Ben Stein Expelled

I used to think Ben Stein was one of those few intelligent public figures, but not after watching the trailer to his upcoming documentary. You got to see it to believe the audacity of it. In it, you will see Darwinism equated with Nazism (I mean, Hitler may have used Darwinism as a justification, but that does NOT mean it is a logical conclusion of Darwinism!). You will also see some sort of Big Science conspiracy against Intelligent Design. I am involved in one of the more controversial scientific disciplines for ID folks, and I have NEVER seen any ounce of professional discrimination because of it. There was even an all-day ID session at a recent Geological Society of America conference replete with ID proponents, and believe me they had their fair say with no suppression or persecution. In fact they were probably some of the more popular talks at the meeting!

Kelly and I were discussing it last night, and I brought up the distinction between Free Speech and Science. With free speech, any idiot has the right to say what they want, but good science is supposed to be close to some objective truth, and therefore is held to a higher standard than plain old free speech. That's why scientific journals are peer reviewed with rigorous scrutiny (I know this firsthand--I had plenty of opposition to my puny little paper). And if your paper gets rejected, I would say 99% of the time it is because you have bad science or unfounded conclusions in it. To make it even more fair, most journals allow you to list unacceptable reviewers who might have personal motives against you!

The biggest problem with the movie is that Ben Stein is a respected individual. Whatever he says, the ordinary American will immediately accept. Fortunately, he seems to have a lot of opposition from the internet masses, judging from the comments to his blog posts.