Shortly before the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” came out, I reviewed it and recommended it on my blog. (I saw it in a special screening before it was in theaters. I did not review this movie without seeing it, as many in the left-wing media did.) I believe that the issues it speaks to are of great importance. I also believe that some in the aforementioned left-wing media would have us to believe otherwise.
As stated on the Evolution News and Views blog, an editorial in the New York Times presents, as fact, statements that are simply not true. It says that we creationists “struggle with reality,” that teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution is “code for teaching creationism.” These statements are simply false.
But it gets worse. It moves from ill-informed opinion to blatant lies:
Scientists are always probing the strengths and weakness of their hypotheses. That is the very nature of the enterprise. But evolution is no longer a hypothesis. It is a theory rigorously supported by abundant evidence. The weaknesses that creationists hope to teach as a way of refuting evolution are themselves antiquated, long since filed away as solved.
But The Scientist (magazine) would beg to differ. It seems that all the mysteries and questions surrounding the process of evolution have not been “filed away as solved.”
This theory of evolution is really a framework for thinking about change in the living world. It provides no specific guesses for the kinds of traits that may exist, no strong requirements or prohibitions on how they may interact to make a complex organism or ecosystem, and no commitments to how innovation can occur. Even the problem of how a differentiated population ultimately divides into two distinct species (posed in the title of Darwin’s seminal work) remains a major technical problem in evolutionary biology
Someone needs to explain to the New York Times the difference between fact and fiction.
