The previous thread to this subject for the Obama campaign's responses to these questions has grown too lengthy to follow and has diverted widely to unrelated political subjects. Which is okay to a point, but in this thread I'll work harder to keep things on topic.

Senator John McCain's campaign has submitted their responses to those same 14 science policy questions, and those responses are now listed side-by-side with Obama's at Science Debate 2008. These display some strong contrasts that should serve to inform the public fairly well about how each of the candidates would approach the important issues of science, education and technology as we head into the second decade of the 21st century, with our economy is tatters and continuing to spectacularly fail on an almost daily basis (Merill Lynch and Lehman's both went down this weekend, just a week after the the nation's primary mortgage lenders were nationalized due to criminal bankruptcy).

Please use this thread for discussion of the actual questions and the contrasts (if any) between the campaigns' responses to them. Thanks!

Politics isn't a focus of this forum, and participants here cover the spectrum of political views and policy leanings. This is not a thread about politics, please don't use it as one.

That out of the way, I'd like to post a few excerpts from a review of progressive activist Markos Moulitsas' new book Taking On the System, because his words have broader social application.

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Our semi-annoying, semi-enlightening commenter and sometimes contributor Thought Provoker has spent the better part of the past week valiantly attempting to defend Charles Darwin from Ben Stein's charge in the movie Expelled that Darwinism led to eugenics, and eugenics led to Adolph Hitler's eugenics laws, which led to… The Holocaust.

I admit to sensitivity on this issue, as both my Godparents were Jews, very recent immigrants from Europe. Both of them had tattoos and had lost their entire families in the Holocaust. They never had any children of their own. Can you guess why? So I got 'indoctrinated' very young in the importance of what Never Again! means.

My husband's Aunt Melba (still spry but blind at 96) was sterilized as an adolescent when she and her sister were dropped off at an orphanage back when being an orphan was considered a symptom of "undesirable genetic inheritance" in America. So both sides of this family have some eugenics horror stories in the family album and a serious commitment to making sure it never happens again.

These family stories are related. Such things were as common when I was growing up as unfortunate survivors of polio and thalidomide babies and radiation-induced cancer clusters from atmospheric bomb testing. What happened to my Godparents had its insidious roots in what happened to Aunt Melba years earlier in Oklahoma. Direct, irrefutable connections, as history amply documents in collections from Cold Spring Harbor to the Holocaust Museum.

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Comments about Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed abound. Expelled the Movie: Opening Night Box Office Exceeds Expectations at Darwinian Fundamentalism has this to say:

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed brought in an estimated $1.2 million on its opening night. Even though it was #14 in terms of number of screens, it was #8 in overall revenue, and #4 in per screen average (among those on the Friday estimate chart). Most box office sites I looked at predicted it would end up with 2.0-2.4 for the whole weekend (Friday to Sunday) with an average of 2.2. It is on track to get at least $3.5 million for the weekend, which would be 60% above expectations.

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My wife and I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed tonight. It was worth it. Ben Stein interviewed prominent individuals from both sides of the Intelligent Design issue. The overriding theme of the movie was freedom. Freedom to view questions from all vantage points without retribution. Dembski, Berlinski, Wells, Sternberg, Gonzalez and more from the ID side were interviewed along with Dawkins, Provine, Ruse, Myers and others from the opposing side. I enjoyed Berlinski the most while Provine provided an ample view of the dark side. I was surprised (although I should not be after years of watching internet exchanges) by the obsession of critics with religion and their own philosophical interpretations of it. Religion and science are inversely related according to the simplistic formulation of Myers. More of one necessarily means less of the other.

Dembski made the point that evolution need not be an opposing paradigm to Intelligent Design and Ruse made a comical attempt to explain a crystal based explanation for life's origin. After offering a very abbreviated explanation Ben Stein asked how it works and an exasperated Ruse twice repeated that he already explained it. Crystals and mutations were not enough for either Stein or most of the theater viewers based on their reactions.

Expect the usual charges of dishonesty and a liberal dose of insults from the critics. Ignore it. They spring from motives having nothing to do with science. If you spend a significant amount of time at Telic Thoughts you owe it to yourself to see the movie.

Tired of fighting? Love movies? Have a FaceBook account? Then join our club!

The Books section of the weekend New York Times offers this article:
Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

It begins…

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from "American Idol," appearing on the Fox game show "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?" during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: "Budapest is the capital of what European country?"

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. "I thought Europe was a country," she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. "Hungry?" she said, eyes widening in disbelief. "That's a country? I've heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I've never heard of it."

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We live in a culture where our media often defines our reality for us. This is because we are a nation of consumers. We not only consume products, but we consume images, news, and stories. We sit before the TV or our favorite web page and absorb the packaged message. Since most people do not have the time to think critically about all the visual and auditory messages that bombard us daily, those images seep in and shape our views of the world around us.

Thanks to the Dover trial, Intelligent Design has become part of the pantheon of media imagery, taking its place next to our obsession with Britney Spears and the newest commercial for Nike. This is clearly seen from the slick article in the New York Times that reviews the upcoming PBS documentary, Judgment Day.

Now, I have no desire to criticize the documentary (afterall, I was pleased with the court's decision), but I think it is worth noting the images that are being disseminated about ID.

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The NYT article about the movie Expelled has created some buzz around the blogosphere. Here is a sample.

Life Under the Blue Sky: The View From Below

The Register

Reason

The Christian Post

Guardian Unlimited: Arts Blog

I see the NYT Times has given the movie Expelled some free advertising. What caught my eye was something Francis Collins said. Now, keep in mind that I like Collins, as he seems to have a lot of integrity. What's more, he is criticized by both the ID movement and the New Atheist movement. Nevertheless, he does seem to have changed his tune. In the NYT article, we read:

Mr. Ruloff also cited Dr. Francis S. Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and whose book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" (Simon & Schuster, 2006), explains how he came to embrace his Christian faith. Dr. Collins separates his religious beliefs from his scientific work only because "he is toeing the party line," Mr. Ruloff said.
That's "just ludicrous," Dr. Collins said in a telephone interview. While many of his scientific colleagues are not religious and some are "a bit puzzled" by his faith, he said, "they are generally very respectful." He said that if the problem Mr. Ruloff describes existed, he is certain he would know about it.

Yet consider what Collin said back in 2000:

Collins, who prays and attends church regularly, says that "In my field, biology, the standard assumption is that anyone with faith has gone soft in the head. But I don't check my brains at the door when I go to church." He finds that many scientists are biased against faith–"When a scientist describes himself as a believer, the first reaction among colleagues may be, 'How did this guy get tenure?'"–essentially for turf reasons. "Scientists are taught to believe that the data will eventually yield all answers," Collins says. "So if you tell them there are important aspects of life that cannot be understood through lab tests or data, that means their form of knowledge will always be limited, and some find that threatening."

You decide.