The VENT

Now

Then

Ben Stein in his ‘documentary’ “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed” illustrates to me the propensity of people to pick easy targets with little impact.  If he wanted to tackle ‘consensus science’, why not Anthropogenic Global Warming?  No he picks a topic with hardened political factions and then chooses the simplistic pronouncements.

For instance, the historical fact that evolution was used by some people to extrapolate to eugenics and other silly to horrendous notions is not news outside of the target audience for this film.  If this ’side show’ had to be pulled out of his hat, why not talk about extrapolations from ‘The Theory of Relativity’ to ‘relativism’.  He couldn’t do that, it would complicate and even counter his argument.

The biggest problem I have with this shallow, ‘one sided’, ‘one dimensional’ documentary is he sticks to the two hardened views on the topic and doesn’t even attempt to explore any of the assumptions of either solitude.

For instance, if you drop the notion that ‘intelligence’ is divine or even something that can only arise organically, then you can travel down a number of different roads.  Just as the old definition of man as a ‘tool maker’ would now have to include a number of species of a wide variety, the dated ideas of intelligence and consciousness needs to include a number of our machines, other species, and even inorganic systems.  Is intelligence merely the storage of information and the illustration of purpose?  Is consciousness simply being self aware and maybe introspective?

If it is, then Ben Stein’s movie is simply as dumb as a rock or as lively as a tree.  Evolution is a fact, but what mechanisms brought about rapid biological change or an explosion of the number of species in the fossil record in some ‘periods of time’ is still under debate.  In the lab we can simulate the Earth’s early atmosphere and come up with amino acids and peptides and the step to self replicating ‘prion like’ organisms evades us but it is not a huge extrapolation.  So Ben is right to suggest there is ‘no settled science’, but he is absolutely wrong to suggest ‘Intelligent Design’ in itself adds anything new or useful to the enquiry of the origins of life.

The hubbub is about losing the inference of the question in the language barrier.  The reality is Stephan Dion simply does not understand his own answer because he doesn’t have one.  First he has to have that painful 30 day convention of idiots to decide how to pick up the pieces when we are side swiped in some as yet unknown way.

The original post can be found here …

Well it took just 7 days for someone in Pakistan to try to make my forum a center of their interests in the fringes of North American’s entertainment industry so I shut it down again.  Thank you ‘Word Press’ (my blog software) for warding off the demons of ‘mystery meat’ from my blog.  It appears I will have get serious about finding Forum Software that works with Yahoo Web Hosting’s database and doesn’t get so quickly over ridden.  Maybe that Yahoo 360 …  or maybe I’ll just give up on the idea.  Sorry about that Danny

The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting a Cold Winter coming against the backdrop of AGW.  Looking at it’s explanation and the climate scientists helping them with their work, I now understand the reason they are bucking popular sentiment.  Also, the author of this article, “Is Global Warming on the Wane?” in the 2009 Farmer’s Almanac has become quite familiar to me in my research on the topic.

Peggy Sussed by UNDERWORLD

… and then there is the rest of the soundtrack for the movie ‘Sunshine’.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm