Ron Bailey on Expelled

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.

Berlinski invokes Godwin's Law

David Berlinski draws a connection between Hitler and Darwin

One man -- Charles Darwin -- says: “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. …”

Another man -- Adolf Hitler -- says: Let us kill all the Jews of Europe.

Is there a connection?

Yes obviously is the answer of the historical record and common sense.

Published in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species said nothing of substance about the origin of species. Or anything else, for that matter. It nonetheless persuaded scientists in England, Germany and the United States that human beings were accidents of creation. Where Darwin had seen species struggling for survival, German physicians, biologists, and professors of hygiene saw races.

They drew the obvious conclusion, the one that Darwin had already drawn. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals. German scientists took the word expense to mean what it meant: The annihilation of less fit races.

The point is made with abysmal clarity in the documentary, Expelled. Visiting the site at which those judged defective were killed -- a hospital, of course -- the narrator, Ben Stein, asks the curator what most influenced the doctors doing the killing.

“Darwinism,” she replies wanly.

The view that we may consider the sources of Nazi ideology in every context except those most relevant to its formation is rich, fruity, stupid and preposterous. It is for this reason repeated with solemn incomprehension at the website Expelled Exposed: “Anti-Semitic violence against Jews,” the authors write with a pleased sense of discovery, “can be traced as far back as the middle ages, at least 7 centuries before Darwin.”

Let me impart a secret. It can be traced even further. “Oh that mine head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears," runs the lamentation in Jeremiah 9.1, “that I might weep day and night for the slain daughters of my people.”

And yet if anti-Semitism has been the white noise of European history, to assign it causal powers over the Holocaust is simply to ignore very specific ideas that emerged in the 19th century, and that at once seized the imagination of scientists throughout the world.

So Berlinski's thesis is that even though hatred of Jews has run through the past couple of millennia of history, no one had tried to eliminate them before Hitler. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

What is often called social Darwinism was a malignant force in Germany, England and the United States from the moment that social thinkers forged the obvious connection between what Darwin said and what his ideas implied. Justifying involuntary sterilization, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” He was not, it is understood, appealing to Lutheran ideas. Germany reached a moral abyss before any other state quite understood that the abyss was there to be reached because Germans have always had a congenital weakness for abysses and seem unwilling, when one is in sight, to avoid toppling into it.

Interestingly enough, Jonah Goldberg devotes a chapter of his book, Liberal Fascism to eugenics, including the Final Solution.

He has some interesting things to say about Social Darwinism"

Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.

[emphasis in original]

Note: the term was invented by progressives to label opponents of eugenics. Continuing:

Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist – he coined the phrase – "survival of the fittest" – but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good—albeit classical—liberal: he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported itlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigeur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing "greed" and even the Holocaust.

[emphasis in original]

[pp. 257-258]

And of course the point remains: Hitler could have slept with Origin of Species under his pillow, and read passages from Ascent of Man over every meal, and it would have no bearing on whether Darwin's notions have any merit or not. The most we could infer is that some minds are too addled to handle science.

Berlinski Responds to The Derb

Berlinski Responds to The Derb

David Berlinski has written a piece in response to John Derbyshire on "Expelled".

Having not seen the documentary that he proposes to criticize, Derbyshire is nonetheless quite certain that he knows what it conveys. “It is pretty plain,” he asserts, “that it is a piece of creationist porn.” Perhaps I will be forgiven for suggesting that John Derbyshire’s late-night scrutiny of the Internet may have corrupted his habitual search for le mot juste. Expelled has nothing to do with creationism, and if it is pornographic, the details have not become widely known.

Unfortunately, Intelligent Design is Creationism -- albeit with the serial numbers filed off. In his opinion in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, Judge Jones made precisely that finding:

[p. 136]

H. Conclusion

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

Expelled promotes Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is Creationism. Therefore, Expelled promotes Creationism. Q.E.D.

Go ahead and read the rest of his piece. And then go ahead and read ExpelledExposed.com, and some of the other pieces I've linked at my site.

For what it's worth, I've read a couple of Berlinski's comments on evolution, and decided this is an area where he doesn't read for content very well. In particular, his discussion of a piece by Nilsson and Pelger, "An optimistic estimate of the time required for the evolution of the eye", he did not read the article he presumes to debunk. Seriously. He claims the article fails to address points that it most definitely does address.

The only explanation of the content of his "response" to the piece is that he read Richard Dawkins' description of the article, tracked down the article, and read only the captions of the illustrations therein.

The other piece he wrote was less memorable, and not nearly as egregious, but it still fell far short of the sort of analysis (or understanding) I'd expect from someone with his credentials.

A BadIdeas Review of "Expelled"

Another review, including this on the "link" between "Darwinism" and Nazism.

What about the link between evolution and Hitler?

Frankly, the film does a lot more than simply call Darwin out for playing directly into Nazi and eugenic ideologies.

Now, a lot has been made of the upfront citations of darwinian influences in these movements, and how these are woefully incomplete and highly selective as history. The film certainly makes caveats about how not all mainstream biologists are Nazis (oh. Gracious thanks!). But it hints that those who are not of a dark bent (an attitude which it tries to pin on William Provine, and fairly effectively) aren’t being logical, not following through with the inevitable implications of their ideas. Like those insincere Christians that support evolution, non-genocidal evolutionists are apparently kept at bay by their better natures (which, as any good apologist will tell you, are merely on loan from Christianity). The idea that eugenics or racial genocide are based on illegitimate and bizarre distortions of evolutionary biology or confusion about how descriptive science relates to normative values… that’s a no-show in the film. And the film ultimately even undercuts its spoken caveats with things like Stein accusingly staring Darwin down and quote mining Descent of Man (again, something that’s right out of young-earth creationism 101) directly subsequent to a visit to Dachau.

But all of this is arguably less important than where the film goes next: basically asserting that these horrible things are going to happen all over again, or maybe are already happening, because of how pernicious the influence of the “Darwinian” worldview is. Berlinski quotes a German saying that means “this is how it always starts.” And what, exactly is starting again? Stein asks Jeffrey Schawrtz “What’s going to happen if this doesn’t change?” “I think we’re watching it happen.” Again, this comes straight out of the film’s musing on the horrors of the Holocaust.

I just don’t see how there’s much room for quibbling over what the film is getting at here either.

The failure of "Intelligent Design"

By Dinesh D'Souza

As a Christian, I believe that the universe and its living creatures are the products of intelligent design. This belief is not merely derived from theology but is also supported by rational considerations. There is enormous intelligence embedded in the laws of nature. The greatest scientists over the past few centuries have worked to decode the intelligence mysteriously imprinted in the workings of nature. Scientific laws, as spelled out by Kepler, Newton, Einstein and others, reveal nature as exquisitely orderly. So who encoded this intelligence in nature?

Since the universe had a beginning, how did it get here? There is no natural explanation, since the universe includes all of nature. It is more than absurd to posit that the universe caused itself. The most reasonable explanation is that our rational universe is the product of some super-rational or omniscient intelligence. An intelligent designer is not the only explanation, but it certainly is the best explanation.

How the creator went about His business of making the universe and its life forms is another question, and this is a question for science to answer to the degree that it can be answered. Darwin's theory of evolution posits that chance, mutation and natural selection largely account for the transitions between one life form and another. Man, as an animal, is also the product of evolution, having descended from the same evolutionary "tree" that produced gorillas and chimpanzees.

Did God order things this way? Certainly if you read the Bible you would never predict Darwin's theory of evolution. But neither from the Scriptural accounts could one predict that the earth goes around the sun. The Bible is not and does not purport to be a science textbook. It takes no position, for example, on the heliocentric theory. Unfortunately, in past centuries, many Christians interpreted a few casual references to the sun "rising" to mean that the earth must be stationary and the sun must revolve around the earth. These interpretations were hasty, to say the least: the Bible is describing sunrise from a human or experiential perspective. Still, these narrow-minded Christians opposed Copernicus and Galileo until they were forced to admit that they were wrong. It wasn't the Bible that was mistaken; it was the foolish certainty of its interpreters that was exposed and discredited.

Today some Christians may be heading down the same path with their embrace of "intelligent design" or ID. This movement is based on the idea that Darwinian evolution is not only flawed but basically fraudulent. ID should not, however, be confused with bible-thumping six-day creationism. It does not regard the earth as 6,000 years old. Its leading advocates are legal scholar Phillip Johnson, biochemist Michael Behe, mathematician David Berlinski, and science journalist Jonathan Wells. Berlinski has a new book out The Devil's Advocate that makes the remarkable claim that "Darwin's theory of evolution has little to contribute to the content of the sciences." Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" provides horror stories to show that the case for ID as well as critiques of evolution from an ID perspective are routinely excluded or censored in the halls of academe.

ID advocates have sought to convince courts to require that their work be taught alongside Darwinian evolution, yet such efforts have been resoundingly defeated. Why has the ID legal strategy proven to be such a failure, even at the hands of conservative judges? Imagine that a group of advocates challenged Einstein's theories of general and special relativity. Let's say that this group, made up of a law professor, a couple of physicists, several journalists, as well as some divinity school graduates, flatly denies Einstein's proposition that e=mc2.

How would a judge, who is not a physicist, resolve the group's demand for inclusion in the physics classroom? He would summon a wide cross-section of leading physicists. They would inform him that despite unresolved debates about relativity--for example, its unexplained relationship to quantum theory--Einstein's theories are supported by a wide body of data. They enjoy near-unanimous support in the physics community worldwide. There is no alternative scientific theory that comes close to explaining the facts at hand. In such a situation any judge would promptly show the dissenters the door and deny their demand for equal time in the classroom. This is precisely the predicament of the ID movement.

The problem with evolution is not that it is unscientific but that it is routinely taught in textbooks and in the classroom in an atheist way. Textbooks frequently go beyond the scientific evidence to make metaphysical claims about how evolution renders the idea of a Creator superfluous. my book What's So Great About Christianity provides several examples of this.

Most Christians don't care whether the eye evolved by natural selection or whether Darwin's theories can account for macroevolution or only microevolution. What they care about is that evolution is being used to deny God as the creator. For those who are concerned about this atheism masquerading as science, there is a better way. Instead of trying to get unscientific ID theories included in the classroom, a better strategy would be to get the unscientific atheist propaganda out.