Got your attention? Good. Here's a recent video called "Evolution, theGrand Experiment," that dozens of VPers helped to make, innocent of the fact that the smooth-talking and obviously intelligent filmmakers were young-earth creationists. As the publicity says, it was "filmed over 12 years on three continents and seven countries," and you can get it for twenty bucks on Amazon. It's being widely shown on cable TV. And it's being used in testimony for a current trial about whether and how to teach evolution in schools.
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Grand-Experiment-Episode-1/dp/0892216972
The scientists punked by these twerps include Jim Kirkland, Phil Gingerich, Angela Milner, John Long, Gary Morgan, Irena Koretsky, TasserHussain, Gunther Viohl, Peter Wellnhofer, Tim Rowe, Annalise Berta, Phil Currie, Bill Clemens, Paul Sereno, Dave Weishampel, Nick Czaplewski, AndyKnoll, and Monroe Strickberger ... and yours truly. It's not that what all of you say in the video is wrong. It's that the filmmakers have taken it completely out of context. They have represented the honest uncertainty of science as fraud and hoax.
Oh, except for the supreme a**holery of Storrs Olson, king of the knuckleheads. He plays right into their hands, as you would expect.
The lesson would seem to be: unless you know personally and trust who filmmakers and media folk are, don't talk to them. Except, of course, if they are from National Geographic. The best thing about this film is that it blows a new protostome into the scientific pretensions of some of that magazine's staff, who ignored Tim Rowe's evidence that Archaeoraptor was a fake, and instead went with the counsel of an (unnamed but widely known) advisor to NG who stated that "all these fossils have been altered anyway."
You may want to consider buying this video and showing it to your students with your own narration. You could even build a non-majors course inscientific inquiry and evolution by showing and stopping this film, interspersing your own evidence and perspective, and showing how some people are happy to lie for Jesus and any other religious icon.
Thanks to the NCSE staff for putting us on to this scam.
AronRa again. How can these douchbags seriously claim that thier opposition to evolution has anything to do with morality?
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6 comments:
What's the deal with Storrs Olson? I only know his name and not really his work or apparent controversy? Kevin Padian seems to imply that the problem here was almost inevitable, what have I missed?
Olsen is an ornithologist at the Smithsonian, and a theropod-bird link denialist. See:
http://dml.cmnh.org/1999Nov/msg00263.html
Ah. I can see how that would do it. Thanks for the clarification.
I think this kind of Creationist need to be put in the same category as conspiracy theorists. To them Evolution is a sham constructed to lure people away from religion.
So you can't expect respect, because they assume scientists are self serving liars who will say anything to continue the conspiracy against religion.
Creationists like these consider this sort of action moral because they're exposing the 'lies' of the conspiracy.
I could buy into creationism being a (misguided) moral crusade for what they consider the "truth", if not for the fact that they are so blatantly and deliberately dishonest in thier representation of evolution, and themselves.
Quote mining, telling stories with critical details changed or left out, lying about thier academic credentials, and repeating false statements about evolutionary science even after they have been corrected, are par for the course when dealing with creationism.
This kind of behavior is far to deliberate to be due to a misunderstanding, so on some level, they have to know that they are lying. They may be concerned about morality on some level, but such pathological liars cannot be concerned about the "truth."
I wouldn't classify it as 'misunderstanding'. Highly convinced self delusion as justification for moral superiority was what I was shooting for!
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