Tomorrow is the premiere of Ben Stein's new movie EXpelled. (Have you seen the commercials? They're great!) My hope is that we are going to see a flood of discussion as the movie makes its mark, and that voices heretofore silenced out of fear and outright censure will begin to be heard. Voices like Bruce Chapman's today in the Seattle Times:

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." He's now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse.

When I was taught Darwin's theory in college more than four decades ago, it was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those days to respect academic freedom, which is a good standard to apply in any field. In the 1990s, before intelligent design was added to the ideas studied at Discovery Institute, I learned about an assault on the academic freedom of Dean Kenyon, a biologist and author at San Francisco State University who had come to view Darwin's theory as flawed. At first, the effort to restrain him from teaching seemed like just another skirmish over political correctness.

Then, following the Kenyon case, I began to examine the account of life's development that I once had been taught so dogmatically. One after another of the demonstrations of the theory that supposedly were "certain" and "conclusive" when I was a student — such as Ernst Haeckel's embryo drawings that showed various animals looking almost identical in the earliest stages of life — have been abandoned or replaced. What has not changed is the dogmatism.

Finish reading his piece here:

An intelligent discussion about life

Labels: Education, Movies, News, Social Observation