Ben Stein’s Grand Unified Theory of Stupid
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
If you haven’t heard of the alleged documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, it’s basically a slimy turd of a propaganda piece designed to sell the ideas that:
a) Evolution (or "Darwinism") is an outmoded theory being unfairly promoted by atheistic biologists who refuse to accept evidence that life and its complexity can be attributed to an intelligent designer, and
b) Evolution/Darwinism is a philosophy which leads to things like mass-murder, genocide, eugenics etc.
The star of the show is Ben Stein, an intellectual luminary whose credits include being a speech writer for disgraced former president Richard M Nixon, starring as the droning teacher in the 1980s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and hosting some shit game/reality shows such as Win Ben Stein’s Money and America’s Most Smartest Model.
Until now I assumed he was just another anti-science nutjob who failed to understand that intellectual freedom does not include the right to be paid to teach bullshit at an educational institution. But hearing some of the things he says in this I realize he is in fact quite horribly stupid, and more ignorant than the average 13 year old when it comes to science.
To clarify my position on stupid: there is nothing inherently evil about it per se… I harbour no ill will toward the stupid in general, except where they exercise their stupid in a detrimental way, and Stein’s attempt to rouse the heaving masses of latent stupidity against the scientific "establishment" is a very good example of what I consider beyond stupid and well into very fucking evil territory.
Some of the stupid things Stein appears to believe about the Theory of Darwinism (he believes these things enough to spout them in TV interviews and press conferences)
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Evolution claims that life arose from non-life via natural selection — it does not; evolution is concerned with speciation, ie how life diverges into new and complex species, as it clearly does based on fossil and genetic records.
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A keystone of the theory is that new species can arise from existing ones, and yet this has never been observed — in fact it has been observed in multiple instances, but even had it not this wouldn’t be a deal breaker anyway… evolution has taken place over hundreds of millions of years, so new species can’t be expected to crop up in front of your eyes.
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Evolution is flawed because it does not account for the origin of the universe — WTF? Here his stupidity burns so bright it hurts. Because in his tiny brain he is seeing Darwinism as the key opposition to Creationism, I think he forgets that evolution is a theory specific to the origin of the biological diversity we see today; it was not invented to replace creationism, but Stein is unable to grasp this very simple fact. He also complains that evolution fails to explain gravity, thermodynamics and astronomy…!?!
It’s kind of ironic that Stein is the host of America’s Most Smartest Model, where he plays the sneering intellectual tripping up models with trivial questions like "what is the square root of 144?"— The ignorance of the pretty boys and girls he mocks will never do the kind of damage that his own much more potent and willful stupidity might under the guise of intellectual freedom.
April 27th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Just to clarify a point that the film should have made clear(?). Darwinism promotes or endorses (not leads to) racism, genocide etc. It’s only going to have that affect on some people. And Stein should have run his script passed AiG scientists. You have clearly shown that he is no scientist. That does not negate other aspects of the film, however, such as the rabid discrimination that otherwise top class scientists face if they “come out of the closet” regarding their creationist leanings.
April 27th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Ross, not only is Stein no scientist, his comprehension of the subject of his own film is lower than that of the worst hack who ever called themselves a science journalist.
Darwinism at its worst does not promote or endorse genocide… there is nothing natural about extermination of a race or ethnicity… it makes more sense to invoke selective breeding as a causal effect in these cases, and selective breeding has been practiced for millenia, long before Darwin was ever born.
Your misconception is a perfect illustration of why literal creationists make SUCH BAD SCIENTISTS. You infuse everything with intent, whereas a rational scientist does not look at evolution and read intent or higher purpose into it (and therefore does not extract any kind of moral framework from the fact that is evolution).
I’ll grant you that evolution can be twisted to support racism, but just barely since we humans are in fact just one species. Even if this is the case, does the fact that bad people might choose to misinterpret and misuse such information make it less true? No.
We evolved, copious empirical evidence supports this, deal with it. Better to deal with the truth than deal with nut-jobs trying to argue that blacks and Jews are descended from “mud people” or the sons of Cain etc
And if you want to argue against the fact of evolution then I would first request that you tell me how all the land animals from the Ark could go from being functionally extinct to thriving populations again. And then talk about how the carnivores used to be herbivores before original sin, even though they had big pointy teeth. Forgive me if I don’t know exactly where you conveniently draw the line here between history and fairytale.
April 27th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
To answer your second point, if a scientist believes and asserts that A is true, even though all the evidence points to B, then he is a bad scientist and should not be supported. It’s clear that your guys can say and do whatever the hell they like and get away with it… so it’s not censorship that’s the problem here… it is their ridiculous demand for unearned respect within the scientific community.
Science is all about evidence, you can hope all you like that we will find God’s signature in our DNA but until we do you need to chill and accept that ID is just wishful thinking from people who cannot stomach the idea of being wrong and think proper science is too hard.