The American Spectator

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(Page 6 of 15)

No Intelligence Allowed : /p> p> Expelled ! I saw the trailer on the website -- an excellent project & so awesome to see the truth getting out. I will definitely be going to see the whole film & encourage others to do so. Thank God for Ben Stein and all these scientists. br> -- Kathy br> Arizona /p>

Tom Bethell's review of the anti-Darwinist film Expelled displays a staggering ignorance of science. I am aware that The American Spectator is a politically conservative publication, but since when did denying overwhelming scientific evidence become a conservative position? Expelled -- a film financed and produced by creationist propagandists -- merely repeats a tired litany of baseless accusations and untruths about evolutionary biology, and Bethell has swallowed them hook, line, and sinker.

Bethell's ignorance of science is particularly reflected when he asks "What does the science show? The vast majority of species that once lived are now extinct. New animal designs and "models" appear in the fossil record without detectable precursors. But fossils can't reveal ancestry so in the end they don't get us very far." These are misconceptions based on the profoundest ignorance of paleontology and molecular biology, both of which testify to the abundance of evidence for those very transitions creationists would like to pretend don't exist. The pages of every major scientific journal in biology, genetics, and paleontology are filled with detailed, scientific evidence for the common descent of all organisms on Earth. But it is easier for creationists to pretend this evidence is part of some kind of vast conspiracy cooked up by 'Big Science' (to use the favored term of the producers of Expelled) than to compete in the fair marketplace of ideas by producing their own peer-reviewed refutations.

p>The greatest fallacy -- and the clearest example of faulty logic by Bethell and opponents of science -- is to argue that because some evolutionary biologists (for example, Richard Dawkins) are atheists, that therefore all Darwinian evolutionary biology is an atheist attack on religion under the disguise of science. Conservatives and liberals alike should join in repudiating baseless attacks on the very science that not only daily expands our knowledge of the natural world around us, but which has also given us the ability to combat deadly viruses, bacteria, and diseases that can only be understood in light of evolution. br> -- David Sepkoski

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