Open Science Thread

Chris Mooney reviews the anti-evolution movie Expelled. After the obligatory and accurate recognition the film is a steaming pile of crap, he points out what most reviewers avoid:

From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences. There are no standards. There is no filter. And the truth is not just automatically going to win in the competition of ideas when the playing field tilts against it.

Regardless if the movie is a money maker, thousands of people will see it. Hopefully, most won’t walk out of the theater blaming evolutionary biologists for the Holocaust despite the intent of the producers to do exactly that and more. But I bet plenty of viewers will buy into the slickly packaged premise that evolutionary biology is built on a tottering foundation of lies propped up by a vicious cabal of modern day Lysenkoists eagerly persecuting those brave martyrs presenting the revolutionary evidence for creationism, or intelligent design, or whatever opinion poll tested pseudonym is chosen next. That same spurious public relations methodology will continue to win hearts and minds, on everything from stem cell research to climate change, until such time as we invest in and develop counter measures that can match the efforts of our highly motivated and often well paid anticognates.

• I've recently been highlighting right-wing lunatic Sun-myung Moon by way of author of John Gorenfeld. Let's take a trip down DKos memory lane and revisit Dr. Jonathon Wells who also appears in Expelled and whose science education -- intended in his own words to 'destroy darwinism' -- was paid for by Moon's Unification Church.
• People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering a one-million dollar prize for anyone who develops a process to produce meat in the lab, with no animal attached.
• A reader sent me this article which sounds dreadfully familiar to those of you who've followed the political attacks on James Hansen and NASA GISS, except the tax payer supported agency under seige this time is the EPA.
• I hope to be announcing a science panel at Netroots Nation 2008 next week, the subject of which will be, in part, repairing the extensive damage inflicted on US science policy over the last eight horrible years.

Update 5:15 AM EST: It would be inexcusably misleading to blame Christianity for Nazism or the death camps, even though at times Hitler used a perverse, twisted theology to justify his ideology. Hitler referred to his Christian beliefs -- including his idea of Jesus as an Aryan role model that would have condoned persecution of Jews and other scapegoats targeted by Nazis (More recent evidence suggest the Nazis had vague plans to eliminate traditional Christianity or at least those elements of it considered in conflict with Aryan supremacist  dogma and replace it with a more compliant, Nazi friendly version) -- many times more than evolution to rationalize his murderous actions. Any intellectually honest person, religious or otherwise, would readily concede that blaming the Bible and modern day Christians for the evils of Nazism would be as silly and as ugly as blaming Isaac Newton for the V-2 rocket -- or laying the responsibility for Auschwitz at the feet Charles Darwin. Sad to say, there are documented instances of creationists doing precisely that, both directly or indirectly, including portions of Expelled.