Since someone a while ago on another thread brought up the subject of Expelled the movie and believed the part about those interviewed about losing their jobs over intelligent design I thought I’d look into it some.

Caroline Crocker in the movie claimed that she had lost her job and career for merely mentioning ID, but that does not seem to be the case. Crocker was employed under a part time contingent faculty contract at George Mason University, and her contract was not renewed. She also taught at Northern Virginia Community College.

Neither did Crocker loose her career or simply mention ID in a class. She resigned from NVCC to take a job with the defense department doing cancer research. And what Crocker refers to as simply mentioning ID was in fact a lecture in a cell biology class where she used many of the standard arguments against evolution such as asserting that the Miller-Urey experiments failed, no evidence for evolution, no one has ever seen a dog turn into a cat, no transitional fossils, and Darwin is responsible for the holocost.

Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor did not loose his job or career. He was crictized by other MD’s and researchers for posting at the Discovery Institute’s web site an essay claiming that the study of evolution was irrelevant to medince.

Robert J. Marks did not loose his job or career either. He is a professor of electrical engeering At Baylor University. And his complaint is that the university took down his school funded website, but he doesn’t mention that he was using this website to promote ID, something out of his area at the university.

Gullermo Gonzales did not loose his job or career either. He was denied tenure at Iowa State University, and moved on to Grove City College as head of the astronomy program and the new observatory there.

The Chronical of Higher Education said “Gonzalez had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation.” Ben Stein in the movie says that Gonzales had a stellar research record. That may have been so before he joined Iowa State, the school felt that his record wasn’t what it should be for tenure. Tenure is not granted automatically by senority, and before Gonzales’ denile 4 out of 12 applicants had been denied tenure in the same department, So Gonzales was not alone

So there you have it, no one interviewed about being expelled from academia were in fact expelled. That’s not to say that they were not crictized for using their positions to promote ID, they were, and rightfully so. In Crocker’s case a lecture on how evolution fails did not belong in a cell biology class, she was crictized for teaching completely outside the curiculum. An essay supporting ID and opposing evolution by Egnor was crictized for his stance on the subject. Marks was crictized for misuse of his school funded webpage, and told to take it down. Gonzales was crictized for a book he wrote The Privilaged Planet which was called “Old hat creationism” by William H. Jefferys.

It was my impression that a big part of academia was having your opinions crictized, and the further from accepted theory your opinion is the more criticism you are going to get, but it seems some people want special treatment. They want unsupported ideas founded on their religious beliefs to be allowed into scientific classrooms, and or they want to be free to promote those ideas in other ways, but protected from all consequences.

The film is full of fail before the deceit about the premise, but thats interesting to know; not really surprising.

Yet more information to fight the fail of cretinists! Thanks for this!

Oh, the public domain is now replete with reasons why Expelled belongs on the all time turkey movie list.

But one of the best ones has to be this.

Having engaged in false pretences to rope PZ Myers into taking part, they then barred PZ Myers from watching a preview screening. How many movies do you know where the principal stars are excluded from the premiere? This alone should be telling you something interesting. However, having gone to all the trouble to exclude PZ Myers from the screening, they let his guest in. Who was his guest? That's right ... Richard Dawkins.

This is a level of fail that only creationists could produce, and still not regard as being a terminal embarrassment for their cause.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGCxbhGaVfE[/youtube]

wow,this guy was a speechwriter for nixon and ford,still going strong i especially like the last bit of the trailer,very funny.

This might be old news, but Richard Von Sternberg is focused on in the trailer above and in the movie. He is another person claimed to have been expelled, but he neither lost his job or had his career ruined by publishing Stephen Meyer’s paper, because he had already resigned his editor position before publication, and it was to be his last publication. His real job was with the National Institutes for Health and he still works there.

I just spent a mind numbing afternoon reading the Meyer’s paper, and have to admit that if Von Sternberg had not already put in his resignation then it would have been completely appropriate to have fired him, but even then it would have been an unpaid volunteer job that he lost not his paying job, and he still would have had his career. Von Sternberg stayed on with the Smithsonian for a while as a research associate and what he lost was the office that he had enjoyed as editor which seems to have gone to the editor that replaced him. He also claims to have lost his key to the building, which may have been standard procedure when leaving the position of editor. And he claims to have been denied access to specimens that he needed to do his research. Whether this is true is a he said she said situation.

Anyway Von Sternberg as portrayed in the movie is another lie. He is an advocate of intelligent design. He knew that Meyer’s paper would be biased towards ID, and he selected himself as the sole peer reviewer. He says that there were four others that did peer reviews, but he will not name them, leading me and other people smarter than me to be skeptical that anyone other than Von Sternberg was involved because there was no need to go outside of the Smithsonian for peer reviewers with the qualifications adequate for this paper.

If anyone would like to read/suffer through Meyer’s paper here is a link http://www.discovery.org/a/2177

Cali have you read it and or dissected it? If you have taken the time already or would like to now I would be very interested in reading your thoughts/evisceration. I can spot the legions of straw men that make up Meyer’s army of sleight of hand arguments, but I do not have the patience, expertise or your way with words to do this pile of steaming, stinking dung the critique it deserves.

One more short observation. The guy in the movie claiming that evolution by natural selection and neo-Darwinism is not supported by evidence, and all he wants is an open and fair discussion is Jonathan Wells. The Guy claiming that he loves science and that the evidence for evolution by natural selection is being propped up and distorted has been a member of the Unification Church since 1974, and has stated that his prayers convinced him to devote his life to "destroying Darwinism". So much for being an unbiased researcher.

If anyone has not seen the movie and would like to here is a link http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... q=expelled

Oldskeptic wrote:If anyone would like to read/suffer through Meyer’s paper here is a link http://www.discovery.org/a/2177

Cali have you read it and or dissected it? If you have taken the time already or would like to now I would be very interested in reading your thoughts/evisceration. I can spot the legions of straw men that make up Meyer’s army of sleight of hand arguments, but I do not have the patience, expertise or your way with words to do this pile of steaming, stinking dung the critique it deserves.

I read it and dissected it over at RDF but unfortunately I no longer have the link to my (lengthy) rebuttal. If someone with more time and/or skill with search functions would like to find it, I have no objection to it being reposted here.

mmmcheezy wrote:Yet more information to fight the fail of cretinists! Thanks for this!

These subtitles make it almost watchable;
http://www.bogosity.tv/forum/index.php?topic=27.0

I strongly recommend against watching that "movie" without some form of sanity protection. Whether that's ethanol, edited subtitles, or a punching bag, it doesn't matter so much.

Probably fit some heavy duty screen protection too.