Of course, when America's most prominent man of science, James D. Watson (#2 on the 2006 Atlantic Monthly's historians poll of most living influential Americans) says something about IQ and race, he's immediately kicked to the curb with barely a word of protest.

I wonder how many of his natural constituents will be offended by that?

Steve: What on earth does that have to do with Expelled? Or did you just feel like getting that off your chest for about the 10,000th time?

The lack of scientific understanding in this country never ceases to astound.

All the MSM went bonkers "fact-checking" all of Moore's movies. Expect that to happen now? Time's review of Expelled went on and on about how Dawkins et al are meanies. Well done, liberal media!

C'mon, Kevin, think about it for a moment: it's about the dominance of "liberal creationism," the idea that humans must have stopped evolving 50,000 years ago when they spread out from Africa, and scientists who point out the flaws in the dogma will be crushed like a bug.

America's most distinguished man of science, James Watson, attempts to start a conversation about the implications of the rapid improvement in genetic testing and what this may reveal about recent human evolution, and within a week he's out of his job at the scientific laboratory he built up over four decades.

"Then it picked up. Unfortunately for Stein and the IDers, it did so only by becoming increasingly unhinged. Stein spends the final half hour wandering around Dachau and telling us outright that his real motivation for attacking evolution isn't any real flaw in the theory, but his belief that Darwinism leads directly to Nazi-ism, eugenics, atheism, the breakdown of morals, and mass slaughter. Can't have that, so evolution needs to go too. Maybe this is an institutional problem with makers of political documentaries. After all, Michael Moore did the same thing in Sicko when he decided to finish up the movie with a paean to the healthcare system of Cuba. This didn't really do much except forfeit his ability to persuade anyone who was skeptical of his case in the first place, and that's what Stein's finale does too."

I don't really see how Stein's theory that Darwinism leads to Nazi-style extermination of millions of innocent citizens is "the same thing" as Michael Moore's case that Cuba's health care system works better for Cubans than the US's health care system does for Americans (especially given the vast difference in resources available to the two nations).

Kevin, do you really, truly, genuinely believe that Michael Moore's position that Cuba's health care system seems to work better than the US's is as "unhinged" as Stein's position that Darwinism leads to Nazi holocausts?

Or are you just, yet again, needlessly bashing those to the left of you so as to keep claim to your cred as one of the "responsible" and "serious" liberals?

Patrick Meighan
Culver City, CA

What did Moore do again, exactly, that you're analogizing to Stein and his film?

As Glaivester pointed out, many view the theory of natural selection as merely a good reason for feeling contemptuous toward people who believe in God; they abhor the idea of using Darwinism to understand the human world around them, especially when it undermines their fondly-held political dogmas.

a vast, worldwide conspiracy of Darwinists who are shutting down legitimate scientific inquiry into Intelligent Design

Well, when you put it like that, I can't really disagree.

There IS no "legitimate scientific inquiry into Intelligent Design," at least none at all that is supportive, and barely any of any other kind since it's so scientifically ludicrous.

One might consider it more of a tacit conspiracy than an active one, because so little effort is put into it, but insofar as common action (or inaction) based on a shared mindset can be determined a "conspiracy," I can go along with the description.

Of course, whether this is a bad thing is another question...

Expelled is full of lies far beyond those about evolution.

Like about why P.Z. Myers, Pharyngula, was expelled from a screening and Richard Dawkins wasn’t. Like about the movie being made under false pretenses.

Like about how Dawkins “shrank” before associate producer Mark Mathis.

More links to the lies of Expelled, including video from Dawkins, at the link above; other Expelled posts include that it was a big, fat, flop at the box office.

And, at least Moore was working with tangible evidence, Kevin.

Sailer, James Watson did no such thing and you know it. STFU.

Is his problem with Darwinism or evolution? They're not the same thing. Darwin had a theory to EXPLAIN evolution. Astronomer Fred Hoyle accepted evolution, but disagreed with Darwin that it was caused by natural selection/random mutation.

Steve,

That would make an excellent documentary. May I suggest the name, "A Genius can't be Racist."

Geniuses never make mistakes: Look at Einstein and Quantum Mechanics... um, bad example. Look at Newton and Alchemy... another bad example.

All I know is that I know when I'm right. Trust me.

Stein is more or less right that Nazis really did tend to think -- in a hazy, confused way -- that Darwinism supported their views. They got a lot of their thinking about evolution from the vulgarized Nietzsche that the Imperial German government promoted during WWI, when it issued a book of carefully selected excerpts from Nietzsche to each soldier on the Western Front.

By the way, Karl Marx thought Darwinism endorsed Marxism. He sent a manuscript of Das Kapital to Charles Darwin and asked if he could dedicate his masterwork to Darwin. The biologist politely replied that his German was too rusty to make it through Marx's book, so he'd have to say no.

This whole "Darwinism leads directly to Nazi-ism, eugenics, atheism, the breakdown of morals, and mass slaughter" frame is just beyond silly. Either evolution is real or it isn't (hint: it's real).

The fact that some scumbags use the language of a branch of science to justify doing hideously evil things doesn't turn fact into fiction. It's like deciding that the Theory of Relativity has to be disproved because it leads to developing nuclear weapons. Ridiculous.

Steve Sailer,

Why don't you post on your own blog about this topic? And give me a link, so I can put my penis in your asshole on every single failure-of-logic you are holding so dear.

Patrick Meighan, I think Kevin is saying that Moore made a similar "tactical error" relative to audience reaction - not objective level of impropriety - by mentioning Cuba's health care system. Of course it really is appropriate to look at what a given country is doing about X even if we have reasons not to like them, etc. BTW, it is also possible that the idea of natural selection and "the fight for survival" has influenced some people (whether Nazis or not, I wouldn't know) to oppress others they consider inferior. But it wouldn't tell us whether natural selection was true (actually happened) or not anyway.

BTW, about opposition to Darwin: If someone doesn't believe in creation of all the animals basically "at once" some few thousand years ago, then I don't know what the middle ground (ID?) is supposed to consist of. After all, if you accept geologic ages and the reality of the times and characteristic life in the Cambrian, ... Devonian, ... Jurassic,... Miocene, etc., and if you accept that creatures of any complexity are born from other creatures (or seeds, eggs, splittings, etc.), then that means they "evolved." It may not be just in the way or for the reasons synthetic theory imagines, but it is still descendants eventually being very different from their progenitors. Anyone know?

So let me get this straight. Michael Moore took a number of 9/11 rescue workers, who had been denied treatment in the US for serious lung ailments for five years, because they were volunteers, to Cuba. They got treatment, and Moore showed this. Did the Cubans cooperate because they wanted to score propaganda points? Certainly. But did Moore show anything false, or crazy? No, he did not. Cuba really does have an amazing health care system considering how poor they are.

How is this equivalent in any way to claiming that belief in evolution leads to Dachau? Or do you think that saying anything good about Cuba is insane?

I think that you owe Michael Moore an apology, unless you can come up with a justification for sliming him.

ResumeMan writes:

"This whole "Darwinism leads directly to Nazi-ism, eugenics, atheism, the breakdown of morals, and mass slaughter" frame is just beyond silly. Either evolution is real or it isn't (hint: it's real)."

Similarly, we're about to rapidly find out for sure whether or not genetic differences in IQ among races have evolved over the last 50,000 years. When America's most eminent scientific figure says that may well have happened, he's immediately denounced by right-thinking folks everywhere and forced into retirement. Watson's interest in recent human evolution was excoriated by bien-pensants for exactly the same reasons as Ben Stein excoriates interest in ancient human evolution: the fear that such knowledge can lead to bad political consequences.

Patrick/Ty: Settle down. Like I said, I'm solely trying to judge how effective these films are at persuading their audiences. Moore took a perfectly good film and then went one step too far, pretending that Cuba's healthcare system is better than ours. This was done solely to be incendiary, and is so far from the truth that it just works to reduce the credibility of the rest of his film.

Stein did the same thing. He was making a (tedious) film that might have been persuasive to some people, but then goes a step too far and starts blaming Dachau on Darwin. Anyone who might have been nodding along during the first half hour is likely to stop nodding in the last half hour. All he does is lose his audience.

That's the analogy. Two filmmakers who (I'm guessing) might have lost parts of their audience with the final segments of their films. That's all. Just because Moore is a fellow lefty hardly means he's either above criticism or incapable of making a mistake.

As for me, I prefer the theory that aliens came to earth in prehistoric times, found some intelligent apes, and sped up their evolution to create homo sapiens. Hence our ancients myths and religions about sky gods and flaming chariots. Can you prove it didn't happen?

Sailer has a good point - that too much of this debate is wrapped up in political/social/ideological agendas (on both sides), rather than good science and the pursuit of truth.

Kevin writes:

"He was making a (tedious) film that might have been persuasive to some people, but then goes a step too far and starts blaming Dachau on Darwin."

Stein's argument is hardly as uncommon as you imply, although on the left it's usually finessed by blaming Dachau not on Darwin (can't give the Fundy Christian rubes a bone), but on his half-cousin Francis Galton, inventor of correlation analysis and the word "eugenics."

Steve,

So let me get this straight. You are perfectly fine with the theory of evolution. It is all perfectly correct but because it can lead to bad "political" outcomes, that's the problem?

Too bad you weren't around in the days of Copernicus. There were a lot of concerns about the political ramifications of his theories too.

Kevin Drum says: "Moore took a perfectly good film and then went one step too far, pretending that Cuba's healthcare system is better than ours. This was done solely to be incendiary, and is so far from the truth that it just works to reduce the credibility of the rest of his film."

Okay, Kevin, could you please hook me up with the objective evidence that Cuba's health care system is *not* better than ours (particularly when factoring in our nations' respective GNPs), and that to claim otherwise is to claim something "so far from the truth"?

"Just because Moore is a fellow lefty hardly means he's either above criticism or incapable of making a mistake."

Agreed, certainly. I'm just trying to figure out what Moore's mistake was in declaring Cuba's health care system better than ours (particularly when considering the differential in available resources). If you're simply saying that Moore's claim was strategically unwise, that's one thing. But you seem also to be saying that Moore's claim was also patently false, and thus "the same" as (and as "unhinged" as) Stein's claim that Darwinism brings on holocausts. If so, please defend that assertion, Kevin.

Patrick Meighan
Culver City, CA

Ever since I first stumbled into computer-networked discussions (back in the digital stone age, on GEnie, logged on with 1200 baud modem) certain topics have spawned endless threads which, from then to now, are still essentially the same. "Darwinism" is such a topic. The arguments have hardly changed, though some of them were packaged up into something called "intelligent design," a new name for the same old crap. In a hundred years there will still be people shouting the same ideas back and forth.

Assuming I for some reason decided to waste two hours of my life on Ben Stein's drivel, I'd wait until I could take it out of the library so as not to send him any of my money.

Can we all agree that the fact of evolution and Darwin's theory of evolution are not exactly the same thing?

Steve Sailer,

There is no biological thing such as "Race." It is a social construct. --Meaning, you and I can say that someone is White or Black, by our social standards. Genetically, the difference between two random black people is most likely as great as that between a random black person and a random "insert other race here" person.

Because there is so much variation within a single "race" that the races overlap each other to great extents. (Unless you are talking about mitochondial DNA or Y-linked genes, which you are not.) So, other than mitochondrial or Y-linked genes, it's impossible to use genetics to prove if someone is white, black, japanese, East Timorese, etc. That's why Watson (and you) is wrong.

Source: Long, Jeffrey C. and Kittles, Rick A.
Human Genetic Diversity and the Nonexistence of Biological Races
Human Biology - Volume 75, Number 4, August 2003, pp. 449-471

[Sorry guys, I'm Greasemonkeying him and going to take my pissy attitude to do some laundry.]

the documentary FLOCK OF DODO's is great though...

Ben Stein should just give away money like he used to and people may start to care about him again...

wow, I dip back in here and find Drum making comparisons between Cubans and Nazis. Why the hell do people listen to this broken down old fool?

Absent Observer asserts:

"Genetically, the difference between two random black people is most likely as great as that between a random black person and a random "insert other race here" person."

No, it's not true, as a minute's thought would show you.

They now have commercial genetics tests that will tell you your racial admixture. They aren't perfect for any one individual by any means, but they are very accurate for determining the racial ancestry of two groups you are comparing.

I saw Expelled on Friday, the first day of general release, after having seen snippets in various trailers and promotional clips. Only when watching the entire movie do you get the full effect of the movie's organizing theme: bits of recently filmed interview alternating with bits of black-and-white documentary footage. It really is agitprop. And Expelled depends very strongly on the ignorance of its viewers as it presents its supposed victims of the Darwinist conspiracy against academic freedom. It's full of faux victims and faux experts. More here.

There seems to be a pattern here. He also says Woodward and Mark Felt were the cause of the Cambodian genocide.

It's nice to feel smarter and less unhinged than Ben Stein. Thanks.

They now have commercial genetics tests that will tell you your racial admixture.

I addressed that in my previous comment, so it doesn't take a "minutes thought."

Y-linked tests can tell where your father's father's father's father came from.

But how many genes are there on the Y-chromosome? Two? Three? It essential only functions to say whether or not to turn on "male"?

And mitochondial tests will tell where your mother's mother's mother came from.

And mitochondial DNA isn't even in the nucleus with the human genes, so to say it is peripheral to one's genetic makeup is literally accurate. As to the impact mitochondia have on a human's phenotype: Think zero, except in cases of mitochondial mutation, which is a death sentence.

Got any learning in genetics? Taken any classes in it? Or are you one of those knownothings who's so much more correct than those IvoryTower's who do crazy things like research?

Unlike the smug, self-righteous Ben Stein, I don't see any fundamental conflict between evolutionary biology and the notion of a creator of the universe. Who created life on earth is a cosmological question. Evolutionary biology merely explains how life progressed after it got here.

They now have commercial genetics tests that will tell you your racist admixture?

okay Steve, we get it, black people are stupid. Is that what you need to justify your pathetic existence?

Got any learning in genetics? Taken any classes in it? Or are you one of those knownothings who's so much more correct than those IvoryTower's who do crazy things like research?

I'm gonna go with the third one. Steve got schooled.

I really feel stupid for feeding the troll, but I'd always heard that Black Africans have a greater genetic diversity than the rest of humanity combined.

J. Bronowski said this while standing in a swamp near Auschwitz. There is more truth in these few lines than Ben Stein has uttered in his entire life.
"It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. This is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible."

Kevin Drum writes, "Settle down."

Yeah, settle down, you children. Shut up and you might learn something. So what if, according to the WHO, Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the US (7 per 1000; US is 8 per 1000) an equivalent life expectancy (75/79; US is 75/80), a higher ratio of doctors to the general population, universal coverage, and gets all that for $229 per capita (6.3% of GDP) as opposed to the US getting equivalent or worse results and no universal coverage for $6,096 per capita (15.4% of GDP). So what? IT'S CUBA, DAMMIT!!!! IT MUST BE BAD! DON'T YOU KNOW? So by all means, do NOT look at these awful websites, what with their "facts" and "research" and the like:

http://www.who.int/countries/cub/en/
http://www.who.int/countries/usa/en/

The World Health Organization. Who they? All stats and no heart. It's obvious to anyone who sensible and above the fray like me and my wise sensei, Kevin Drum: suggesting that Cuba might have some lessons for us in health care is as unforgivably wrong an assertion as saying that evolution leads inevitably to Nazism. It may not be true, but it FEELS true. And that's what matters most.

So calm down, you wackos. And get off my lawn!

Unlike his erstwhile collaborator, Francis Crick, James Watson spent the majority of his later career more as an administrator than as an active researcher. He also wrote that popular little book we've all read, The Double Helix, about the race to discover the structure of the DNA molecule, his own brilliance, and the general doofishness of everyone else involved in the process. Most of the other people he mentions in the book were pretty ticked with him, BTW. His treatment of the scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose x-ray crystallography photos made the identification possible, is particularly egregious, and reeks of misogyny. She was dead by the time he wrote the book and never received credit for her role in the discovery process until the last few years when historians have re-examined her work, and realized her brilliance.

Watson was a very bright young man who was in the right place at the right time. He was also very skilled at getting attention. He was hardly a brilliant genius nor is there any reason why we should give any particular credence to his ramblings on race and intelligence, anymore than his prejudices on gender. Neither have anything to do with molecular biology, which was his area of expertise.

I cannot figure out what any of this has to do with Ben Stein, who started out as a mediocre acolyte of Milton Friedman, then decided he had a better future in pictures, and now in Bushworld has apparently launched himself into some bizarro combination of the two.

So, what we see here in the comments, once again, is the same mixture of ideology and ignorance that Ben Stein directs at Charles Darwin directed at James Watson, instead.

Ben Stein is against the idea of human evolution because he thinks the prestige of Darwin's 1859 book "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" led to the Holocaust, an idea that's exaggerated, but is not wholly historically wrong. Certainly, the Nazis felt that they were speeding up evolution by preserving their Favoured Race in the Struggle for Life.

Similarly, the forces of conventional wisdom came down like a ton of bricks on James Watson last October not because they are smarter about science that the Nobel Laureate is, but because they fear the political consequences of letting the cat out of the bag about recent human evolution.

I think it was HD, Humorous Design, myself.

Ben Stein's documentary that posits a vast, worldwide conspiracy of Darwinists who are shutting down legitimate scientific inquiry into Intelligent Design.

Ben Stein almost has it right. The truth is that for close to two millenia where there has been a worldwide conspiracy into shutting down legitimate scientific inquiry. Period.

They now have commercial genetics tests that will tell you your racial admixture.

Steve, can you provide a link to where I can acquire one of these tests. I would like to determine a) what race/s I am, and from that b) if I'm smart or not.

Thanks.

"Moore took a perfectly good film and then went one step too far....Stein did the same thing. He was making a (tedious) film that might have been persuasive to some people, but then goes a step too far and starts blaming Dachau on Darwin."

No. No. No. It is not the same thing. Even if Michael Moore's tactic alienates some viewers, there is evidence, even if debatable, he is right. There is NO evidence for Stein's idiotic ramblings. You yourself call Sicko "a perfectly good film"; but Stein's position is no such thing. It is an appeal for scientific ignorance and promotes an anti-intellectualism that is poisonous .

Steve actually has a point. There is obviously an intelligence difference between black people and white people. Black people are clearly smarter. Only 2% of them support George W. Bush.

The inventors of the Holocaust were the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael. Look up the Bucharest Pogroms. They put holy water on themselves before massacring Jews. Good Christians all. Hitler admired them. Nothing to do with Darwin.

I hope I'm not the troll in this instance.

Wikipedia's got a good map of the distribution of Y-linked and Mitochondrial haplotypes, as well as a hypothesized map of human migration of subgroups out of Africa. Interesting stuff!

But there are 25,000 protein-encoding genes on the other 45 chromosomes, and probably twice as many genes that aren't protein-encoding. These genes are ignored when testing "racial admixture." Seem like too much to ignore for my tastes. Y-linked and mitochondrial DNA altogether code for maybe 10 genes, and those few genes are not able to give any prediction of the distribution of those other thousands of genes within populations.

Were all human beings and it doesnt really matter how we got to where we are today, I think, and we should be looking at ways to preserve our planet for other humans far into the future. This here, now, greed, war, empire, military as business, stuff aint gonna cut it.

The reasons other planets are devoid of life may be because they had much better nuclear weapons scientists than we do.

Steve, you're not even coherent. If you want to be a racist, go ahead. I know a lot about Watson's biography, more even than you can find on Wikipedia. Why, I know stuff you have to read actual books to find out. So rant away. You won't convince anyone but yourself.

Culture wars.
So Bush. So yesterday. So so-so.
Yawn.

More interesting: this 9 minute Oxford biography podcast on Anne Darwin.
Note: Must have iTunes for link to work!

Anne was the second of ten children. She died at 10. I had no idea that he studied her via the scientific method and preceeded to write one of the founding texts of child psychology.

Fascinating.

Bad day for Kevin. Wow. Very bad indeed. I am tired of Kevin throwing liberals under the bus to prove he is objective. Moore's movie made a powerful point: An economy ravaged by 50-years of embargo can deliver health care to everyone (albeit that care would be better without an embargo).

Stein's point is that he is Kissinger in a dunce cap. He is a stupid man, making an argument that is fallacious factually, ethically, and logically. A trifecta of dullardism.
Moore's movie left most of us emotionally spent and pissed off because we were embarrassed by the promise of this nation being sold so cheaply by the "go-along, get-along" contingent. There is nothing Michael Moore could do that would make the wealthy do the right thing except through shaming.
Stein just needs medication.

TRex writes:

"Steve, can you provide a link to where I can acquire one of these [racial admixture] tests."

AncestryByDNA.com has been longest in the ancestry admixture testing business (as opposed to just looking at where your patrilineal or matrilineal lines originated, which is much easier, but less informative).

I would, however, strongly recommend reading the firm's FAQ

http://ancestrybydna.com/welcome/faq/#q1

and reading up on admixture testing on disinterested sites such as GNXP.com and Dienekes.com. This is an evolving technology and it's not all that accurate yet at the individual level. It's not uncommon for public figures like Brent Staples of the NY Times to take one of these tests, get an unexpected result and then feel they've learned something profound about themselves and humanity when their result may just have been caused by an insufficient sample size of genes checked.

Kevin had been doing some kickbutt work for weeks, but starts talking about Michael Moore, the reflexive urge to appear reasonable and evenhanded takes over (credibility!), and suddenly you have Mako the wonder shark! Look at Mako go! Somersaults, backflips, and what's that? Can it be? Yes! A triple axle!

Can we all agree that the fact of evolution and Darwin's theory of evolution are not exactly the same thing?

Maybe nit-picking, but because it's always useful to get the details right when talking about science (particularly in the context of arguing against anti-science), let us remember that there is no "fact of evolution"; there is only a "theory of evolution." That is, you cannot observe evolution; you can only observe facts that support the theory. It's like the theory of gravitation; you cannot observe gravity per se, but you can observe what we theorize to be its effects.

A theory, by definition, can always be disproven via contradictory evidence, even if the weight of available evidence is so massive that it's absurd to think of that actually happening. Absent some new category of evidence, evolution cannot be a scientific "fact."

Science, at least, is sufficiently robust to acknowledge its limitations.

Kevin, Michael Moore backs up what he says about Cuba's health care system with references.

I recently saw Sicko, and the film never claimed that every Cuban would get just as much attention as the Americans Moore brought got; he even suggested that they would not, but the point was still made. Those people suffered for five years without basic treatment. That is absolutely disgusting, and would not happen in Cuba or in any developed country other than the US.

For me, the stunt of trying to get the patients into Guantanamo Bay was over the top, and there were other things that one could quibble with (the UK's NHS has some problems, though nothing compared to the problems of an American without health insurance). But your attack shows the symptoms of excessive exposure to the DC cool kids, some of whom work for the Washington Monthly.

Wow! Get a clue! If you want to argue that ID has some sort of "scientific" value, then you should be able to point to a peer review of the this 'Theory'.

Otherwise you should STFU!
Just sayin.
This movie is a Bad Joke for anyone that is up with the thinking on this, what next, flat earth?

Evolution denialists like Stein like to proclaim evolution as untestable in the scientific sense, ignoring the fact that the theory has withstood a severe test over the last forty years and emerged stronger than ever. The traditional phylogenetic trees of the species were developed by observing conformational similarities between the species, literally counting the number of scales on the back of their necks and other such comparisons. This was done in complete ignorance of the underlying molecular structure of life-forms. First in the seventies with protein structure, and then in the eighties and nineties with DNA, we were able to compare and contrast the underlying molecular structures of the species. If the results had contradicted the observed macroscopic characteristics, or indeed if they had just been random, it would have been the end of Darwin’s theory. In fact the agreement between the macro and micro was nearly perfect. The few contradictions led to new insights, such as the fact that killer whales are more closely related to carnivores of the bear-dog family, while baleen whales are closer to bovines.

Social and moral conclusions obviously need to be taken with extreme care. Science is about describing the physical world around us, and says nothing about moral values such as right or wrong. Still it is interesting that Victorian concepts of racial purity seem badly flawed, as genetic variation usually seems to trump genetic purity. It also appears that altruism is a characteristic with positive survival value among social species, which is quite different from the assumption Stein draws.

Stein did the same thing. He was making a (tedious) film that might have been persuasive to some people, but then goes a step too far and starts blaming Dachau on Darwin. Anyone who might have been nodding along during the first half hour is likely to stop nodding in the last half hour.

My God, Kevin, you are so fucking naive.

Sailor – Can’t people like Watson slowly descend into senility without people like you embarrassing them?

I can accept that some awesome invisible deity could create every living thing that ever existed in a day or two, no problem. But there is no way that the theory of evolution could lead to a genocide. That's CRAZY!!!! Ben Stein totally lost me with that one.

Wow, I didn't realize that the racist fuckwit Sailer ever posted here. In an amazing feat he manages to be dumber than he is racist.

Steve: They now have commercial genetics tests that will tell you your racial admixture.

From the F.A.Q at AncestryByDNA.com:

"Race is a complex and multivariate construct that we tend to over simplify but in our analysis, we are measuring a person’s genetic ancestry and not their race."

Seems like maybe these guys aren't doing what you think they're doing.

The test slots you into one of four groups, which are by no means clearly distinct "races" in the minds of anybody discussing any side of this issue:

Native American Those peoples that migrated from Asia to inhabit North, South and Central America.

European Europeans, Middle Easterners and South Asians from the Indian subcontinent including India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

East Asian Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders including peoples native to the Philippines.

African Peoples from Sub-Saharan Africa such as Nigeria and Congo region.

I'm part Pacific Islander -- so according to this test and your theories I should have distinct intelligence capabilities similar to the Chinese???

I don't think so. Those guys are way smarter than me. And for people like yourself who argue that sub-Saharan Africans aren't as intelligent as those of European descent due to the vagaries of evolution: how do you explain the differences between nationalities that fall within the same Biogeographical region? Like Albanians and Continental Indians? Iraqis and Germans? The Maya and the Cherokee?

On face value these groups would seem to have very disparate cultural accomplishments, suggesting unequal intelligence potential on your theory. Right? Or on your theory are Sub-Saharan African somehow distinctly disadvantaged over the rest of the groups?

Perhaps "intelligence" (whatever the western europeans who write the tests mean by that) just has much more to do with environmental factors than "race."

Well, of course it does. I was just being uncharacteristically polite.

And I rather think that an "intelligence of the heart" which endows a group with the ability to function harmoniously with themselves and nature might in the long run be superior to an "intelligence of the mind," which has brought us industry and technology run amok to the point where our entire planet is imperiled.

Why is it that people can get into a freaking froth over something that matters not one iota and yet roll over like cows while our government sends our tax dollars on pallets to Iraq and bails out their brokers and buddies in the financial sector with more of our tax dollars?

Can you people please find something better to fire up the outrage about?

How can the human body be a product of intelligent design when the playground is so close to the dump?

If you want to check out something more intelligent than Expelled, check out my new diary here.

I agree with Steve Sailer that the Nazis believed in a lot of quack-science and quack-sociology (Steve Sailer calls this "in a muddled kind of way"- I call it "quack" because what it really was, was a nonscientific sort of way- a laymen's bigoted, parochial approach to science). Also today I think the right is involved in a lot of quack sociology (like believing that it's going to benefit our society if women aren't able to be in the military or work in a lot of other jobs that men can work in), with the quack science located probably a little more on their disgusting, hidden underbelly.

I would like Steve Sailer to explain the story more again if he's going to mention it again- just a single additional sentence that goes more into the detail of what happened and why it was wrong would make the comments a little less obtrusive and a more helpful. I think Kevin should knock off telling Steve not to post this stuff, because he's obviously trying to tell us something helpful and there are plenty of more annoying comments to knit your eyebrows at all over the place.

Kevin may give himself a pass for mentioning the ABC debate a couple of times, and then forgetting it, but we people who are really trying to fight something know that sometimes you've got to repeat something a few times to get people to wake up and recognize it. People sure ignored the plight of the Jews during WWII for quite a while, but that sure didn't make it any less right or desireable to keep talking about it and trying to get someone to do something.

Thanks, Steve Sailer, and please, Kevin-- knock off those annoying comments.

Can you people please find something better to fire up the outrage about?

Americans lack the economic and political power to fire up an outrage unless it is about evolution, race, Britney Spears or Michael Moore.

Thanks, Steve Sailer, and please, Kevin-- knock off those annoying comments.

I meant Kevin's comment at 8:37 PM here, not Steve's, which weren't annoying, merely too short.

Anyway, the Watson stuff was tangentially related, because it's about evolution science, so people who are interested in Kevin's post because it's about evolution science might be interested in Steve Sailer's story, too. Point being, it's not really that off-topic.

"Patrick/Ty: Settle down. Like I said, I'm solely trying to judge how effective these films are at persuading their audiences. Moore took a perfectly good film and then went one step too far, pretending that Cuba's health care system is better than ours. This was done solely to be incendiary, and is so far from the truth that it just works to reduce the credibility of the rest of his film."

well...Ironic. You could make the same claim for this post, which had a fine and logical point before you dragged Moore into it and lost a sizable part of an audience otherwise amenable to your argument.

Can you people please find something better to fire up the outrage about?

Well, this kind of does matter in a way that things like these are a continued assault on the way science and the scientific theory work. While it may not make many people into believes of ID like Kevin might suggest, it still muddies the water through half-truths and fallacies that make it much harder to keep scientific fact and theory safe from political tweakery.

It's like the theory of gravitation; you cannot observe gravity per se, but you can observe what we theorize to be its effects.

The problem here, bleh, is the word 'theory'. It's a word with a specific scientific meaning that doesn't quite match the laymen's usage, and that disconnect is exploited to plant seeds of doubt. While it could never be used to really fight against a theory like gravity (because there are thankfully precious few people who want to deny its outright presence), it's convenient enough to use as a bludgeon against Evolution, because using 'theory' to a laymen is the same as saying 'Evolution is really just a guess, it's not really supported'.

What's with the snide remarks about Sicko recently, Kevin? You had a similar sort of aside last week, if I remember correctly.

Moore's use of Cuba was actually quite, umm, conservative -- in that his ultimate point was more or less the jingoist if Cuba can do this, surely we super-duper Americans can. I don't recall any recitations of Marx or fellatio for Fidel.

re: How can the human body be a product of intelligent design when the playground is so close to the dump?

Brings to mind the old joke about the three engineers arguing about God. The ME says God must be a mechanical engineer – just look at the skeletal system and all the muscles. The EE sys God must be an electrical engineer – just look at the brain and the nervous system. The civil engineer replies that it is obvious God is a civil engineer – who else would route a waste disposal channel through a recreational area?

Pet peeve -- we're usually homocentric when considering evolution, forgetting about plants, other animals and the earth itself. It is impossible for any observant person to live in the western US and not see the results of evolution in the land forms, both micro- and macro-, all around. Evolution may not be a fact, as written above, but geology is surely a science.

Actually, bleh, so called "micro-evolution" is observable (bacteria, fruit flies, etc.) and this fact is pretty much conceded by the IDers. They are focused on denying macro-evolution (wombats, zebras, etc.) these days. Though frankly, from all reports, there isn't much exposition on ID theories in Expelled.

Kevin, there's still plenty of work to do to convince the non-trolls here that Cuba's healthcare is not better than that available in the U.S.

Absent some new category of evidence, evolution cannot be a scientific "fact."

Not quite.

It seems that the film was a bit of a flop. The numbers look good only if you don't take into account that, unlike most documentaries, it went into wide release. The $3M weekend gross was spread over 1000 theaters, so about $3K/theater, $1K/theater/night, less than most successful documentaries.

More here.

Kevin, there's still plenty of work to do to convince the non-trolls here that Cuba's healthcare is not better than that available in the U.S.

I'm fairly confident that if I walk into the Mayo Clinic with full health insurance, I'll get better medical care than the average Cuban. That's not the issue that Sicko was addressing--it's the fact that the US is unique in the "developed" world in that people have to worry about their health being affected by their financial status, or that health problems can cause financial ruin. The fact that it's also true in the case of Cuba is even more damning. The Guantanamo Bay stunt was a bit silly, however.

In A.D. 50, the Romans most probably inferred, from data on "cultural achievement," that they were vastly superior, genetically, to the Anglo-Saxons.

While he's supposed to be some kind of comic genius, which is stupid in itself, Ben Stein is an idiot.

While Mr. Sailer is, as apparently ever, talking nonsense, Steven Jay Gould once wrote about how horrified he was to read reports of the Wannsee Conference, where the Holocaust was decided upon, and discover that many of the SS officers involved in it were speaking in unmistakeably evolutionist terms. He suggested, IIRC, that it was something like watching your child being raped.

However, the fact that many Nazis were evolutionists does not prove that evolution created Naziism. Interestingly, the monarchists of the Wilhelmine period were also evolutionists (and legitimated their conduct in World War I on the basis of the struggle for life). So were the liberal eugenicists who promoted the sterilisation of "morons" in the US and elsewhere. The political misuse of evolutionism is a historical fact.

Unfortunately, contra Stein and Sailer, this does not have anything at all to do with the truth of evolutionism, any more than Hiroshima disproves nuclear science.

George W. Bush is perhaps the best argument against intelligent design that one can cite.

Stein's argument is not unique; it was, in fact, a concern of William Jennings Bryan which convinced him to take on the Scopes Trial. The biology text book that Scopes was teaching from advocated eugenics, based on Darwinism. I don't remember that part in "Inherit the Wind".

We can't base our scientific description of the Creation on our moral revulsion at what we (or others) see as its implications. Otherwise, we'd be back at Ptolemy. Ben Stein seems like a smart guy, so you'd think he'd get that. Alas.

Stein's basic problem is that during the first half hour or so he keeps his film sounding fairly reasonable. Maybe ID proponents really are getting the shaft!

Kevin Drum has written a mountain of dumbness in his career as a professional blogger, and that statement should go on his plaque at the "Very Serious" Commentator Hall of Shame.

How exactly have the IDrs gotten the shaft, Kevin? The reason why scientists laugh them out of the lab is that ID by its very definition posits itself outside of the scientific method, because it does not propose hypotheses that can be tested. In other words-ID is not science. So yes, ID proponents "get the shaft". In the same way that astrologers and alchemists do.

Please, Kevin, leave the science to scientists.

There is a difference between biological evolution, which is a fact, and what has come to be called social Darwinism. Social Darwinism, that notion of social survival of the fittest- predates Darwin's biological theory. It can be found in the proto-libertarian writings of Herbert Spencer. It became the dominant view of the great capitalists at home and the imperialists overseas. It is a natural, as opposed to divine, justification of authority, domination and ruthlessness. It is this tradition that was inherited by the Nazi's themselves. It has nothing to do with biological evolution which encompasses more than natural selection.

Jimm wrote:

While he's supposed to be some kind of comic genius, which is stupid in itself, Ben Stein is an idiot.

Stein isn't that funny when he doesn't have a movie-script writer feeding him lines. What is he, a one-trick pony? He just dead-pans the nerd act? That's not really that amusing or original or clever.

Stein isn't that smart when he's not repeating rotely memorized trivia facts. Being a capable intelligent person requires a lot more than that skill. Their are hordes of Madrassa-trained, fanatical idiots who have memorized a lot of information (Koran passages)- basically the same thing as what Ben Stein did. Stein is basically the typical "evil nerd"-- he's not as smart as he thinks he is, because he's basically psychologically hamstringed himself from being able to use a lot of his intelligence- his personality and his pet beliefs have forced him not to fairly explore and test reasoning he wants to reject. I'm sure there are a lot of situations he couldn't help out in, no matter how smart he likes to think he is. Knowing the name of the capitol of Vanu Atu or Mauritius doesn't really make you more useful than a trained show-dog.

Shorter Ben Stein:
"I'm not really a smart guy, but I play one on TV."

The Sailers of the world have a point. Unfortunately for them, it's not well supported.

First, timing. 50,000 years doesn't give the whole racial superiority thing a lot of time for much more than a single allele change. That's a lot of work for a single allele. On the average mutations occur every 200,000 years.

Second, there wasn't a single migration out of Africa. There's been a kind of slow leak. And yet Europeans and Chinese have this magic allele, but it's not real clear that Australian or Amerindians do. That's a pretty magic allele to pick its targets.

Third, the migration hasn't been one way. Sometimes, like adult children people who migrated from Africa moved back. And yet, despite many generations of intermarriage, the magic allele stubbornly said, "Not gonna do it" when it came time to infest dark skinned Africans. The allele to produce Big Brains turned out to be not advantageous in Africa (and Spain and Australia and the first inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.) Magically, the Big Brain allele also proved non-advantageous when Africans left Africa and came to Europe or the Western Hemisphere. Timing is everything magic allele-wise.

Fourth, there are national demarcation lines of IQ. Chinese show an advantage over their SE Asian neighbors. IQs in Israel are markedly different than their neighbors. The Big Brain allele is apparently nationalistic.

Genes swap around. That's all there is to it. We humans are like cuckoos and share the wealth of our genes all over the place. For example, there's a haploid group that shows up in large concentration around the Levant and curiously in some Amerindian populations. (Shades of Joseph Smith!) No haploid group holds sway everywhere and all regions have multiples. In short, the magic allele theory just doesn't match up with the data.

Liberals and scientists bear a lot of the blame for the uptick in recent years in the number of Americans who do not believe in evolution. We allowed the creationists to control the debate and rarely responded in force except in court cases. It took forever for scientists to even begin pointing out that the word "theory" when used by scientists does not mean just a conjecture, but an idea with strong evidence supporting it.
Too many liberals hate getting into these kinds of arguments preferring to stay above the fray and keep their dainty hands clean. As a result the right frames and dominates the debate. With such weak responses, it is no wonder that people buy into the right's arguments.
The same thing has happened with the claim that tax cuts raise revenues. Republicans say this all the time and so do pundits (as Charlie Gibson did in the last debate.) When was the last time you heard a liberal point out that this is a grossly misleading statement? Tax cuts do raise revenue but never enough to come close to replacing what was lost by the cut.

Americans lack the economic and political power to fire up an outrage unless it is about evolution, race, Britney Spears or Michael Moore.

Sadly, I know. Karl Rove is right. Americans have a collective IQ of 85 and will ignore actual facts and things that are critical to the operation of this country in favor of gibbering over social culture issues. We are in the period of greatest financial instability since the Great Depression and all people care about is petty crap. The fact that our entire system of government has been bought, sold and is being run by corporations for their own profit is less important than whether or not Britney Spears left the house wearing panties this morning.

We get the government we deserve.

Kevin Drum has written a mountain of dumbness in his career as a professional blogger, and that statement should go on his plaque at the "Very Serious" Commentator Hall of Shame.

I think you misunderstood Kevin. He was not saying that he believed that "Maybe ID proponents really are getting the shaft!" but that the average, uneducated moviegoer might be persuaded of this from the first half hour of Expelled. But then the rest of the movie got increasingly unhinged and even that theoretical, average, uneducated moviegoer would have trouble believing Stein, unless they were already predisposed to do so.

Ben Stein suffers from a mild form of the Jonah Lucianne syndrome. Usually it refers to stupid progeny of stupid people who somehow found themselves in corridors of power, the senior Stein was a good economist who happened to have the misfortune of working for tricky dick.

Gregor wrote:

Usually it refers to stupid progeny of stupid people who somehow found themselves in corridors of power, the senior Stein was a good economist who happened to have the misfortune of working for tricky dick.

If you've ever seen Ben Stein on "Win Ben Stein's Money," he knows a lot. To be honest, I think he might be really smart, but despite his smartness, he pushes some dumb beliefs (which he believes in himself). There are a lot of very smart people who have some dumb beliefs, and who aren't very useful in some situations. They have smarts, but they don't know how to use it well. The thing is, a lot of smart people let knowing that they are smart get in the way of improving themselves and using their smarts. It's a terrible handicap to being intelligent, to believe that you're so smart that you rely on the facts you've already accepted and neglect critically analyzing your own conclusions often enough. Something doesn't automatically transform into truth just because it's fallen into your set of accepted beliefs, and believing something like the opposite is uselessly egotistical.

All that said- there are legions of dumb or average-intelligence people who could have memorized all the stuff Ben Stein knew on "Win Ben Stein's" money, if they applied themselves to it. Creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving ability are the real tests of applied smarts.

Bzzzzt. "legitimate scientific inquiry" and "intelligent design" cannot be juxtaposed in the same sentence without the presence of a negative.

Evolution seems to be a very intelligent design. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and they evolved.

Steve Sailer,

America's most distinguished man of science, James Watson, attempts to start a conversation about the implications of the rapid improvement in genetic testing and what this may reveal about recent human evolution, and within a week he's out of his job at the scientific laboratory he built up over four decades.

I really hope this is sarcasm because otherwise it is complete BS.

Scientific American has a good debunking of this movie.

I am very disappointed in Ben Stein. Until now I admired the guy. He's very smart, he's managed to get acting gigs as a character actor, and he was also beginning to complain about the utter non-conservative cronyism and fraud on Wall Street. He is IMHO a respectable conservative.

Lending his name to this sham of a movie really lowers my opinion of him. Either he's got a huge blind-spot or he has sold out his name for the money.

Say it ain't so, Ben.

arteclectic,

Why is it that people can get into a freaking froth over something that matters not one iota and yet roll over like cows while our government sends our tax dollars on pallets to Iraq and bails out their brokers and buddies in the financial sector with more of our tax dollars?

Good question. The answer is that the two items (our invasion of Iraq and "Intelligent Design") are related.

Both of these items came about largely because of the support of a group of people called authoritarian followers. They are not rational - meaning they do not reason. Among other things they blindly follow their trusted leaders.

When they keep to themselves they are no big deal, but now that they are trying to run the country (under social dominator leaders) it IS a big deal because they make some really stupid decisions.

Attacking science and invading Iraq are two of the really stupid decisions. We need to understand them and push back before our country makes more stupid decisions.

I've now read all on this thread that I can stand. Bottom line, Ben Stein is an idiot and Kevin has made himself LOOK like an idiot. First, Kevin tries to prove how reasonable and balanced his blogging is by trying to equate Expelled and Sicko, when their shortcomings are not comparable. And clearly he doesn't understand just how far out there Intelligent Design is. To say it's out in left field, scientifically, would miss the point. It's not even in the stadium. Please, Kevin, have the humility to at least consider that maybe you were dead wrong and need to re-think your position. If you dig your heels in and waste your time trying to craft clever defenses, I fear you will be on that slippery slope toward right-wing perdition.

The political misuse of evolutionism is a historical fact.

Damn right. People who do horrible things, almost by definition, need to latch onto something in order to justify what they do. Nazi genocide has as much to do with Darwin as the Crusades had to do with Jesus. As in, you know, none.

Honestly, what sort of rock do you have to live under not to understand how rationalization is a part of human nature?

What is the anti-science connection between conservative Jews, including the neocons, and the religious right in America? There are at least two tributaries that feed into a rejection of rationalism, materialism, and science. The first is traditionalism that sees rationalism as a threat to traditional authority and to social order. This was the central concern of Leo Strauss the grandfather of neoconservatism. He regarded liberal democracy as the source of the moral apathy that laid the foundation for totalitarian regimes. Likewise the highly influential Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, he casts a long shadow over American evangelicalism, found materialism to be the basis for the moral decay that caused of most of society’s ills. The second current is the rather anti-paternal romantic movement that craves spiritual unity and an irreducible self. Both of these currents run together and try to preserve a mystic dimension against the onslaught of the unholy vivisection of human life by commerce and science. Many revolutionaries have started off down the river of romantic anti-authority seeking a new unity and redemption only to find themselves the dictators of a new, more pure, traditionalism.

What is most surprising about these factions is that they are entirely unaware of their similarities to the other right-wing movements they denounce, including fascism. The Nazis were obsessed with the moral decay of society. They were bringing about the reestablishment of good German moral order. They were, after all, backed by the German traditionalists who realized too late that they had given absolute power to a man with his own ideas about what to do with Germany. The Nazis were not overt atheists dedicated to materialism, they had a rather impoverished understanding of Darwin, but they were nationalists who mystified the unity of the German people and sought to purify the German state for the German people. They did not need Darwin or Nietzsche to give them the intellectual framework necessary for domination and extermination. The religion of nationalism is all they needed.

It amazes me how narrow minded the people on both sides are. How about "In the beginning the big bang created the heavens and the earth" or should it be
"In the beginning the big bang evolved the heavens and the earth" ? Now don't be narrow minded. How about a little critical thinking.

Somewhere there is a website that succinctly summarizes all of the arguments in favor of creationism and ID, and then provides the counter-arguments against each. Does anybody know which website I am talking about it? I found it a couple of years ago but I forgot to bookmark it.

you cannot observe evolution

Well, of course you can. Ever hear of antibiotic resistant bacteria?

http://www.fda.gov/Fdac/features/795_antibio.html

Tripp: Until now I admired the guy. He's very smart ... He is IMHO a respectable conservative.

Tripp, I have to disagree. The last thing I heard from him prior to all this creationist nonsense was a piece he did for (I think) Marketplace wherein he condescendingly explained to us morons how high gas prices shouldn't be blamed on energy companies, since wholesale oil prices were high. Of course, I'm not an expert economist like Ben Stein, so I wasn't aware that Exxon, Chevron, etc all sell at cost.

So, Stein is either so stupid that he doesn't know what role the concept of "profit" plays in capitalism, or he's so arrogant and dishonest that he thought millions of listeners wouldn't. His "essay" about the energy market was every bit as transparently right-wing propaganda as this stupid movie is.

"So, Stein is either so stupid that he doesn't know what role the concept of "profit" plays in capitalism, or he's so arrogant and dishonest that he thought millions of listeners wouldn't."

Don't forget his blaming those who "brought down" Nixon for the fall of Vietnam and the Cambodia genocide:

STEIN: When his [Nixon's] enemies brought him down, and they had been laying for him since he proved that Alger Hiss was a traitor, since Alger Hiss was their fair-haired boy, this is what they bought for themselves in the Kharma Supermarket that is life:

1.) The defeat of the South Vietnamese government with decades of death and hardship for the people of Vietnam.

2.) The assumption of power in Cambodia by the bloodiest government of all time, the Khmer Rouge, who killed a third of their own people, often by making children beat their own parents to death. No one doubts RN [Richard Nixon] would never have let this happen.