Posted on 04/21/2008 4:00:27 PM PDT by Between the Lines
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the pro-intelligent design documentary featuring actor Ben Stein, made history this weekend as it propelled full speed into the top 10 box office. It opened as the widest and one of the most commercially successful releases for any documentary film.
In an impressive opening weekend, the film debuted at No. 9 at the box office, earning a respectable $3.2 million while only appearing on 1,052 screens.
“Leatherheads,” the story of a struggling football team based in Duluth, Minnesota, and written and directed by George Clooney, trailed the new documentary film, placing at only No. 10 its third week at the box office, despite showing at over twice as many screens.
Although the new pro-intelligent design documentary had struggled with a reported marketing and production budget that ranged only in the single digit millions – a miniscule figure compared to the standard $117 million regularly burned by Hollywood productions – the film proved to defy expectations and panning by critics.
From the beginning of its conception, the film had been heavily criticized by scientists who dismissed the film as inaccurate, misleading, and dishonest in its portrayal of the shortcomings of evolution.
Reviewers were also among the film’s vocal critics, and in an article written for the Orlando Sentinel, Roger Moore was among those who believed the film would fail commercially, describing the film as a “mockery.”
“'Expelled’ is a full-on, amply budgeted Michael Moore-styled mockery of evolution, a film that dresses creationist crackpottery in an ‘intelligent design’ leisure suit and tries to make the fact that it's not given credence in schools a matter of ‘academic freedom,’” Moore wrote in his description of the film.
Producers of the film, however, had hoped that while disadvantaged and outmanned in the realm of Hollywood, active marketing and outreach with Christian groups and homeschoolers could help propel the movie, in the manner of David versus Goliath, into a box office hit – a strategy that appears to have worked.
In one such campaign, the producers of the film offered to award as much as $1,000 in a contest among church groups to bring the largest crowds to see the film.
Christian groups in general proved to be receptive to the film’s message.
Anthony Horvath, executive director of the Athanatos Christian Ministry, an online apologetics academy dedicated to the defense of the Christian faith, praised the film.
"The outrage expressed by the atheistic community at Ben Stein's movie, ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’ has been so palpable you could bottle it up and sell it as an energy drink. They are practically foaming at the mouth," he said in a statement.
"The blogosphere reveals the utter disdain that the hard core atheists have for anyone who merely suggests that it might be possible to scientifically detect design. If all Stein's movie accomplishes is revealing more publicly what many in the scientific community have been saying quietly all along, that is a major accomplishment,” he added.
Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, gave the film a thumbs up, commenting, "I think it should be required viewing for anyone who wants to understand what is going on and what is at stake in the debate over worldviews in this society,” according to Baptist Press. "This is one of these times when you can vote with your pocketbook. You can vote with your economic franchise, and Hollywood will listen when they see the dollar signs.”
“Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is a feature-length documentary film about researchers, professors, and academics who claim to have been marginalized, silenced, or threatened with academic expulsion because of their challenges to some or all parts of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Makers of the documentary said the movie doesn't seek to champion intelligent design as the sole truth but calls for more academic freedom, where challenges to any scientific theory including Darwinism would be fairly considered.
We don't even need to discuss natural selection here. We are talking about an entirely different issue.
Absolutely correct. The attempt to divert the discussion to natural selection is a red herring. By *whatever* several means "microevolution" takes place, the question you have put forth, which is being dodged, is what would allegedly prevent accumulated microevolution from achieving "macroevolution". Add up enough small changes and you've got very large change indeed.
Here, for example, using real fossils as illustration, is a sequence of 50 relatively small steps (each of which a stubborn anti-evolutionist could argue as being small enough to be "just microevolution"), that starts with an ancient fish and ends with a modern elephant -- which even your current discussion partners must surely agree is a total change of "macroevolutionary" degree: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1508770/posts?page=142#142.
I, too, wish that the folks who wish to deny the obvious would explain what, exactly, they imagine would prevent large change from eventually resulting from long-accumulated amounts of small changes. They keep asserting this (despite the clear evidence to the contrary in the fossil record among other places), but keep running away when asked to explain how exactly this would supposedly work -- how, exactly, does the DNA "know" when it's on the verge of accumulating "too much" change, and what mechanism supposedly "puts on the brakes" to prevent further change and "stop" macroevolution from being achieved?
They never answer. The reason why is pretty obvious.
But if any staunch "anti-macroevolutionists" wish to tackle a specific example and attempt to explain where exactly the "biological stop sign" lies that prevents microevolution from accumulating into macroevolution, here are two specific challenges for you to address:
1. Here's a free online tool for exploring the fully sequenced genome (full DNA sequences) of a human and a chimpanzee: Genome Browser. Go ahead and find for us any DNA difference between the two species which is, individually, beyond any "microevolutionary" amount of change. Alternately, find any differences which are larger than could reasonably be achieved by *known*, *observed* rates of genetic change within six million years (the approximate time between now and the last common ancestor between humans/chimps). We'll wait.
2. Find any one difference between a domestic dog and a brown bear that is beyond what you would consider to be "just" microevolutionary change (e.g. a large qualitative change, not just a difference of degree in some one trait). Alternately, explain what would prevent the accumulation of the multiple "micro" differences between dogs/bears from reaching the point of accumulating enough to produce the total "macroevolutionary" difference between dogs/bears over the period of 50 million years (the time between now and the last common ancestor between dogs/bears).
(And I would not agree that natural selection has not been established as a significant force in evolution.)
The person you're responding to has made that transparently false claim because she has grossly misread the abstract of the paper she's so inaccurately summarizing (no, the author did NOT say what she falsely claims he said), and because she's extremely unfamiliar with even the most basic works in the field she's attempting to critique. There are THOUSANDS of good studies of observed natural selection. Here are just a few for starters: http://www.gate.net/~rwms/EvoNatSelWild.html. See also the http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/09/20/news/13127.shtml">thirty-year study of natural selection in the wild by Peter and Rosemary Grant, among literally thousands of other examples.
If anything is "profane [and] vain babblings" and "science falsely so called", it's the kind of transparently false anti-scientific claim that was made above: "natural selection is an assumption that has not been established by science". Bearing false witness like that does no glory to God whatsoever, and the Bible correctly abhors it.
I really wish that people who attempt to critique evolutionary biology would at least learn something about it (from reliable sources, not creationist pamphlets or Ben Stein) before attempting to attack and denigrate 150 years of research. Besides doing a disservice to science and truth in general, it really makes conservatives look bad and gives solid ammunition to the people who see conservatives as being know-nothings who engage in a "war on science" -- since unfortunately, too many conservatives actually do, and that's the last thing we need in a critical election year.
Sorry, but this answer is entirely inadequate.
Yes, the cell contains self-correcting mechanisms. No, they're not perfect, and thus are incapable of preventing genetic changes from occurring. Nor from accumulating. Nor are they in any way capable of doing the kind of "total amount detection and limitation" you naively claim they do. They can't -- once any one change, or any arbitrary number of single changes, get into the genome of a population, the DNA repair mechanisms have nothing to compare the genome squence against in order to make a "determination" of how much the genome has drifted from the ancestral form, much less be able to put a stop to any further changes slipping in.
This is really basic biology, I'm surprised anyone could be so unaware of this type of information in this day and age.
Please, people, if you're not familiar with the basic science, don't muddle the discussion with your wild guesses.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal. Reading the mind of another poster is “making it personal.”
Boy.. do I have some posts for YOU to see... hehe...
Most of the anti-religionists try to use the “proof by arrogant condescension” method common among liberals. Demeaning terms directed toward others, etc.
There are two strands to DNA, plus various and uncounted "copies" of sequences floating throughout the cell. That is not to include any possible "checksums" and encoded signals that indicate something changed within the DNA. As we learn more about the genome, less "junk" DNA is the result. The implication can be made that changes within the DNA that are passed on, are "allowed" to be passed on despite the self-correcting mechanisms.
VA: “I would challenge you to define what you mean by this term.”
Coyote: “Speciation.”
That is like asking for a definition of the word “garbage” and someone answering “trash”. Speciation is as confused as (or more so) than macro-evolution. Please define specifically what you mean by macro-evolution. How much change/differentiation must exist to qualify for macro?
For example, do you consider two species to be macro-evolved if the two can no longer reproduce (assuming the original still exists in its original form)?
What other characteristics must be true to assure that two derivative animals are not of the same species?
placemark
Yes indeed-y AndrewC! Problem is, I don't think they can. :^)
Astrology can be scienfically tested too. One could test the life outcomes and personalities of a pool of test subjects and their relationship to their position on the zodiac or birth sign.
But astrology is not science.
Of course astrology is not science. The sun isn't science either but it exists and just like astrology it can be scientifically studied. It is possible to put forward a hypothesis that astrology can be used to predict the future. You can call it GunRunner’s Theory of Astrologicism. If you use the scientific method to test your theory, it is a scientific theory.
Religion is not science and it will never be. Even if in the future, the Bible is scientifically proven to be completely and literally accurate, Christianity will not be science, it will still be religion. ID on the other hand is a scientific theory that can be tested using the scientific method. The anti ID Darwinists’ argument that ID is religion is false and dishonest. ID is testable and many Darwinists claim to have tested it scientifically and disproved it. The actual Intelligent Design that ID hypothesizes about isn't science and neither is decent from a common ancestor but both of these hypotheses can be scientifically studied.
Darwinists are dishonest about ID. It is one thing to claim that the evidence doesn't support the hypothesis and a completely different thing to claim that ID is religion. It seems to me that the Darwinists are afraid of ID and are not confident in the evidence for Darwinism.
Science does not know what "life" is yet.. I'm not sure science knows what "TIME" is either.. for time only appears to be linear/lineal..
For example, Coyoteman has often posted the example of ring species, in which different types of birds (for example) are distributed in a ring pattern such that each type can breed with the one next to it, but the varieties at the end cannot or do not interbreed. That example is usually rejected as an example of micro-evolution because they're still the same "kind" of birds. So how different would they have to be? Are horses and donkeys different enough, or would that just be "micro-evolution"? How about horses and zebras? Or how about lions and tigers? Lions and cheetahs? Lions and lynxes? Lions and hyenas? It seems to me the people asking for evidence of "macro-evolution" (and making up the term) should be responsible for defining exactly what its boundaries are.
I think that it is a useful distinction. Microevolution related to the varities of specices that we can actually study. Macroevolution to beings that no longer exist and whom we can study only thru the fossil record and by retroprojection of these based on the study of living creature. Once we get to the question of the origin of life, we are clearly in a realm of pure speculation. We simply have no way of knowing the conditions that pertained billions of years ago.
So no organism that currently exists, no matter how much it changes, can be said to undergo macroevolution, by definition?
This is confusing to me because I recently (in another thread) posted the series of fossils that are considered to be examples of the evolution of the horse. And I was told that they hadn't changed enough--that they were all still the same kind of animal.
So I'm still wondering what constitutes macroevolution. Let's say, hypothetically, that the horse and zebra are related--that one evolved from the other. Is the distance between them enough that that would be an example of macroevolution?
I agree that the mechanism we’re talking about isn’t known in terms of an explicit biological process that is understood by either evolutionists or the Intelligent Design crowd. There is no clear evidence either way. As a postulate, evolutionists must believe it. However, it is generally believed in the theory of devolution that random mutations are taking the viability of all life forms on this planet in a spiraling downward direction toward inevitable, unstoppable extinction.
Interestingly, in support of devolution, there does seem to be persuasive evidence that all life that we know about, except bacteria and algae, is programmed genetically to become extinct within the next 1000 generations.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,,1187868,00.html
HHTVL:”I think it’s odd that you’re asking Coyoteman to define “macro-evolution,” since he’s said many times that it’s not a term scientists use. (I’m also surprised he answered you, but that’s up to him.)”
If you followed the conversation to this point, you would have seen the question that Coyoteman posed: “I am seeking your mechanism which prevents lots of little micros from adding up. Something that stops those silly little micros when they are in danger of becoming a different “kind.””
The Darwinists are the ones who claim that all SPECIES are derived from one origin. How can we (non-Darwinians) answer the question of what “stops” the transformation when Darwinists cannot even define the critical distinction of a species? That was my original post. If Coyoteman does not beleive there is such a concept of “speciation”, then the question of a stopping mechanism is moot.
All this talk of mating lions/cheetahs, zebras/horses is kind of hilarious. These animals are so close together in their genetic make-up that they could easily be of the same ancestor. Let’s get more serious and try mating a grasshoper to an elephant or an eagle with a tuna - better yet, a sheep and a human (this one has already been tried many times throughout the ages to no avail)!
Can you show me any experimental evidence that could make an insect into a mammal? That given enough “time” all things are possible? And forget completely about the evolution from plant organism to animal!
The other consideration you must make is that even the unusual combinations of offspring we have been able to “create” (within kind) have been primarily manipulated by human experimentation. We see almost no tendency in nature to make these same unions. So even our modern day “micro evolution” has been heavily influenced by “intelligent designers” (ourselves).
I am saying tha organisms we can examine “in the round,” so to speak tell us a lot more than the fossil record. Macroevolution relates to micro evolution as metaphysics relates to physics, a kind of expansion of principles outside the range of evidence. There’s a lot more guesswork involved. One can actually see how populations of micro-organisms mutate over generations. Not so with the “horse”fossils you set up all in a row. Are they really distinct species or perhaps something like the enormous variety we see in the size and shapes of dogs? Ditto the famous line of walking primates that show the progression from “ape”to modern man.” So much is conjectural. I am willing to stipulate the evolution of man from other species, but the route is still unknown. DNA can tell us a heck of a lot about about the history of dog populations and human ones, but that is because they are dealing in each case with a single species. Each case, btw, reminds us of the fixity—or rather elasticity of species boundaries, of which animal husbandry had become very aware even in Darwin’s time. If man were to disappear tomorrow, dogs would revert to their wolf-like forms.
Chromosomes.
ML/NJ
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