First, I have problems with the way the film harps on the theme of “academic freedom”. On the surface — and given the film’s heavy metaphorical use of the Berlin Wall and the speech made there by Ronald Reagan — this sounds like an attempt to resolve scientific matters through political sloganeering. (Note also the shot that zooms in on the word “Creator” in the American Declaration of Independence.) But the fact is, there are limits to all our freedoms — the freedom of expression is constrained by laws against libel, slander and yelling “fire!” in crowded theatres, for example — and there are scientific standards that all scientists must meet if they want their theories to be taken seriously within a scientific context. It is not at all clear that Intelligent Design theorists have met those standards, and this film doesn’t even try to demonstrate that ID is scientifically valid as a theory; it offers no clue as to what sorts of testable or falsifiable hypotheses ID theorists have proposed, if any.
Now, I don’t mean to disparage or diminish the experiences of those scientists who have found themselves “expelled”, fairly or unfairly, from the scientific establishment. Given the recent ostracizing of Larry Summers and James D. Watson for comments they made about alleged natural differences between genders and races — ostracizing that, in Watson’s case, prompted William Saletan to say that the “liberals” in academia were being wilfully dogmatic just like “creationists” — no one could deny that politics plays a heavy role in academia, even among supposedly rational and objective scientists. And there is certainly a double-standard if some scientists are being slapped down for expressing their belief in a Creator while other scientists, like Richard Dawkins, are allowed to run around promoting their atheism and their hatred of religion.
But the fundamental question remains: Is ID science? Expelled never really bothers to make the case that it is. But if this case can’t be made, then there is no more place for ID in the science classroom than there is for any number of other non-scientific theories. There is, presumably, a reason why astronomy and not astrology is studied in the science classroom. What is it? And why should ID fall into the same category as astronomy and not astrology? Likewise, there is, presumably, a reason why medical techniques and not miraculous healings are studied in the science classroom. What is it? I believe in miracles myself, and I am deeply impressed by the way Catholics, in particular, will often subject claims of miraculous healings to rigorous scientific analysis, considering all possible natural causes before they turn to supernatural ones. But to make that leap — to assert that an as-yet-unexplained phenomenon must have been caused by supernatural forces — is essentially to leap beyond science and thus, in some sense, outside of science.
Second, there is a line in the film that I find very intriguing, when David Berlinski, an agnostic Jewish mathematician and a self-professed “crank” who sort-of falls on the ID side of the argument, says, “We don’t even know what a species is!” That is a fascinating statement, and I wish the film had teased out its implications. Why did scientists invent the term “species” in the first place? What do they mean by it? What don’t they mean by it? What sort of discussions is the term useful for? What are its limits? And how can old-school creationists argue that no new species has ever emerged from an older one if, in fact, we don’t even know what a species is in the first place? It is the creationists, after all, and not the evolutionists who have insisted that there are clear uncrossable boundaries between the various “species”.
As it is, Berlinski’s line points up one of the other problems I have with ID, at least as it has been presented to the public, and that is the way that ID seems to consist more of tearing hypotheses down rather than building them up. It’s all well and good to encourage skepticism, to point at the gaps in existing theories, or to underscore the fact that words don’t always mean what we think they mean. But at some point you need to agree on a common language, and you need to propose a hypothesis that can be tested and applied like any other scientific hypothesis. And if ID theorists are actually doing that, films like Expelled don’t really clue us in.
More thoughts later, if any occur to me.
Leaving the subject matter aside since it’s a long way out of my field of expertise, I enjoyed the movie for a couple of reasons.
First, it (perhaps tongue in cheek) poked a much deserved bit of fun at the attitude that if you’re not a dyed in the wool Darwinist, you are a young-earth, fundamentalist fanatic and a boorish idiot to boot.
Secondly, it did hit perilously close to the target on the dearth (I won’t yet say death) of dissent in the academy. The academy has become too much of an enforcer of a prevailaing version of “truth” and stiffling questions of weakness or alternative in a prevailing school of thought.
And unfortunately for whatever we mean by “the pursuit of knowledge”, that stiffling extends to many fields beyond the Darwinist/alternative debate.
– Ishmael
I’m not a biologist, but the definition of ’species’ that I’ve always heard is that if two creatures can produce offspring, then they are of the same species.
Such a definition raises some problems. Imagine that we have a set of ‘populations’ of animals, each population identified by a unique integer. Suppose also that an animal in population N can mate and produce offspring with animals in populations N-1, N, and N+1, but not in other populations. This, or something like it, can happen. How many species are there?
This may be the problem Berlinski is referring to.
Those are some excellent remarks upon the film; thanks for posting them. I’d like to address two points.
First, the claim that there is a lack of dissent in academia, promoted by (mostly) the other commentators here, is a deeply ignorant thing to say. Academic debate is quite vigorous and no-holds-barred, as anyone actually in the academy, or who reads scientific journals or attends scientific conferences, would know.
With respect to the Modern Synthesis (the currently accepted theory of evolution), that debate rages strongly around the edges of the theory, involving small details about how evolution works, exceptions to what would otherwise be thought of as rules, and so forth. When a theory is as old as evolution, you tend to find the really central questions were answered 100 years or more ago, and that is the case here. That may lead to the illusion that there is no dissent in the academy.
Similarly, sensible people don’t say that there is “a dearth of dissent” about best medical practices just because every doctor agrees that a gunshot wound can kill a person. There’s still plenty of dissent over whether surgery, medication, or even nothing, is the best treatment for various diseases and disorders.
I don’t know what “Darwinism” is; I guess it is just an anti-evolutionist’s term for something they don’t like, so I can’t really respond to all the claims made about Darwinism.
Second, quoting from the post:
“Given the recent ostracizing of Larry Summers and James D. Watson for comments they made about alleged natural differences between genders and races — ostracizing that, in Watson’s case, prompted William Saletan to say that the “liberals” in academia were being wilfully dogmatic just like “creationists” — no one could deny that politics plays a heavy role in academia, even among supposedly rational and objective scientists.”
Politics does indeed play a huge role in how science is conducted, who gets funded, and so on, but it is not always obvious how the politics works. In the above case, it sounds as though you are quoting in support of the notion that there are racial differences, or that Summers and Watson should be allowed to express their dissenting opinions even though “liberals” disagree with them. The problem here is that the question of inherent racial differences is not a matter of opinion - either such differences really exist, or they do not.
Watson and Summers have rejected a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows there are no such differences. While I’m quite sure liberals dislike them, their serious problems in the academy come from scientists who respect evidence, regardless of their politics. It is well understood that if you want to dissent from a strongly-supported set of scientific propositions, you need to be actually conducting research to show why those propositions are wrong. Watson and Summers have run afoul of the political machine because neither are doing that, while both have seriously and repeatedly misrepresented the scientific work of their colleagues in support of their ideas. In such a case, yes, the political monster will get you - and I’d say rightly so.
A very fair review given your Christian links (and I mean that as a compliment though I’m not certain it comes across as such). Too many people are giving this the thumbs up simply because of its religious undertones.
People talk about a dearth of scientific dissent but from what I understand, every serious scientist would throw out the theory of evolution tomorrow if evidence turned up that disproved it. Alternatively they’d have to overhaul the theory to ensure this new anomaly was explicable in the context of all other knowledge on the subject.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the makers of Expelled because they have no formal theory to disprove. Every anomaly is easily explained when you invoke a creator rather than look for scientific evidence.
In interviews about this movie, Ben Stein has stated that “science leads to killing”. That alone should be enough to seriously reconsider the usefulness of his movie.
I think your points about Intelligent Design are spot on. I don’t have any doubt that “academic freedom” is just a buzzword to gain sympathy for the movement - which thus far has fail to come up with any compelling scientific evidence for its position.
I’m inclined not to take Berlinksi seriously. After all, Berlinski has pretensions of being well acquainted with evolutionary theory, and yet makes the absurd claim that scientists believe whales evolved from cattle. His remark about species probably has to do with the fact that members of two different species can sometimes produce fertile offspring. Of course, it’s not surprising considering species are not discrete entities, but rather part of a continuum - as one would expect with evolution.
Good pickup on Berlinski’s species line. Like many other of the one-line hits against biology in this film, it was a real distortion of the issue.
The reason we don’t “know” what a species is isn’t that we don’t understand species or speciation at all, as Berlinksi’s statement implies. Nor is it that we cannot define precisely what we are talking about as needed.
It’s that _defining_ speciation, all under one single word, is an extremely difficult and convoluted endeavor, without one single “right” way to do it. There are too many ways to define species, all valid, but none of which capture everything we might want to talk about.
We can define species by natural interbreeding.. but what about unnatural situations? What about occasional hybrids? What about ring species? What if the barriers are basically “cultural” (i.e. some fish CAN mate, but refuse to mate with fish of a certain color, but then will mate if we shine an artificial light that confuses that color) rather than genetic, or physical (i.e. the mechanics of reproduction, like a Great Dane and a Pug, aren’t right, even though the genetics are).
The irony here is that a lot of the problems with defining a species exist precisely BECAUSE evolution checks out as science: species are, as we might expect if evolution was going on, indistinct, with many different sorts of continua instead of hard distinctions along a single idea.
Indeed, part of the problem is that we inherited a taxonomic system from a decidedly static and non-evolutionary era. We have to fit things like species names into this system, but it’s endlessly confusing, especially to laypeople.
For instance, when something speciates, it’s given a new species name. This implies to most people that it has turned into something else: it has a genus and a species name, and the species name is different: it’s now a different “kind” of animal in the same genus as its ancestor. But in reality, the evolutionary explanation is that it is a SUBGROUP of the ancestral species, not a parallel one. But the taxonomic system doesn’t really have a good fit for that idea. We use “species” to designate a single breeding population AND as a “rank” in the taxonomic system. But evolutionary biology is nested clades (i.e. groups within groups: descent with modification), not discrete eternal ranks.
Some biologists have tried to propose better, alternative taxonomic system, but the problem is that everyone already knows and is familiar the original one, and its very hard to get people to change (especially across borders and languages). So again, the problem is not that we are ignorant of what a “species” is, it’s the huge logistical mess in trying to define and explain all the complications and strange details in one term.
Berlinski doesn’t even hint at this. He makes a statement that could be technically correct in a sense, but is wildly misleading in its implications.
Tags: academics, ben stein, christian movie review, get expelled, scientists
