For the next couple of hours, I’ll be watching instead of blogging, mostly (“Judgment Day: Evolution on Trial”). PZ is liveblogging, he says. I’d go for the popcorn, but we just finished dinner.
These issues are still very much alive. Texas science standards are up for rewriting now (a bunch to come on that here, from Texas Citizens for Science, soon). Texas biology books will be updated in the near future. Creationists have flocked to Texas in anticipation.
Judge Jones was featured on The News Hour tonight — the man is a statesman of great stature, refusing to denigrate either side, but carefully explaining the law and the judge’s duty.
Stay tuned to PBS tonight. You will not see anything like this program on any commercial outlet, broadcast or cable. PBS remains one of the shining lights of our government, a wonderful idea executed with flair.
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7:56 p.m.: The guy playing Kenneth Miller in the trial reenactment is good, but he’s nowhere near as engaging as Miller is. This NOVA is a good deal: I wish someone had a good video of Miller’s presentation to the Texas State Board of Education in the 1990s (1999? 1997? I’ll have to look that up). It was a stellar performance before a hostile crowd, and it was one of the big rocks that stopped the anti-evolution tide.
For that matter, I wish we had copies of the testimony of Andy Ellington and Stephen Weinberg from 2003. I understand a video may still exist (Discovery Institute taped the whole thing, but don’t expect to see them ever let this stuff out for others to see — it’s too powerful). Ellington was afire, and Weinberg was as statesmanlike as anyone will ever see him. It was great.
Nick Matzke got a little camera time earlier. He’s a hero in this story, and he was grand earlier in other states.
Watch this stuff carefully. The scientists and policy defenders of evolution are almost to a person, wonderful people. You’d enjoy a dinner with Eugenie Scott. You’d love to spend an afternoon with Andrew Ellington. There are scientific, political and religious differences galore, but very few really disagreeable people defending evolution. Funny: The pro-evolution side demonstrates the virtues of Christian charity better than the self-proclaimed Christian side. (And as if on cue, just after 8:00 p.m. Bill Buckingham shows up to attack the teachers as non-Christian, or not good Christians, even the ministers’ kids — and he looks crabby, if not downright bothered.)
8:07 p.m.: The actor playing Michael Behe has his voice and delivery down pretty well, but without the usual smirk. I wonder if Behe smirked through his testimony — anybody know? Maybe the ID folks would have been better off to hire an actor to play Behe.
8:10 p.m.: Behe’s irreducibly complex stuff, and bacterial flagella: Has anybody ever asked Behe why an intelligent designer wouldn’t have used a screw propeller, which would be more efficient than a flagellum? Is the designer irreducibly dense, too?
8:55 p.m.: IDists and other creationists won’t like the program. It was fair. In two hours, NOVA offers clear understanding of what happened at the trial, and to people who listen, it tells why evolution came out on top.
Great program. How many will it sway?
In the interim comes word that Kenneth Miller will be in Dallas day-after-tomorrow from something called “Pegasus News Service.” Since Pegasus is the flying horse logo of the old Magnolia Petroleum Company, which was adopted by Dallas-based Mobil (before Exxon-Mobil), it’s clearly a Dallas-based news group. Maybe SMU related. Here are the details of Miller’s visit:
On Thursday, Nov. 15 at 5 p.m. in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom on the campus of Southern Methodist University, Kenneth R. Miller will lecture on the subject of science and faith in America, and how the falling out of favor of “intelligent design” will affect our understanding of science as a tool for understanding our world. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Only one Scout meeting conflicting . . . can I make it?
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Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Scopes remains the only person ever arrested for teaching something in evolution; I missed the G-man scene (I’ve got it on tape and will review); Inherit the Wind was a diatribe against McCarthyism. The play was not intended to portray accurately any event in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, and the creationist gripes about the play are quite disingenuous. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments isn’t exactly Biblically accurate, either, and not a reason to complain about any faith.
Scopes was a science teacher, in addition to being a phys ed teacher. I don’t think it’s inaccurate in any way to portray him as such. Larson called Scopes “the high school’s 24-year-old general science teacher and part-time football coach, John T. Scopes” (see Larson, page 89). In the scene Larson describes there, it is Scopes who takes down from the shelf the Hunter Civic Biology in its Tennessee-approved form and opened it to show that evolution was an integral part of the course.
Yes, the case was a test case, brought in Dayton both to expose the folly of the law and to draw attention to Dayton. What else is new? Any overturning or exposing of injustice is generally considered a good idea, especially when done in court. As you know, courts in the U.S. may not take hypothetical cases. There was a genuinely stupid law, and a genuine legal issue, and Scopes, a genuine science teacher, had genuinely taught evolution in violation of the law. That he had drinks with the prosecutor only shows how civil the debate was back then — if only we could get back to such a set of civilized behavior, things would be better all the way around.
“Propaganda arm of the NCSE” is rather like saying they tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. It’s like accusing someone of adhering faithfully to the first point of the Scout Law. That might be unsavory in your neck of the woods, but I doubt it.
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NOVA lost credibility when it called Scopes a “science teacher” and showed fictitious scenes from Inherit the wind of G-men arresting a science teacher in class as though it were even close to true. NOVA writers and producers were no doubt aware of Edward Larson’s Pulitzer Prize winning book “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion,” yet choose to propagandize in the form of a documentary. The truth is Scopes was a physical education teacher who occasionally substituted for other teachers, who volunteered to be prosecuted to bring publicity to his publicity whoring town, and who even had drinks with the prosecutor during the trial.
NOVA is now a propaganda arm of the NCSE.
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A flip side to the use of “atheist” as epithet, I wonder how many of those Christians really understand that their scriptures don’t say anything against evolution, and that almost none of their sects have any doctrine against it? Methodists, Catholics, Disciples of Christ, UCC, Presbyterians and many others have statements supporting teaching evolution in public schools, and no major Christian university teaches either creationism or it’s younger cousin/daughter, intelligent design. At the highest levels of intelligent Christianity, there is no problem with evolution.
So the “Christian” anti-evolutionists are being misled about science and their own faith. Go figure.
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I saw it; very well done. What I find depressing is that so many people seem to be downright threatened when they are not allowed to have others as a captive audience for their superstitions; it is as if they feel that they are somehow “entitled” to have the stamp of approval from science on what they “believe”!
And yeah, those people and the label “atheist”; I wonder how they’d feel if they knew that 93% of the academy of science level scientists were either atheist or agnostic; that means that the medications that they are taking to keep themselves healthy and alive were, gasp, developed by atheists!
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How representative of New Mexico is Rio Rancho? Reading the headlines in the newspapers, one might get the idea that every corrupt official and fundamentalist in New Mexico is in Rio Rancho — which could be good, to get them all in one place to limit the damage.
What about the rest of the Land of Enchantment?
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Two things struck me during all this:
first, that many of the individuals in the documentary said the word “atheist” like it was something dirty and disgusting…
second, that even declaring the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ unconstitutional hasn’t prevented it in our Rio Rancho, NM schools.
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