"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed", is perhaps one of the most aptly named movies of late. It was nothing more than lies, half-truths, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Here's why:
1) Dishonest interview methods
The scientists who were interviewed, were lied to about the intentions of the producer and Ben Stein. They were told they were going to be participating in a movie about the controversy between evolution and creationism, and that the movie was to provide unedited, unbiased accounts by both sides. They were told they were being interviewed for a movie called "Crossroads". The production company and the movie title were both fictitious.
When these scientists were tipped off about the true nature and title of the film, they confronted Ben Stein and producer Mark Mathis. Both claimed that the movie title was changed recently. However, others found that the Expelled website was up and running well before the interviews took place.
2) Dishonest portrayal of the particulars of the "persecuted"
Lets take a look at each of the scientists who were supposedly expelled for their religious beliefs.
RICHARD STERNBERG
According to Ben Stein, this guy published a paper advocating Intelligent Design as the explanation for the diversity of life. However, the actual topic of the paper in question was the Cambrian Explosion, and it was rejected because the research was shoddy, and the details were poorly edited (in other words, it was rejected for the same reasons that thousands of other poorly constructed papers get rejected in the peer review process).
Also, this man was not "expelled" in any way.
"...Before publishing the paper, Sternberg worked for the National Institutes of Health at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (GenBank) and was an unpaid Research Associate – not an employee – at the Smithsonian. He was the voluntary, unpaid editor of PBSW (small academic journals rarely pay editors), and had given notice of his resignation as editor six months before the Meyer article was published. After the Meyer incident, he remained an employee of NIH and his unpaid position at the Smithsonian was extended in 2006, although he has not shown up there in years. At no time was any aspect of his pay or working conditions at NIH affected..."
GUILLERMO GONZALEZ
According to good ole Ben, this man had his tenure denied at Iowa State University based on his IDist views. However, Ben fails to mention that this character's academic record was less than acceptable to be granted the desired tenure.
As per ISU: "...Gonzalez’s tenure decision was based on refereed publications, his level of success in attracting research funding and grants, the amount of telescope observing time he had been granted, the number of graduate students he had supervised, and most importantly, the overall evidence of future career promise in the field of astronomy...”
"...Gonzalez’s publication output dropped steadily during his time at ISU. The work he did publish was based on re-evaluations of data he had previously collected or analyses of other people’s data..."
The average tenured faculty member at ISU's physics and astronomy department brought in $1.3 million in grants during their first six years. Gonzalez brought in $200,000 in his best year, and out of that, $64000 of it was used to pay a doctoral student at another university, and another $58000 of it he spent on his ID book, The Priveleged Planet. His numbers showed a general decline in his last four years there. Also he had a very high failure rate among his graduate students. Also, the grant moneys he spent on his ID book, were misappropriated because he was writing about a field of science he had no credentials in (he was an astronomer).
In other words, he was a poor scientist and an even shoddier professor that couldn't make the cut or the school's minimum requirements for the desired tenure. His religious/political views did not even come into the picture at all.
CAROLINE CROCKER
"...Despite claims of being fired, Crocker was allowed to continue teaching and complete her GMU contract after the Department became aware of her ID instruction through student complaints. She was instructed to not teach about intelligent design and creation science, which was not part of the curriculum of the courses she had been hired to teach. Academic freedom does not mean the freedom to teach about anything you want, regardless of the expected content of your courses. And, far from having her academic career “come to an abrupt end”, after leaving GMU, Crocker taught at NVCC, and additionally acquired in 2006 a postdoctoral position at the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, MD, working on T-cell signal transduction – an actual scientific investigation – suggesting that her reputation as a scientist was unaffected by the controversy over intelligent design..."
Despite numerous complaints from students that she had replaced much of the school's proscribed curricula with Intelligent Design propaganda, she was still allowed to teach.
She left GMU because her contingent contract ended, and the school opted to not extend her contract, as they have every right to do, especially when dealing with a faculty member who has blatantly disregarded the school's policies time and again. She was not "blacklisted" as Ben Stein insinuates in this movie, as she continued teaching at Northern Virginia Community College and received reviews in various scientific journals afterwards.
ROBERT MARKS
Robert Marks was hosting a private website, promoting ID on Baylor's privately owned web servers. This is not allowed in any event, in any business setting, regardless of what content the website promotes.
Baylor met with Marks and his attorney to try and reach an agreement (they were even willing to allow him to continue to host the site on their server if he agreed to certain terms-- so much for the poor, persecuted ID activist), to which he declined. The website is now appropraietly being hosted on a third-party web server, and Marks is still teaching at Baylor. So much for being Expelled...
There were a couple other individuals cited in the movie, and their story was very similar, so I won't waste white space detailing them as well.
3) A total lack of science
Considering that this movie was supposed to be about the controversy in science between those who support evolution and those that support intelligent design, little or no science is mentioned in this movie, nor are the particulars of either viewpoint.
4) Dishonest quote mining and using the interview material out of context
Ben Stein and producer Mark Mathis edited many hours worth of interview footage and took most of the quotes out of context.
For example, here is an excerpt from a statement made by Richard Dawkins about the nature of his interview and how his words were misused:
"...Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe).
My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed.
Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE..."
Ben Stein used similar tactics with all of the other scientists he interviewed, such as this strange interview tactic he used on PZ Meyers, eminent biologist:
"...After the interviews, some of the scientists noted peculiar elements in the interviews. Dawkins recalled Stein being unusually aggressive in his questioning; Myers recalled Mathis’s odd behavior of holding up flashcards with prominent creationists’ names written on them to get his reactions. It seemed a curious approach for a documentary supposedly on the “controversy that exists in America between Evolution, Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement.” – Myers apparently did not react to the flashcards strongly enough on camera, so none of this footage was used in the movie..."
5) Equating the Nazi Holocaust to evolution and atheism
Ben Stein makes numerous refernces to the holocaust, interspersed with seemingly unrelated images plagiarized from various WWII recordings of the Nazi's abusing people and the Jews.
How these shameless refences have anything to do with atheism, ID, creationism, or evolution, only Ben Stein knows. Last I checked, Adolf Hitler was a practicing Catholic, who stated quite clearly in Mein Kampf:
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” --Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
But, I must say, only Hitler and the Nazi's are responsible for what they did; not Catholicism, not Christianity, not atheism. There is no philosophy (or lack thereof) in the world that can't be taken to an extreme and used to justify atrocities.
6) "Expelling" the "expellers"
Invitations to the movie's initial pre-screenings were issued to those who signed up on the website for them. Biologist PZ Meyers sent his RSVP reporting that he would be bringing visitors, as permitted by the producer's invitation. He invited his family, and since he was also in town, Richard Dawkins (as both of them were interviewed for this movie and were curious to see what ends they were utilized for).
Upon arriving at the theater, a bunch of producer Mark Mathis' goons recognized PZ and did not permit him to enter the premises.
When confronted about this huge blunder, producer Mark Mathis and Ben Stein responded by telling the media that PZ Meyers was not invited to the showing. When confronted with the evidence of PZ's RSVP and that he had in fact signed up online, Ben Stein and Mark Mathis responded by saying that they feared that the mild-mannered and soft-spoken PZ Myers would be "disruptive", yet their security goons totally missed Clinton Richard Dawkins.
Numerous other high-profile pro-evolution individuals were also denied entrance, by being told lies like the screening had been cancelled or that the time had been changed. Among them was evolutionary biologist John Lynch and Eugene C. Scott.
How ironic (moronic?) that the producer and main protagonist of a movie that tries to spin-up various creationist persecution fantasies and conspiracy theories would turn around and deny a large number of high-profile individuals from the opposing camp entrance to their movie....talk about expelled.
Summary
In short, this movie is nothing more than the ususal propaganda. Fallacies, circular logic, intellectual dishonesty, and persecution fantasies.
This movie tries to promote Intellignet Design by taking a curious, but not unfamiliar approach for those who have encountered creationist literature before: by trying to play on our sympathies, portraying the scientists who were supposedly "expelled" as hapless, innocent victims of a grand, evolutionist conspiracy of good ole boys in the scientific community, when in fact, all of the cited professionals shot themselves in the foot by violating school policies, misused private prperty to further their religious agenda, and for outright shoddy work and research.
Pretty sad if this is the best that the ID camps can provide. Even if I were a supporter of ID/creationism, I would be insulted by this bumbling, feeble attempt to generate sympathy for their viewpoint. I guess if your poor science cannot make the cut in the scientific arena, everyone should feel obliged to try and turn the tide with popular support instead.
Great job, Ben Stein. Glad to see that Harvard education is paying off in dividends. What a tool....
