The Weekly Wedge Update: February 25, 2002, Monkey Trial shows on PBS

February 25, 2002

Monkey Trial Airs on PBS

I have two big events to report.

First, I received a phone call last Saturday from Nebraska PBS-TV producer Christine Lesiak, informing me that Monkey Trial (MT) would have its first showing on PBS stations nationwide the next evening, Sunday, February 17. MT is a joint product of Christine and WGBH-TV in Boston, which produced the infamous Evolution series shown last fall, a critical review of which you can obtain at the Discovery Institute web site http://www.reviewevolution.com/. You may assume on the basis of their record that WGBH and PBS would present only Darwinist propaganda, but you would be mistaken. Perhaps WGBH is trying to atone for its sins. MT totally demolishes the "Inherit The Wind" myth of the Scopes trial and tells all kinds of truth about the event and the participants, truth that has long been suppressed or distorted. I appear as a talking head on the program. More importantly, I influenced Christine's research and thinking from the beginning. This was a particularly appropriate topic for a Nebraska producer, because that was William Jennings Bryan's home state. Remember Nebraska man?

If you did not see the original showing of Monkey Trial on Feb. 17, or even if you did, I recommend that you consider ordering the videotape at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/monkeytrial/. It won't be available for a couple of weeks, but I hear it is already the hottest selling item in the PBS store. If journalists finally get into this story, it will lead them to the gross distortions in the recent WGBH-PBS Evolution series, and also to the distortions and manipulations by newspapers and science organizations during the Kansas controversy of 1999, the true history of which is told in chapter 3 of my book The Wedge of Truth..

Second, be sure to read "Unraveling the DNA myth," by Barry Commoner in the February Harper's, available on-line at http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/DNA-Myth-CommonerFeb02.htm.

Commoner does not seem to realize that in "Unraveling the DNA myth" he is also unraveling the neo-Darwinism myth, but that will become clear eventually to thinking people, when the implications have time to sink in.