Un-intelligent design

Ben Stein has a new movie. It's a documentary, sort of, about intelligent design (ID) theory. Cleverly, they're calling it "Expelled" (see, it's a riff on the expulsion from paradise, while whining that the poor ID scientists are being unfairly expelled from intellectual circles - and jobs at academic journals - just because they're propounding "science" that violates every tenet of what science stands for.

Oh, wait. That's not quite the way they put it... according to a review in Scientific American, the main issue was how a pro-ID paper get published in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington without peer review. According to Managing Editor Richard Sternberg, "it was my prerogative to choose the editor who would work directly on the paper, and as I was best qualified among the editors, I chose myself.")

According to Sternberg, "after the publication of the Meyer article the climate changed from being chilly to being outright hostile. Shunned, yes, and discredited." As a result, Sternberg filed a claim against the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) for being "targeted for retaliation and harassment" for his religious beliefs. "I was viewed as an intellectual terrorist," he tells Stein. In August 2005 his claim was rejected. According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!

Oh.

And it gets worse from there. Read the whole thing....