Expelled flunks the test

www.ExpelledExposed.com finds new creationist “documentary” lacking accuracy on many levels

Oakland, California, April 15, 2008 — Millions of dollars have been spent promoting Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed to fundamentalist church groups, but that money would have been better spent on fact checkers. www.ExpelledExposed.com, a website launched today by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), reveals the truth behind the creationist movie’s misrepresentations.

“Creationists have been making the same arguments for decades,” says Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. “They’ve gotten better at marketing these claims, but they’re no more valid now than during the Scopes trial of the 1920s. Creationists have been predicting the death of evolution for over a century, yet it is constantly affirmed by evidence from fields Darwin could never have imagined.” Given the damning assessment at www.ExpelledExposed.com, Scott adds, “Perhaps the filmmakers should have spent more time hitting the books, instead of beating up on hardworking scientists.”

Throughout the movie, Ben Stein claims that “Big Science” represses intelligent design to advance an atheistic agenda, but Peter Hess, from NCSE’s Faith Outreach Project, doesn’t buy it. “There are many successful evolutionary biologists who are also people of faith,” he observes, “and a host of people of faith who regard intelligent design as a misconceived and harmful rejection of science. In attempting to pit Christianity against science, Expelled misrepresents both.”

“We reviewed public records and reports on the intelligent design promoters who were supposedly discriminated against, and we discovered that the claims that they lost their jobs over intelligent design are unsupported,” explains Josh Rosenau, a biologist at NCSE. “That said, professors who aren’t making advances in their field, editors who disregard their journal’s established practices, and lecturers who repeat creationist falsehoods shouldn’t be surprised if they have trouble holding jobs. These people weren’t expelled; they flunked out.” www.ExpelledExposed.com contains information about the “martyrs” from Expelled, and also of real scientists who successfully challenged established science. “The difference,” NCSE researcher Carrie Sager observes, “is that real scientists back their challenges with experimental results. Results are what changed minds, forced textbook revisions, and earned Nobel Prizes.”

More insidious are the movie’s attempts to link evolution to the Holocaust. Susan Spath, a historian of science at NCSE, comments: “The implication that Darwin led to Nazism and the Holocaust is an irresponsible misrepresentation of a terrible history. Hitler abused many things, including science, and Expelled is wrong to shift blame off his shoulders and onto evolution.” www.ExpelledExposed.com quotes the Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman, who described similar claims in a previous creationist movie as “an outrageous and shoddy attempt … to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust.”

The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The NCSE maintains its archive of source material on the history of creationism at its Oakland, California, headquarters. On the web at www.ncseweb.org. www.ExpelledExposed.com is a resource for journalists, teachers, and curious moviegoers who want the full story behind Expelled.

By Maria Glod
Washington Post
Published on: 12/05/07 Washington —- American teenagers have less mastery of science and mathematics than peers in many industrialized nations, according to scores on a major international exam released Tuesday.

Education experts say results of the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment highlight the need for changes in classrooms and in the federal No Child Left Behind law. The average science score of U.S. 15-year-olds lagged that of students in 16 of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group that represents the world’s richest countries. U.S. students were further behind in math, trailing counterparts in 23 countries.

“How are our children going to be able to compete with the children of the world? The answer is not well,” said former Colorado governor Roy Romer, chairman of Strong American Schools, a nonpartisan group seeking to make education prominent in the 2008 presidential election.

The PISA test, given every three years, measures the ability of 15-year-olds to answer math and science problems. About 400,000 students, including 5,600 in the United States, took the 2006 exam. There is also a reading portion, but the results for U.S. students were thrown out because the tests were printed incorrectly.

Students in Finland earned top scores in science and math. Mexico was at the bottom of the pack.

The PISA results underscore concern in some quarters that too few U.S. students are prepared to become engineers, scientists and physicians and that the nation may lose ground to economic competitors. An expert panel appointed last year by President Bush is preparing to recommend ways to improve public school math instruction, with a focus on algebra.

PISA, first administered in 2000, covers reading, math and science, but each time the test is given it focuses in depth on one subject. Last year’s exam spotlighted science, covering concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and earth and space science.

On the science portion, U.S. students, most of them 10th-graders, earned an average score of 489 on a 1,000-point scale, 11 points below the average of the 30 countries. Canada, Japan and Korea were among the countries in which students outperformed American counterparts. U.S. students were on par with eight countries and outperformed five.

In math, only four countries had average scores lower than the United States. Students in 23 countries earned a higher average score, and those in two countries did about the same as the Americans.

The ranking of U.S. students in math and science is about the same as it was in 2003.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called the results disappointing but noted that the National Math Panel and other initiatives are in motion to improve math and science education. The ranking “speaks to what President Bush has long been advocating for: more rigor in our nation’s high schools; additional resources for advanced courses to prepare students for college-level studies; and stronger math and science education,” she said in a statement.

HERE’S THE COMPETITION

Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has analyzed skills of 15-year-olds in 43 countries. Here’s a snapshot of the Top 10.

MATH

1. China

2. South Korea

3. Hong Kong

4. Switzerland

5. Belgium

6. Finland

7. Czech Republic

8. Liechentenstein

9. New Zealand

10. Netherlands

24. United States

SCIENCE

1. New Zealand

2. Finland

3. U.K.

4. Australia

5. Japan

6. Canada

7. Liechentenstein

8. Slovenia

9. Hong Kong

10. Ger., Czech.

14. United States

The Alliance for Science has announced their second annual National High School Essay Contest. Interested students may submit essays of up to 1,000 words on one of two topics — Climate and Evolution or Agriculture and Evolution. Click on the topic names for some possible ideas to explore in your essay. Submission deadline is Feb. 29, 2008.

Guaranteed Cash Prizes! 1st Place $300.00, 2nd Place $200, 3rd Place $150, and 4th Place $100. Additional rewards for sponsoring teachers: 1st Place $150, 2nd Place $100.

Topic too hot for WKNO
Show on intelligent design didn’t air here

By Michael Lollar

Thursday, November 15, 2007

WKNO-TV, the local PBS affiliate, did not air a “NOVA” production on
intelligent design as part of its Channel 10 broadcast this week because
of the “controversial nature” of the subject.

The show, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” aired nationally
Tuesday, but was confined in Memphis to the station’s digital broadcasts
(channel 910 on Comcast or 810 on Comcast’s high-definition tier). Up to
70 percent of Comcast subscribers have digital service.

On Channel 10, the nondigital or analog version of WKNO, the station
re-aired a locally produced show with Mid-Southerners sharing their
World War II experiences.

WKNO spokesman Teri Sullivan said the station received complaints that
the “NOVA” broadcast was pre-empted, but would not say how many. In
response, WKNO will air the “NOVA” production at 7 p.m. Jan. 22 “with a
local followup to discuss the various views on the show.”

As for Tuesday night’s scheduling shift, Sullivan said, “We had plans to
do our local programs to honor veterans this week during Veterans Day.
We thought Tuesday night was a good spot for local programs of this
nature, and we were concerned about the controversial nature of the
(’NOVA’) program as were 15 percent of the top 50 public television
stations in the country.”

Sullivan said seven other PBS affiliates chose not to run the “NOVA”
production, which recounts the federal trial of a Dover, Pa., case in
which parents sued the school board. They objected when the board
required science teachers to read a statement to biology students
suggesting that some features of life are too complex to be explained by
the theory of evolution and must be the result of intervention by an
intelligent agent.

An exhaustive trial with witnesses for both sides ended in a ruling in
which U.S. Dist. Judge John E. Jones III, a Bush appointee, dismissed
intelligent design as a religious argument for creationism. In forceful
language, he said intelligent design has no place in a science
classroom. The Dover school board members who required the intelligent
design statement were voted out in the next election.

In response to one viewer complaint, WKNO program manager Debi Robertson
said Wednesday that while the “NOVA” episode reported the outcome of the
trial and the arguments during the trial it “might look particularly
one-sided to most of our audience.”

To viewer David O. Hill, 67, a retired FedEx pilot, the WKNO decision
was like refusing to show a Civil War broadcast for fear it would offend
some Southerners or a broadcast about Nazi atrocities in World War II
“for fear it would offend some Germans in the viewing audience.”

“I’m a supporter of and love this station. I really appreciate what
service they do, but when they step out of line like this it violates
the whole premise of what NPR and PBS stand for nationally … This was
an historical review of an important judicial decision in America, and
they chose not to do it.”

Hill’s education and background also factored into his reaction. An
ornithologist, he said he was trained as a biologist.

“Evolution is as important a building block to biology as atomic theory
is to chemistry and gravitation to physics. I can believe in the Easter
Bunny or the Loch Ness monster more easily than that the universe is
only 6,000 years old.”

see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/teachers/programs/3416_id.html

Through courtroom scene recreations and interviews, NOVA explored in detail one of the latest battles in the war over evolution, the historic 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case that paralyzed a community and determined what is acceptable to teach in a science classroom.

The program:

• traces how the issue started in the small, rural community of Dover, Pennsylvania, and progressed to become a federal court test case for science education.
• defines intelligent design (ID) and explains how the Dover School Board was the first in the nation to require science teachers to offer ID as an alternative.
• chronicles the history of legal efforts involving the teaching of evolution, beginning with the Scopes Trial in 1925 and culminating in 1987 when the Supreme Court ruled against teaching creationism.
• summarizes Charles Darwin’s original theory of evolution, as presented in his seminal 1859 work, The Origin of Species.
• recreates portions of the trial from court records, noting that parents who initiated the lawsuit set out to show that the board had religious motivations for teaching ID.
• presents evidence for the prosecution, including transitional fossils and genetic confirmation of Darwin’s theory.
• reports testimony about the nature of science, including what a scientific theory is, how science is done, and why ID is not science.
• presents evidence for the defense, including the idea of irreducible complexity in structures like the bacterial flagellum, a system that provides propulsion for some bacteria.
• interviews a scientist who shows how the flagellum can be reduced in complexity and still function in bacteria as a syringe to transmit disease.
• recounts how the prosecution found evidence showing that the text referred to as a resource for ID, Of Pandas and People, had originally been a creationist text.
• presents closing arguments and the judge’s decision finding both that members of the school board had religious motivations for introducing intelligent design into the classroom and that ID was not a scientific theory.

Taping Rights: Can be used up to one year after program is recorded off the air.

http://www.mdjonline.com/94/10241495.txt

The Cobb school board finally admitted the obvious on Tuesday: that its “evolution sticker” case had devolved into a waste of time, tax dollars and educators’ attention. As a result, it took the long-overdue step of pulling the plug on its federal court appeal of a lower-court ruling that said the evolution disclaimer stickers the board had ordered placed in all high school science textbooks were unconstitutional.

The board agreed on Tuesday to settle the suit brought against it by east Cobb parent Jeffrey Selman and several others. The agreement specifies the board will not use such disclaimers in the future and commits the board to pay around $166,000 in attorney fees for the plaintiffs. The board also wracked up $109,000 in payments to its own attorney during the case, although that attorney firm, Brock Clay of Marietta, had agreed to represent the board gratis during the appeals phase. Just think how many teachers could have been hired with that $275,000 or so the board wasted on something that never should have been an issue in the first place.

The board put the stickers in the textbooks in 2002. The stickers described evolution as “theory, not a fact,” and said students should consider the subject with an open mind. In turn, that prompted Selman and four parents represented by the American Civil Liberties Union to file suit contending that the stickers violated the concept of church/state separation.

U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper agreed they were unconstitutional, ruling in January 2005 that the stickers represented an attempt by the board to advance religion in the classroom. So the board spent about $14,000 having them removed from the books.

But the board was not content to let that be the final word on the matter, and voted in January 2005 to take the case to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. But in May of this year that court sent the case back to Cooper, citing a number of factual problems in his ruling and leaving it to him to determine whether to hold a new trial.

At that point, with the legal costs rising and no end in sight to the litigation - and with three new members taking office as of next month - the board began talking seriously about settling.

“The board maintains that the stickers were constitutional, but, at the same time, the board clearly sees the need to put this divisive issue behind us,” said board Chairwoman Dr. Teresa Plenge.

Indeed, the sticker issue wound up being a huge distraction for the board and top administrators. Among other things, while the board was making a top priority of dissing Darwin, it let the system drop onto the dreaded “Needs Improvement List” under No Child Left Behind. Whatever time and money it would have been spent from here forward pursuing the appeal and preparing for a new trial could no doubt be better spent trying to get the Cobb system back on track.

Hopefully from here forward, the school board will focus on what is supposed to be its main priority - increasing student achievement - instead of wasting its time and the public’s money on more such matters.