expelled
oracknows | March 24, 2016Ever since I mentioned on Tuesday that the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival had taken a massive dump on reality and science by selecting for screening Andrew Wakefield's antivaccine propaganda "documentary," Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe, dedicated to the so-called "CDC whistleblower," the topic has taken over, as topics sometimes tend to do here. In response to the mounting criticism for featuring a film by a scientific fraud clearly intended as an "I'll show you all" moment to persuade viewers that Wakefield was right after all about his long discredited claim that the MMR vaccine…
nisbetmc | May 5, 2009Earlier this month, I was honored to give a lecture co-sponsored by the NIH and National Academies at their historic downtown DC headquarters. The focus of the talk was on "Communicating about Evolution," part of a spring lecture series on evolution and medicine.
The video and the slides for the presentation are now online and include closed-captioning. I gave a similar presentation this past weekend in Pittsburgh at the Council of Science Editors' meetings. The presentation runs about 45 minutes with 30 minutes of Q&A.
For readers of this blog and followers of the "Framing Science"…
nisbetmc | April 29, 2008As I wrote yesterday, one of the emotional strategies employed in Expelled is to paint atheist pundits as the stand-ins for "big science," in the process selectively avoiding interviews with any of the many prominent scientists who have emphasized the compatibility between evolution and religious perspectives.
And as I noted in this earlier post, the claim by Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and other atheist hardliners that science undermines the validity of religion, even respect for religion, is at odds with the consensus view in the scientific community as represented by organizations such as…
esiegel | April 29, 2008No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If our Sun were moving at even one quarter of that speed, it would get thrown out of our galaxy.
Now, here's the kicker: this isn't just any old object getting tossed out of a galaxy, it is a huge black hole! How huge? About 300,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. You read that number right: 300,000,000…
nisbetmc | April 28, 2008Dallas Morning News runs this profile of Premise Media CEO A. Logan Craft. The feature spotlights the results of theater exit data collected by Premise and sheds additional light on the range of impacts I discussed earlier today.
Just like with polls released by political candidates or advocacy groups, these figures are to be interpreted with caution. But of interest from the article is that Premise is looking at the theater run as at least a six week experiment, with this past weekend being a big test. (The film earned another $1.4 million.) Also, given the selective nature of the audience…
nisbetmc | April 28, 2008
Two weeks ago, as Expelled premiered in more than a 1,000 theaters across the country, I went with several friends and graduate students for an early Friday evening screening at the Regal Cinema located in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, DC. The medium sized theater was about 80% full. In attendance was what appeared to be the typical urban professional crowd for the surrounding arts and entertainment district, an audience on a Sunday that is more likely to read the New York Times at a coffee house than to attend church.
As I watched the film, I noticed how effectively Expelled…
awild | April 18, 2008Ben Stein's propaganda flick Expelled comes out today. Since other people have hashed the film to death, I won't write about Expelled except to make the following observation.
This is a graph showing the number of technical publications indexed in PubMed under the search terms "evolution" and "intelligent design". I threw in a third search term, "biochemistry", just to give a sense of how evolution sits relative to another large research field. Basically, the graph measures the productivity of a field in terms of scientific publications. In 2007, scientists produced 17 technical…
nisbetmc | April 8, 2008When producers release a documentary about a public affairs topic, especially in the case of a propaganda film like Expelled, they create several natural advantages over the typical news coverage that follows a policy debate.
First, in the lead up to the release of the film, the documentary generates coverage at softer news beats such as film reviews, the lifestyle pages, and in the case I detail below, the show business beat. In these contexts, the claims of the film are featured without context or absent a counter-argument.
Readers of these news zones are likely to be less familiar with…
esiegel | March 28, 2008There's a movie coming out on Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution, called Expelled, and it's narrated/hosted by Ben Stein (right), a TV/film personality who is an overall intelligent guy (and used to have the TV show Win Ben Stein's Money), and used to be a Nixon speechwriter. Politically, he's quite conservative (for example, immediately following 9/11 he gave a speech where he called abortion "the worst form of terrorism"), but this movie is apparently one of the worst abuses of science since What the Bleep do We Know?! came out.
The movie has an innocuous enough premise: is…
pharyngula | August 29, 2007The second part of the DI's interview with Ruloff, producer of the movie Expelled, is now available. He's claiming now that there will be no hacking and chopping of the interview footage, which is, of course, complete nonsense. I was interviewed for something close to two hours; we know that that will be extensively cut for the movie, and I fully expect my part will be notably brief. The question is one of what context will be removed to make their point.
But OK, since he promises that the movie will make no distortions, here's the challenge: send me a copy of the unedited footage. Likewise,…