Expelling all reason

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Directed by Nathan Frankowski. Starring Ben Stein. Distributed by Premise Media Corporation. 2008. 105 minutes.

"Ben Stein's upcoming film, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed ... is powerful ... shocking ... intense ... humorous at times."

--Jack Brown

CEO, Capitol Prayer

"This is an enormously important project and I am so proud of the fact that Ben Stein, who is a national treasure, is part of it."

--Michael Medved

Nationally syndicated radio host

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Powerful? Humorous? National treasure?

These people need to get out more.

I was invited, probably by accident, to a preview in January of the independent movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring lawyer-economist-actor Ben Stein. Expelled, to be released in April, is the latest effort by the religious Right to put the alleged debate between evolutionary theory and intelligent design back on the political front burner after its devastating defeat in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, in 2005.

Expelled is such a morass of innuendo, untruth, irrationality, and fear-mongering that it's hard to know where to start dissecting it. While presenting a brief for teaching intelligent design (in university classrooms, at least), the film never says what intelligent design is. Then, at a media telephonic extravaganza on January 22, Stein and co-producer Walter Ruloff said they had no theology to promote.

Said Ruloff, "We really are not validating one particular position, being the intelligent design or the design hypothesis, or creationism or other forms. What we're really asking for is freedom of speech."

But the movie, or even a cursory review of the film's Web sites (www.get expelled.com and www.expelledthe movie.com), shows that this assertion is--how to put this politely?--unsupported. Says the GetExpelled.com site, "For decades now, Neo-Darwinism has maintained a stranglehold within public education, suppressing all other theories on the origins of life--especially those that hint of a 'designer.'"

Some of Expelled deals with the alleged academic suppression of non Darwinian ideas. The poster child for this is Richard Sternberg, whose tumultuous, pro-ID controversies at the Smithsonian Institution are chronicled in detail. There is some dramatic, if unfocused, footage of Ben Stein being denied admission to the upper floors of the Smithsonian by a security guard.

Repression of scientific thought, we can all agree, is horrible if true. But it isn't true.

This is a dispute among academics. A lot of cyber-ink was spilled over the Sternberg tussle long before Ben Stein got around to it. You can read Sternberg's version of his persecution (www.rsternberg.net) and a non-ID rebuttal by Ed Brayton (at www.scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/12/creating_a_martyr_the_ster nber.php) online. The dispute has even made Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Richard_Sternberg), a high-water mark for the bureaucratic pissing match.

But however you measure the fight, the allegations made in Expelled are wrong. Sternberg never worked for the Smithsonian, so the Smithsonian couldn't threaten his job there. He was a visiting scholar with research privileges and an office. He still has both the office and the research privileges.

Which is not to say that Sternberg wasn't criticized. He was. Harshly, rudely, and sometimes childishly by other scientists. But rough-and-tumble argument is part of the world of science whether you're studying intelligent design, string theory, or antelope migrations. Freedom of expression protects your right to say what you want, but it doesn't protect you from getting punched in the jaw over it.

There are three or four other cases explored in Expelled, all of which are presented in black-and-white terms as anti-ID intellectual repression by a Darwinist cabal. There isn't space enough to go into them here. I'll leave it as an independent exercise for the morbidly curious.

After a half hour or so of this, Expelled director Frankowski wanders off to blame evolutionary theory for Communism, the Berlin Wall, Fascism, the Holocaust, atheism, and Planned Parenthood. The portions blaming Darwin for the Holocaust are particularly despicable. There's no denying that "social Darwinism" was an abused rationale for racism and cruelty. But genocide and racism were practiced long before the Nazis discovered them and long before Darwin. It can as easily be laid at the door of Christianity, Genghis Khan, the expansion of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent, the Crusades, or a thousand other causes.

ID isn't explained very well in Expelled and neither is Darwinism. This quote from Ben Stein comes from the movie's telephonic promotional extravaganza. It's not in the film itself, but the theme is pervasive in the film:

"Darwinism as I understand it--and maybe I don't understand it," Stein said, "but Darwinism holds that life began by something like lightning striking a puddle and inorganic matter was converted into living matter. And from that, after four-and-half-billion years, came the form of life that we now know."