God is Spirit, and man is created from dust and in God’s image…) — he was a dualist.

So even dualists end up, posthumously and incongruously, in the materialist camp. Denialists are everywhere.

In fact, Ayala’s 2007 PNAS article starkly promotes materialist views of evolution: He concludes that "evolution conveys chance and necessity jointly enmeshed in the stuff of life; randomness and determinism interlocked in a natural process..." Ayala’s PNAS article contends that it was “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment” to remove "a Creator or other external agent" from biology. Just to make sure you aren’t bringing any kind of purpose or teleology into evolution, Ayala’s 2007 PNAS article explains that an evolutionary account "does not necessitate recourse to a preordained plan, whether imprinted from the beginning or through successive interventions by an omniscient and almighty Designer." Ayala isn't saying that this "preordained plan" might exist, for he is adamant that "Biological evolution ... is not the outcome of preconceived design." (emphasis added) He forcefully concludes in his PNAS article that Darwin completed a “conceptual revolution” that “is nothing if not a fundamental vision that has forever changed how mankind perceives itself and its place in the universe.”

Those statements were made in 2007, but yet now Ayala contends that “it is not impossible that evolution was guided by God” and that therefore “science is compatible with religion.” Unfortunately, Ayala has yet to provide a clear, detailed rationale for how he reconciles all of those statements.

But the evidence suggests no such thing. Instead, it points to the willingness of evolutionary biologists to believe just-so stories, and to the ideological corruption of the National Institutes of Health and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Even though centrosomes control many features of the cell (such as its morphology and the process of division), they are of much less interest to neo-Darwinists than cell nuclei, because centrosomes contain no DNA [¹], so they cannot provide the DNA mutations that are assumed to be the raw materials for evolution. Thus many aspects of centrosomes, including their chemical composition, structure, function, and mode of replication—not to mention their origin—are (in the jargon of we-now-know-almost-everything Darwinists) “poorly understood.”

Along come Mark and Mary Anne Alliegro of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In the abstract of an article published online May 5 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (the complete article is not yet available, except to PNAS subscribers), the Alliegros report that some RNAs they extracted from surf clams are “centrosome-associated transcripts representing a structurally unique intron-poor collection of nuclear genes.” Since a subset of these RNAs “contain functional domains that are highly conserved across distant taxa,” the Alliegros conclude that they may “serve as cytological progenitors of the centrosome and may support a symbiogenetic model for its evolution.”

Wait a minute. As the ScienceDaily press release explains, “only two cellular components—the mitochondria and the chloroplasts—are generally accepted by evolutionary biologists as having a symbiogenetic origin.” This is because only mitochondria and chloroplasts (as far as we know) contain DNA that is inherited independently of the nuclear DNA. Since these tiny organelles contain DNA and look a bit like bacteria, the hypothesis of symbiogenesis asserts that they were once free-living prokaryotes that were engulfed by other prokaryotes to form eukaryotic cells. The hypothesis has lots of evidentiary problems, but whatever plausibility it seems to have with regard to mitochondria and chloroplasts completely evaporates in the case of centrosomes.

The problem is not just that centrosomes contain no DNA. The most solidly established function of centrosomes is that they serve as the organizing centers for microtubules, but microtubules occur only in eukaryotes, not in prokaryotes. Furthermore, centrosomes in animal cells contain two turbine-like centrioles oriented at a right angle to each other. Nobody knows for sure what centrioles do, nor why they occur in orthogonal pairs, and their origin is a complete mystery. There is no evidence that centrosomes or centrioles ever existed — or ever could have existed — in anything other than eukaryotic cells. The idea that free-living centrosome-like organisms were once engulfed by other primitive organisms is about as implausible as you can get, and the implausibility is not lessened by the presence in centrosomes of RNAs “that are highly conserved across distant taxa.”

In this case, evolutionary jargon has taken the place of clear thinking. Yet the National Institutes of Health supported this medically useless speculation with our tax dollars, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA elevated it to the status of “peer-reviewed” science—part of the “overwhelming evidence” for evolution.

--------------------

¹ W. F. Marshall and J. L. Rosenbaum, "Are There Nucleic Acids in the Centrosome?" Current Topics in Developmental Biology 49 (2000): 187-205.

Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience.

Velvet worms are thought to be descended of insects, but the evidence for this is scanty; they look a lot like worms, and they have remained unchanged for millions of years. They live along fallen leaves in tropical forests and have two nozzles, one on each side of their head, which can fire off a very quickly drying glue at their prey. These two sprays crisscross back and forth, as if lassoing the victim. Once the victim is securely ensnared, the worm bites a hole in its body, injects digestive juices, and then slurps up the dissolving victim. Curiously, this glue does not dry within the worm’s body, and its digestive juices are well contained. Imagine the difficulty if the intermediate glue dried within the velvet worm, clogging the nozzles, or dried too slowly, allowing the victim to get away before becoming ensnared.

Taken from: Billions of Missing Links
Copyright © 2007 by Geoffrey Simmons, M.D.
Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR
Used by Permission
www.harvesthousepublishers.com

"What on earth has happened to Ben Stein?" asks Derbyshire. "He and I go a long way back." Are the two close? Are they old pals who have been through a lot together? "No," he says, "I've never met the guy."

But wait. How can this be? How can Derbyshire have forged this bond of friendship with Stein without actually knowing him? "Though I've never met him," he explains, "I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him."

Got it.

In fact, Derbyshire displays an amazing ability, far beyond that of the rest of us, to engage with people and things even though he has had no direct contact with them. Take "Expelled" for example. "So what's going on here with this stupid 'Expelled' movie?" he asks — a question which could have been answered by the simple expedient of actually watching it. A man with Derbyshire's special talent, however, is not hampered by such constraints:

That's right: Derbyshire reviews "Expelled" without actually having seen it. This is a man who has friends he has never met, and who can review movies he has never seen. It is perhaps fortuitous that Bill Buckley, the founder of National Review, recently passed from among us: this is a talent I am not sure he would have fully appreciated.

This ability to judge a movie without having to suffer the indignity of actually watching it surely sets Derbyshire apart. Who else could accomplish the task with so few tools: a little hearsay, a few second hand reports—and perhaps a Ouija board. This is a critical skill at which the rest of us can only marvel.

Most film critics attend screenings; Derbyshire conducts a séance.

And what does Derbyshire think of "Expelled" after not having seen it? Very little, it seems. "It's pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance..." One would think, given Derbyshire's method of reviewing movies, that he would have a greater appreciation for ignorance and the uses to which it can be put.

But with his judgment in the can, Derbyshire, like his friend Stein in the movie itself, goes hunting for answers to the question of how could Stein have participated in such an unseemly project. "The first thing that came to mind," he offers, "was Saudi money."

That's right. Saudi money.

Now I will confess that the oil-rich Saudis are not high on my list of people in whose interest it is to explain the dinosaurs away. But as unlikely as this thesis may sound, we must remember with whom we are dealing here, and how far his apparently occult powers of perception seem to extend. Derbyshire may indeed have never met a Saudi, or even been to their country, in which case, who could contend with his knowledge on the subject?

Derbyshire himself has to finally abandon this explanation. "For one thing, Stein is Jewish." There you go. "For another, he is rich, and doesn't need the money." Too true. And then there is Stein's character, which Derbyshire testifies to on the basis of the long and intimate association that he has not had with Stein: "No," he concludes, "Ben Stein is no crook."

The kind of long, painful process Derbyshire goes through to conclude that Stein is not, in fact, motivated by men wearing white robes (No, not those. We don't need to suggest that theory, since it might involve another long thought process and derail Derbyshire from his greater purpose) is one he might well have chosen instead to apply to the merits of the movie itself.

But why bother?

One of the beauties of Derbyshire's sibylline method of reviewing movies is that it places the reviewer at a safe distance from the actual film itself, allowing the critic to say things about the film that are unconstrained by what is actually in it. The downside, of course, is that the reviewer may get it all wrong and look like a complete idiot. But it would be difficult, if not impossible, for us to place him in this latter category, largely because we have actually read his review, thereby placing us perhaps too close to the subject for proper judgment.

But those looking for weaknesses in Derbyshire's review would point to things like his criticism of the quality of the graphics in the movie, which were actually quite good (though probably not as impressive when, as in Derbyshire's case, you don't actually see them), and to his uncritical acceptance of virtually every wild-eyed allegation made against the production of the film.

But these indiscretions are tolerable compared with the alternative. In fact, the best defense of Derbyshire's critical approach of not directly exposing himself to the things he criticizes is to point out what happens when he does.

Although Derbyshire turns his nose up at actually seeing the movies he reviews, he is willing to get his hands dirty when it comes to creationists themselves. And indeed we have to admire Derbyshire's noble effort to actually get to know these people. It is admirable that he would lower himself to do this given the distasteful nature of the whole business:

Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot.

So even though Derbyshire has largely forsaken the direct application of his senses as a basis for making judgments, at least he has not lost all of them. He can "smell" these creationists, and, if they are not too densely congregated, he can even tolerate the odor. It is a measure of his commitment to the truth that, despite the offense to his olfactory sense, he is still willing to pursue it no matter into what unpleasant situations it might lead him.

One can imagine him, conducting his research at a local Baptist church social, reaching out to shake with his right hand, while holding a handkerchief to his nose with his left. But for a man concerned with the very fate of Western civilization, it is a sacrifice he is willing to make.

Yes, Western civilization: This is what Derbyshire feels is at stake in the debate over Intelligent Design, and it is "creationists" who threaten it. And who are these creationists? They are "shifty," dishonest, nasty, and (I hesitate to repeat the term in the context of a Derbyshire film review) uninformed. They even have "bad manners."

Apparently, they weren't observing proper table etiquette at that Baptist social.

And to what can we attribute these moral shortcomings? Again, Derbyshire has a hypothesis. But, unlike the Saudi Theory of Why Ben Stein Supports Creationism, this one somehow makes it through Derbyshire's rigorous verification process: "My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are."

His proof for this theory? The fact that many Intelligent Design advocates deny they are creationists. Now one explanation of why these people might deny they are creationists is the fact that they actually aren't. But this doesn't fool Derbyshire. No, sir. These people are, he says,

a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and [who] set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science" engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas.

Derbyshire does not offer any actual proof for this. In fact, he doesn't even give examples of the misrepresentations he says characterize the movie. "The misrepresentations in Expelled are far too numerous for me to list here, and the task is unnecessary since others have done it." After all, he didn't bother to watch the movie before reviewing it, so why should he offer actual proof of what is wrong with it?

"Western civilization has many glories," he says:

There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

It is on behalf of these testaments to greatness (and, oh, did he forget to mention good manners?) that Derbyshire charges Intelligent Design with "blood libel on Western Civilization." After all, would these achievements even have been attempted if it hadn't been for Darwin? Would the painting, and music, and architecture of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries have even been possible without the concept of Natural Selection? Is there any great building in Rome or Florence or Vienna that does not know owe its very existence to ...

Oh, wait.

Darwin didn't come along until the 19th century, did he? In fact, almost all of the things in Derbyshire's list of great Western achievements were accomplished by men who believed that this world was ... the product of design.

But what about science? We can't say that science isn't in danger from these dishonest, shifty, unmannerly people, can we?

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone.

Of course, at least Stein has actually seen the world, which is more, Stein might respond, than Derbyshire has done with his movie. In fact, that a man whose preferred means of critiquing movies is akin to looking into a crystal ball would venture to criticize anyone for being unscientific is an irony perhaps too obvious for a mind as esoteric as Derbyshire's to notice.

Well, okay, but how about Rudyard Kipling, whom Derbyshire quotes as an example of someone who courageously manned the battlements in the defense of the West, and whose name he invokes as a model of how we too should stand in the fight against the barbarians who now go under the name "creationists"?

Kipling? The author of the Just So Stories, in which the peculiarities of various animals are explained in mythological terms ("How the Camel Got his Hump," "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin," "How the Leopard Got His Spots")? That Kipling? Well, okay, he's not exactly the paragon of science, but okay. We're hip with that.

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.

Trouble is, if it is Kipling's cause in which Derbyshire wants Ben Stein to join him, it is Derbyshire, not Stein who will have to rethink his position in order to do so.

I just want to see the look on Derbyshire's face when, after Stein has joined him on the battlements and they are singing their rousing war songs, they get to this particular stanza:

God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle line
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

("Recessional," by Rudyard Kipling)

Oh, and for Derbyshire's sake we should probably point out that the deity referred to here is not Darwin.

So here I am trying to figure out how a study might be concocted to explain this moving account of a sports team that showed great conscience and panache. Surely someone can get a government grant to find a Darwinian answer to replace the common sense one.

(1) 2001 car models more closely resemble 2008 car models than do 1922 car models, but no one is arguing that cars evolved without intelligent design;
(2) It ignores that ID does not dispute the notion that species on earth have changed over time, but merely disputes the claim that the main driving force generating all complex biological features is natural selection acting on random mutation; and
(3) It forgets the much bigger problem that Neo-Darwinism has trouble explaining the paucity of intermediate forms in the fossil record;

Bailey Mimics Shermer: Deny Discrimination and Blame the Victims
Bailey also adopts the Shermer-style while discussing the persecution of Richard Sternberg: he ignores all the evidence of discrimination against Sternberg and parrots Sternberg's persecutors as evidence that there was no persecution. Interestingly, Bailey prefaces his discussion of Sternberg by citing the alleged "creationist" connections of Sternberg and Stephen Meyer. Why would this be relevant to talk about unless Bailey felt that somehow it would legitimize attacking Sternberg? In other words, Bailey believes that being a Darwin-skeptic delegitimizes your academic stature.

Bailey similarly attacks Caroline Crocker because she believes that, "There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution." Again, why is that relevant to point-out unless he thinks that her expressing such a viewpoint would be grounds for legitimately discriminating against her?

Finally, when discussing the denial of tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, Bailey cites an atheist religion professor, Hector Avalos (who persecuted Gonzalez at Iowa State), to attack Gonzalez's scientific arguments for cosmic design. Again, Bailey justifies discriminating against Gonzalez because Gonzalez supports ID:

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his ID views? Although the university denies it, my guess is probably yes. Why? On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo's colleagues could reasonably worry that his ID views weren't likely to lead to fruitful research results. Gonzalez was not thrown into a concentration camp for his views. He just didn't get tenure.

Bailey's Double Standard
Bailey attacks the film because one of the producers is "a Christian evangelical software millionaire," devoting much space to attacking ID by asserting that the "Wedge Document" expresses religious motivations behind ID. Bailey apparently never stops to consider the hypocrisy of his charges, because throughout the film, Darwinists happily express, on camera, anti-religious motivations for promoting evolution. As one review of the film discusses:

[P.Z.] Myers, a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, compared religion to a hobby, saying it brings some people the type of comfort one can find in knitting.

“What we have to do is get it to a place where religion is treated at the level it should be treated,” he told Stein in the on-screen interview. “That it’s something fun that people get together to do on the weekends and really doesn’t affect their life as much as it has been so far.”

Devaluing religion, Myers said, would benefit society by providing “greater science literacy, which is going to lead to the erosion of religion and then we’ll get more and more science to replace it, and that will displace more and more religion, which will allow more and more science in, and we’ll eventually get to the point where religion has taken that appropriate place as a side dish rather than a main course.

“If you separate out the ethical message from religion, what have you got left? You’ve got a bunch of fairy tales.”

Dr. Peter Atkins, professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, was more direct in his ‘Expelled’ assessment.

“Religion, it’s just fantasy, basically,” he said. “It’s particularly empty of any explanatory content and is evil as well.”

So it seems that the double-standard type-reasoning used at Reason.com construes any statements about religion as criticism against ID proponents but ignores anti-religious statements when they come from leading Darwinists. A more blatant double-standard would be hard to imagine. (For more rebuttals regarding the "Wedge Document," see here, here, here, or here.)

Conclusion
Ronald Bailey's review of Expelled is surprisingly candid in that he unashamedly endorses the intolerance towards ID in academic circles. Not only does he justify discriminating against ID proponents because of their views, but he suggests adopting a double-standard, where alleged religious motives count ONLY against ID but anti-religious intentions never count against Darwinism. Bailey might not realize this, but his intolerant statements justify the fundamental premise behind the Expelled film: there is discrimination against ID proponents in the academy. For this reason, I'm glad he published his review for all to see.

Having not seen the documentary that he proposes to criticize, Derbyshire is nonetheless quite certain that he knows what it conveys. “It is pretty plain,” he asserts, “that it is a piece of creationist porn.” Perhaps I will be forgiven for suggesting that John Derbyshire’s late-night scrutiny of the Internet may have corrupted his habitual search for le mot juste. Expelled has nothing to do with creationism, and if it is pornographic, the details have not become widely known.

Expelled makes a point far plainer than pornography and points to a phenomenon just as widespread. The scientific community is intolerant of dissent and morbidly so when it comes to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Those who reject criticism because it is unwelcome have in John Derbyshire acquired an ally of the best sort. He is not disposed to ask questions of his friends; and he is eager uncritically to attack their enemies.

Now that you've watched that, watch this clip on Open Minds and think about how you felt when you watched the first one.

The good news in all of this is that this issue isn't going away. There are still bills active in Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, and Michigan, and we understand that legislation is going to be proposed in even more states. More importantly, we still live in America, and although Darwinists are doing their best to shut down and intimidate anyone who raises questions about Neo-Darwinism, we still have free speech, and they can't prevent people from hearing about the debate in the public arena, no matter how hard they try.

It is a frightening vision of the future: a flood of creationism let loose on the nation's schools. The end of science is near, and to ride out the crisis, ID critics are building themselves a rhetorical ark and bringing the fallacies aboard two by two.

The charge that ID is part of some creationist conspiracy was recently reiterated by Larry Arnhart, the author of Darwinian Conservatism. Arnhart, a professor at Northern Illinois University, writes in a recent post about the "Rhetorical Blunder in Ben Stein's 'Expelled'," a blunder which has to do, he thinks, with what is really behind Intelligent Design.

Arnhart makes the following statement about "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed":

This movie is the latest project of the Discovery Institute in promoting the political rhetoric of "intelligent design theory" as the alternative to Darwinian evolutionary science.

But Arnhart's main objective in the article is to bolster the "It's a Creationist Plot" theory about Intelligent Design. "The folks at the Discovery Institute," he asserts, "have made a big mistake in their production of this movie." The mistake (which Discovery doesn't make) in making this movie (which it didn't make either) is a contradiction Arnhart claims to have detected:

On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute is to say that "intelligent design" is not a creationist religious belief but pure science, and therefore teaching "intelligent design" in public high school biology classes does not violate the First Amendment's prohibition on establishing religion. On the other hand, the popular success of the Discovery Institute's rhetoric depends on appealing to Biblical creationists who assume that "intelligent designer" is just another name for God the Biblical Creator.

Darwinists have clearly not developed a sense of consistency. Maybe Nature is saving that for the next step up in the evolutionary progress of their species.

In "Expelled," which Discovery made but really didn't, this contradiction, says Arnhart, is on full display:

When Bruce Chapman — President of the Discovery Institute — is interviewed by Stein, Chapman says that journalists distort the true position of intelligent design by saying that it's a creationist religious belief, because the "intelligent designer" is clearly God. Chapman vehemently denies this. But then for the rest of the movie, it's asserted that anyone who denies "intelligent design" is therefore an atheist who denies the existence of God!

I think what Arnhart means to say here (I'm trying to bail you out here, Larry) is that the movie claims that anyone who is a Darwinist is an atheist who denies the existence of God. But note that it isn't proponents of ID who make this claim in the movie, but proponents of Darwinism in the form of people like Richard Dawkins. This has, of course, sent the ID critics into paroxysms of indignation because they seem to think that casting Dawkins in a lead role is somehow misrepresentative of the public debate over Intelligent Design.

The only adequate response to this is to point them to the sales figures of Dawkin's books. And those by his fellow Neo-Atheists--Christopher Hitchins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett--haven't been too shabby either. The Darwinists who disagree with the Neo-Atheists, like Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Educators (NCSE), get upset every time anyone talks to Dawkins about this issue on the grounds that she and her more presentable colleagues are the ones people should be listening to.

Well, maybe they should. But are they? And who is Eugenie Scott anyway? Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion hit #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. How many books has she sold? If Eugenie Scott wants to be a big star in the next Ben Stein movie, then she's going to have to do a better job getting her literary career off the ground. That's all there is to it.

Eugenie, we'll be pulling for you.

To keep asserting that the Neo-Atheists are not at the heart of the debate over ID is to simply have ignored the press coverage of this issue over the last couple of years. These are, in fact, the people who are among the most visible opponents of Intelligent Design. And it isn't as if people like Scott were not included in the movie; they were (despite their lack of star power).

But Arnhart and other critics of the movie feel somehow that the makers of an admittedly partisan movie about Intelligent Design have some kind of obligation to comprehensively state their opponents' case for them in their little hour and a half. Here is a group of people who have control of virtually every scientific professional association, every public university science department, and every secular textbook publishing house — and they want the producers of "Expelled" to use the 90 minutes of equal time they paid for to make the other side look good.

Go figure.

I suppose we should all be happy that ID critics have gotten religion on the issue of accuracy in the media and are now so intent on preaching it to the multitudes. But their conversion has come a little late, hasn't it? Where were the Defenders of Truth like Arnhart when PBS was doing a hatchet job on Intelligent Design in NOVA's "Judgment Day," which was supposed to be, not a partisan, but an unbiased account of the controversy? Well, the one most like Arnhart — namely, Arnhart himself — was praising it.

Arnhart attempts to sound unbiased on the Intelligent Design debate — a pose he strikes often on his blog:

The problem, however, is that both sides of this debate are caught up in a frenzy of rhetorical posturing that makes it impossible to have a thoughtful exchange of competing ideas.

I'll have to admit, Arnhart does look noble in his objective pose. But if you're looking for an unbiased view of the debate, you'll have to look to someone other than Arnhart, whose claim that he is monitoring both sides of this debate for rhetorical posturing is, alas, a rhetorical posture.

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