Flunk This Movie!
Ben Stein's Expelled is all worldview and no evidence.
Ronald Bailey | July 2008 Print Edition
“This is not a religious argument,” Discovery
Institute President Bruce Chapman asserts in the new
anti-evolution propaganda movie, Expelled: No
Intelligence Allowed. Yet the film is free of
scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence
against biological evolution and none for “intelligent
design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the
movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory
for their religious views.
The film begins with moody shots of Stein backstage
before he addresses an unidentified audience on the
alleged suppression of scientific research in the name
of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and
suggests that we are losing our scientific freedom.
As evidence, Stein trots out a small parade of
martyrs. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, then editor of
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,
published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the
“Cambrian explosion” 570 to 530 million years ago in
which most of the body types of animals developed was
evidence for intelligent design.
Many of Sternberg’s colleagues reacted with dismay,
and the journal retracted the article. In the film,
Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian’s
Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign,
and had his religious and political beliefs
questioned. Yet he still has office space in the
museum and has been reappointed for three more years.
True, some of his colleagues might not want to hang
out with him anymore. But that is a far cry from the
grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies and
concentration camps featured in the film.
In 2005, George Mason University did not renew a
teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct
biology lecturer who believes in intelligent design.
She tells Stein that she only wanted to teach students
to question scientific orthodoxies: “I was only trying
to teach what the university stands for—academic
freedom.” Since George Mason let her go, she says, she
can no longer find work.
Interestingly, Crocker delivered the same offending
lecture at a local community college later. It didn’t
turn out to be a “balanced” presentation of evidence
for and against biological evolution. Why not? “There
really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” she
says.
An assistant professor of astronomy, Guillermo
Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University
in 2007. In 2004 Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged
Planet, which argues the Earth was precisely
positioned to enable researchers like him to make
scientific measurements. An Iowa State colleague,
Hector Avalos, neatly skewers this conceit: “This
rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if
our planet had not been positioned precisely where it
is, then he might not be able to do his work as a
plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much
closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the
Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not
exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the
reason that our planet was located where it is.”
Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his views?
The university denies it, but my guess is he did. On
the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo’s
colleagues could reasonably worry that his views
weren’t likely to lead to fruitful research results.
The most egregious part of the movie is the attempt to
link evolution with Communism and Nazism. The claim
that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just silly.
Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism,
and Russian Darwinists were denounced as “Trotskyite
agents of international fascism” and thrown into the
Gulag for their scientific sins.
And Nazism? In the film, the mathematician David
Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient
condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it
was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that
scientific materialism undermines the notion that
human beings occupy a special place in the universe.
If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking,
then morals don’t apply.
But people through the millennia have found all sorts
of justifications for murdering each other, including
plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile,
insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us
understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics
contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism,
xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. The field also
offers new ideas about how human morality developed,
including our capacities for cooperation, love, and
tolerance.
At one point in the film, the science studies gadfly
Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes
first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question
at the proponents of evolutionary biology. As this
dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the
question is far more relevant to the supporters of
intelligent design.
Ben Stein's Expelled is all worldview and no evidence.
Ronald Bailey | July 2008 Print Edition
“This is not a religious argument,” Discovery
Institute President Bruce Chapman asserts in the new
anti-evolution propaganda movie, Expelled: No
Intelligence Allowed. Yet the film is free of
scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence
against biological evolution and none for “intelligent
design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the
movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory
for their religious views.
The film begins with moody shots of Stein backstage
before he addresses an unidentified audience on the
alleged suppression of scientific research in the name
of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and
suggests that we are losing our scientific freedom.
As evidence, Stein trots out a small parade of
martyrs. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, then editor of
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington,
published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the
“Cambrian explosion” 570 to 530 million years ago in
which most of the body types of animals developed was
evidence for intelligent design.
Many of Sternberg’s colleagues reacted with dismay,
and the journal retracted the article. In the film,
Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian’s
Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign,
and had his religious and political beliefs
questioned. Yet he still has office space in the
museum and has been reappointed for three more years.
True, some of his colleagues might not want to hang
out with him anymore. But that is a far cry from the
grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies and
concentration camps featured in the film.
In 2005, George Mason University did not renew a
teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct
biology lecturer who believes in intelligent design.
She tells Stein that she only wanted to teach students
to question scientific orthodoxies: “I was only trying
to teach what the university stands for—academic
freedom.” Since George Mason let her go, she says, she
can no longer find work.
Interestingly, Crocker delivered the same offending
lecture at a local community college later. It didn’t
turn out to be a “balanced” presentation of evidence
for and against biological evolution. Why not? “There
really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” she
says.
An assistant professor of astronomy, Guillermo
Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University
in 2007. In 2004 Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged
Planet, which argues the Earth was precisely
positioned to enable researchers like him to make
scientific measurements. An Iowa State colleague,
Hector Avalos, neatly skewers this conceit: “This
rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if
our planet had not been positioned precisely where it
is, then he might not be able to do his work as a
plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much
closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the
Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not
exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the
reason that our planet was located where it is.”
Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his views?
The university denies it, but my guess is he did. On
the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo’s
colleagues could reasonably worry that his views
weren’t likely to lead to fruitful research results.
The most egregious part of the movie is the attempt to
link evolution with Communism and Nazism. The claim
that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just silly.
Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism,
and Russian Darwinists were denounced as “Trotskyite
agents of international fascism” and thrown into the
Gulag for their scientific sins.
And Nazism? In the film, the mathematician David
Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient
condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it
was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that
scientific materialism undermines the notion that
human beings occupy a special place in the universe.
If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking,
then morals don’t apply.
But people through the millennia have found all sorts
of justifications for murdering each other, including
plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile,
insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us
understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics
contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism,
xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. The field also
offers new ideas about how human morality developed,
including our capacities for cooperation, love, and
tolerance.
At one point in the film, the science studies gadfly
Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes
first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question
at the proponents of evolutionary biology. As this
dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the
question is far more relevant to the supporters of
intelligent design.
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