Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a documentary charging Darwinists with suppressing and persecuting opponents in order to avoid discussing the scientific challenges which Intelligent Design presents to the Theory of Evolution. The film's premise is that scientists have been expelled like naughty children from schools, universities and the scientific community, merely for daring to ask inconvenient questions. The documentary is hosted by Ben Stein and was released Friday, April 18, 2008. You can locate a theater near you by state or zip code here.

The film is described in its online trailer as “a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.”

The film cites several academic disputes to argue that scientists and educators who promote intelligent design are persecuted by the scientific establishment. Examples given by the film include Richard Sternberg, a biologist and a journal editor and research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, and Guillermo Gonzalez, a pro-Intelligent design astrophysicist denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007.

In the film's trailer, Stein states that there are "people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God" and that "freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions."

Several critics deny that the ideology of "survival of the fittest" led to the Holocaust. But the connections that the film makes can hardly be disputed. By the 1920s, German textbooks were teaching evolutionary concepts including heredity and racial hygiene. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927; in 1933, Germany passed the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health. Josef Mengele studied anthropology and paleontology and received his Ph.D. for his thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In 1937, Mengele was recommended for and received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfort, and subsequently became the "Angel of Death" for directing the operation of gas chambers of the Holocaust and for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates in pursuit of eugenics. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould admitted: "The Nazi racial hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with genocide."

Before the film opened, pro-evolution opponents of the film engaged in the same kind of illegitimate tactics that the movie describes. In an attempt to demonize the film, many evolutionists call it "hysterical" even though there is no sign that any evolutionists were amused by it. Time magazine, in its review, said Stein misrepresented evolution as saying that the first cell "arose whole" from the primordial soup, which is unlikely as the movie website correctly acknowledges the evolutionary view that it took millions or billions of years for the first cell to be produced by random, natural processes. The Time reviewer, having put words in Stein's mouth, then claims that this supposed misrepresentation is a typical example, probably hoping that potential viewers will choose not to watch the movie. Actually, all it shows is that Time is so desperate to keep people fooled about the weaknesses of the theory of evolution that they will stoop to misquotation and character assassination.

Filmmaker statements

"If you acknowledge this idea that design can be detected scientifically in the universe, then you open up the door to saying, 'Maybe this atheistic view isn't true,' [and] the entire worldview of people who are atheists crashes down around them," Mathis said. "This is a foundational concept for people who believe this way. So they defend it with incredible vigor."

Liberal Reception

Predictably, complaints about the film from liberals have not addressed the film's premise. The atheist liberal Richard Dawkins claimed he was tricked into appearing, indicating that he had been told it would be a movie named Crossroads that would be focused on "exploring the controversy." (Two others who were similarly deceived said they would have appeared anyway.) In response, conservative Ben Stein said that no one he interviewed asked what the film would be about, and the co-producer Walt Ruloff said at the preview that interviewees were paid and were even told ahead of time what the questions would be.

The pro-evolution magazine Scientific American criticized the film, calling it "intellectually dishonest," and detailed their objections with the film and intelligent design in a series of inflammatory articles.

The pro-evolution magazine New Scientist ran a review which described the movie as follows: "Expelled is pure propaganda, its style reminiscent of a substandard Michael Moore flick complete with voice-over narration and lots of aimless wandering around". The review criticizes the movie's treatment of Dawkins and claims that the movie "seems to be the next step in sneaking ID into schools after the Kitzmiller vs Dover case saw the compulsory teaching of ID ruled unconstitutional in 2005".

Movie Reviews

In National Review, David Klinghoffer describes the Darwin-Hitler connection:

• Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.
• "The key elements in the ideology that produced Auschwitz are moral relativism aligned with a rejection of the sacredness of human life, a belief that violent competition in nature creates greater and lesser races, that the greater will inevitably exterminate the lesser, and finally that the lesser race most in need of extermination is the Jews. All but the last of these ideas may be found in Darwin’s writing."

Tom Bethel wrote:

The film, a documentary, is about scientists and researchers who acknowledge the scientific evidence for the intelligent design of life and who have been ostracized or denied tenure as a result. In a word, they have been "expelled" from the academy.

Carl Wieland:

This powerful documentary is all about the persecution and censorship of any scientist who dares to oppose the Darwinist paradigm, by even suggesting the relatively modest hypothesis that the universe shows detectable evidence of design.

As described by the review in the New York Sun, Richard Dawkins "becomes so flustered at one point that he even posits a creation theory of his own that fits the parameters of the film's working definition of intelligent design" in Expelled, but claims the movie is "dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed, and utterly devoid of any style, wit, or subtlety."

Roger Friedman, a liberal who writes articles on the website for the Fox News Channel (as part of their ongoing goal to remain balanced), criticized the movie in a celebrity gossip column by personally attacking Ben Stein, and claiming that the movie's "warped premise" that "somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust" is actually anti-Semitic:

"Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein... is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck..... Who cares, really, if "Expelled" is anti-Semitic? It will come and go without much fanfare.

Jeffrey Kluger's review in the liberal Time Magazine asserts that Holocaust was the result of "the simple fact of being human," a shockingly ignorant claim that denies its unique horror:

"The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another [in the Holocaust] is the simple fact of being human."

In his quest to attack Ben Stein further, Kluger puts words in his mouth, and then commits the strawman fallacy:

"[Stein] makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't...

The movie does not criticize Darwinists for saying the cell "arose whole" but for arguing "that life arose from a primordial sea on a lifeless planet through a chance collision of chemicals". This is the typical pro-evolution device of pretending that critics don't understand what evolution is saying. But it backfires, because the movie comes with a leader's guide which shows that Kluger is the one in error.

Justin Chang wrote the following for the liberal publication Variety, which has a circulation smaller than Conservapedia's daily page views:

"...the film's flippant approach undermines the seriousness of its discourse, trading less in facts than in emotional appeals....the filmmakers' failure to offer even a working definition of [Intelligent Design] leaves them open to the common charge that it's all unprovable, faith-based pseudo-science....Even more offensive is the film's attempt to link Darwin's "survival of the fittest" ideas and Hitler's master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust)..."Expelled" is technically well-mounted, though its aesthetics trump its ideas at every turn. If evolution is worth debating, it's worth debating well, and by a more intelligently designed film than this one."

Alleged Copyright Violations

On April 9, 2008, legal notice was sent to the producers of Expelled by the graphic firm XVIVO, LLC, alleging copyright infringement. The notice states that Expelled includes a segment depicting biological cellular activity that was copied by computer-generated means from a video entitled The Inner Life of a Cell. XVIVO holds the copyright to all the models, processes, and depictions in The Inner Life of a Cell, and had not authorized Premise Media or Rampant Films to make any use of the material. The notice threatens legal action if the producers of Expelled do not remove the allegedly infringing segment from all copies of the film prior to its scheduled commercial release on April 18, 2008.

The producers of Expelled responded with a lawsuit filed on April 14, 2008, seeking declaratory judgment that there is no copyright or other infringement. This lawsuit is currently unresolved.

See also

• Origins debate
• Theory of evolution
• Creation-evolution controversy
• Design detection

External links

• Michael Shermer’s Fact-Free Attack on Expelled Exposes Intolerance of Darwinists towards Pro-Intelligent Design Scientists