The uncut interviews

After posting the FSM Expelled video, it was obvious to some (and hopefully all) that several quotes were taken out of context, and certain views were shown in a biased way.

This was all intentional!  The point of the video was satire, and the target was Ben Stein and the Discovery Institute’s upcoming Expelled trailer.  They take clips from leading”darwinists” and show nice long interviews from IDers.  In the spirit of satire I chose to do the same, giving pro-FSMers a long speech and quote-mining the “darwinistic” supporters.

However, I choose to do one more thing to poke at Expelled - I’ve now released all the interviews to YouTube completely UNCUT!  Let’s see the Discover Institute’s full interviews online (with the false premises exposed).

So here they are (in order of most to least misrepresentation):

Dr. Denis Lamoureux

Dr. Warren Gallin and Dr. Brad Magor

Dr. Zbigniew Gortel

Dr. Michael Caldwell 

FSM Expelled!

With the UofA Atheists and Agnostics, I worked for the past bit and created the following parody trailer to the upcoming film Expelled:

Of Pandas and Birdmen

PZ Myers has the pen for wit and sharp criticisms of the Discovery Institute.  In this installment we see him drawing an analogy with those non-”Wrightists” who know that people can not fly.

Rehashing the Atheist Test

I tackle the Atheist test again in my latest video:

I also took the Blasphemy Challenge:

cdesign proponentsists

From the Nova special last week on the Dover trials, it was shown that in an early draft of “Of Pandas and People” (the ID-friendly “biology” textbook from the Discovery Institute) there was a slip up in one of the edits where “cdesign proponentsists” where mentioned (as a change from “creationists” to “design proponents”). This was one of the key pieces of evidence that ID was just religious creationism relabelled.

Now the definition has shown up on UrbanDictionary.com as follows:

The missing link between “creationists” and “design proponents”, as used in the textbook Of Pandas and People. Used to refer to creationist dumbfucks who are all to generally confused by science theology or even common sense.

Science says man evolved from other apes. Cdesign proponentsists say apes smell and prefer the scientific explanation “Goddidit”.

Evolving Clocks

“Evolution isn’t true because clocks never spontaneously evolve,” well if you make them alive and breed them in a computer simulation you can have clocks form from a pile of gears.

Evolution and the wisdom of crowds

I just read an amazing article about a better way to explain or illustrate the concepts of evolution to people it may be unfamiliar to entitled “Evolution and the Wisdom of Crowds.”  He uses the examples of Wikipedia, prediction markets, and the Netflix recommendation system to explain how evolution can produce things which seem intelligently designed, but don’t have to be.

Do yourself a favour and read the article.

An Angry Atheist

Greta Christina posted a great article which pretty much sums up what one can be upset about when being atheist/agnostic/non-religious.  Many of these are reasons organizations like our UofA Atheists and Agnostics have come into existance.

Freewill Criticisms

There’s many a critics of atheism who claim that it must lead to the belief that there is no free will.

PZ Myers has a well written piece responding to that here:

At every step of the way, I can say that only natural processes were involved, and that’s just beautiful to me.

A movie for no one to see

When it comes out in February 2008, everyone please ignore Expelled starring Ben Stein as the rebel with a cause - getting ID into science classrooms.  I hope someone can teach Ben what exactly the Scientific Method is, and why ID isn’t science (instead of psuedo-conspiracy theories).

(Thanks to P.Z. for the link)