Anyone seen Flock of Dodos? - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

kerry · #1 10-15-2006, 11:46 AM

Saw Flock of Dodos last night at the Museum of Science and Nature. Randy Olsen, the director was present, and there was an interesting question/answer session afterward. The flim is about the Intelligent Design-Evolution Circus. It focuses on the Kansas Board of Education and it's attempts to teach ID alongside evolution. He interviews Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biologist who is the leading scientific light of ID, as well as the attorney most well known for defending the ID cause. He also films a poker game between Harvard scientists who are discussing ID. Unfortunately the Discovery Institutue (the big $$$) behind the ID movement refused an interview. Olsen believes that the scientists come across as arrogant jerks (some of the poker players clearly are) and that the media battle is being won by the ID movement. No one has been able to replace Stephen Jay Gould as the public face of natural science.
The film is not very deep but it is a humorous look at a cultural divide, which, given the $$$ devoted to fanning the flames, is likely to be around for a long time.

#2 10-15-2006, 12:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kerry edwards

and that the media battle is being won by the ID movement.

Yeah, right......

Evolution and ID are 100% different and 100% incompatible.

If you want to learn the Christian way life was created, public school is not the place to do it.

kerry · #3 10-15-2006, 12:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForcedInduction

Yeah, right......

Evolution and ID are 100% different and 100% incompatible.

If you want to learn the Christian way life was created, public school is not the place to do it.

The Discovery Institute hired the same public relations firm to make their case that created the Swift Boat Campaign against Kerry. The point the director was making was not about compatibility or incompatibility or credibility/incredibility but that our world is a world of sound bites and media in which cultural battles are not won in academic journals or stuffy intellectual debates but on TV. Scientists have been very weak in exploiting that medium to defend evolutionary science. It may be simply a matter of $$ but it also seems to be a lack of political savvy. For instance, despite the fact that the Catholic Churchis firmly on the side of evolution, the Discovery Institute was able to get the NYT to run an editorial by a deviant Catholic Cardinal opposing evolution and praising ID.

t walgamuth · #4 10-15-2006, 11:38 PM

how any educated person can believe ID is beyond me.

what are they reading anyway?

obviously only what they already know agrees with their faith.

i saw a film about ID at sunday school one day. it was so simple minded it was laughable. their "scientific proof" is nothing more than saying "this is so complicated that we cannot imagine how it could have evolved on its own so there for it must have been created all in one fell swoop".

and yet i have siblings who believe in it and they all are college educated.

tom w

#5 10-15-2006, 11:53 PM

Sing it along with me: “God did it. The end.”

http://www.fstdt.com/

retmil46 · #6 10-16-2006, 02:16 AM

This is the tack I've always taken with this bunch, long before it became ID.

"First off, you don't know how long a day is for God - it could be a split second or billions of years. Second, nowhere in the Theory of Evolution do they try to deny the existence of God or say he had nothing to do with it. Third, God works in mysterious ways, no one knows HOW God went about creating life. In effect, you could say that the Theory of Evolution is trying to chronicle and explain how God went about creating life, the actual mechanics he used. Therefore, when you criticize others for teaching about evolution, you're criticizing them for trying to understand God."

That usually ties them in knots long enough for me to get far, far away from them.

Saw one of this bunch on C-SPAN today, wrote a book called "The Politically Incorrect View of Science", giving a talk to a like-minded organization. Basically, he was blasting government funding of truly independent scientific research that didn't agree with their world view. Spouting off a whole list of nonsense - there is no AIDS problem in the developing world, no one other than "homosexuals and drug addicts" has ever contracted AIDS, global warming is a myth, the evidence for evolution is "weak" and life can only be explained by ID, funding for AIDS prevention in other countries is a "covert way for liberals to keep foreign aid flowing", yadda, yadda, yadda.

Could barely stomach listening to this nonsense, but the Chinese general Sun Tzu had a saying - "Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you will prevail".

retmil46 · #7 10-16-2006, 02:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForcedInduction

If you want to learn the Christian way life was created, public school is not the place to do it.

The one thing that does give me comfort - in nearly every place I've heard about where the school board has been armtwisted into mentioning ID in some way in the classroom, the majority of parents have raised hell in one way or another - took them to court and got the decision reversed, or threw them off the school board at the next election.

Jim B. · #8 10-16-2006, 05:33 AM

The film might be amusing, but the so called "ID" is just a polite way to describe the creationist ideology of the unltraconservative religious right, and the practical result of introducing religious beliefs into the school system, it is not science.

There is no shortage of fundamentalist christians in Kansas and Tennessee who would enjoy nothing more than to have their religious agenda taught in school and given credence there. Nothing has changed since before the days of the Monkey trials in Tennessee in the 1920s

Having to have that POV promoted by the people who represented the so called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", a right wing smear group created solely to crucify presidential candidagte John Kerry tells you all you need to know about the credibility of the "ID" people. Their religious agenda should be kept completely out of public schools.

crash9 · #9 10-16-2006, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForcedInduction

Sing it along with me: “God did it. The end.”

http://www.fstdt.com/

This is such a great link. Thanks so much. I may never run out of material now

kerry · #10 10-16-2006, 01:44 PM

If you go to the Discovery Institute and click on their Science and Culture link, then on to the list of fellows you can click and their links and see that many of them have advanced degrees from many of the best universities in the country. It is a remarkable sociological fact that people can advance thru the educational system to such a level while still holding on to literalist and fundamentalist views of religious scriptures.

I'm not convinced that not teaching ID in high schools is such a good idea. While I don't think ID is science, it is metaphysics and I think high school students, even of the most fundamentalist stripe could benefit from the study of comparative metaphysics. Banning ID's teaching just creates a constantly festering, pus filled lesion on society.