Film Review: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Steve Shives
April 21, 2008
Here is a film I was anxious to see mostly for counterintuitive reasons. I expected it to annoy me, to irritate me, to condescend and manipulate and mislead me. I expected to leave the theater feeling outraged – intellectually, maybe even morally. In short, I looked forward to seeing Expelled for the same reasons why I listen each weekday to radio shows hosted by people I loathe, like Bill O´Reilly and Sean Hannity (not Glenn Beck – I have my limitations). Given these expectations, I can´t honestly say that Expelled, the pro-intelligence design documentary hosted and co-written by Ben Stein, failed to give me my money´s worth.
Despite being one of the most intellectually dishonest films I´ve ever seen, it was not quite everything I expected. One of my fears going into the film was that it would be little more than a retread of the creationist/intelligent design arguments I´m already all too familiar with. I had a naïve hope that it might have something new to offer the debate, but spent little thought on this hope, since I knew it would only break my heart. As it turns out, Expelled brings to the discussion of evolution vs. intelligent design neither the same old arguments nor anything remotely fresh. It pulls off the impressive trick of arguing for an hour and a half in favor of intelligent design, without ever actually discussing what intelligent design is, or what it says.
The film gives similar treatment to the theory of evolution, which is just as well, since most of the few explicit discussions of evolution are misrepresentations or misinterpretations. Rather than attempting to build a scientific case in favor of intelligent design (or contrary to evolution), Expelled spends most of its time railing against what it presents as the unfair treatment of adherents to intelligent design in the scientific community, offering as evidence the stories of people like Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Caroline Crocker, all eminently credentialed scientists and college professors who claim to have been fired or denied tenure as a result of their sympathetic attitudes toward intelligent design. Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, and others, are depicted as martyrs punished unfairly for their beliefs; the dark specter of secular, atheistic Big Science (one of the flimsiest straw men to whom I´ve ever been introduced) is blamed for trying to suppress freedom of inquiry and protect what Stein refers to as "the gospel of Darwinism." I wonder, though, what the reaction would be had these same people had been dismissed or sanctioned by serious academic institutions for advocating, say, geocentrism, or a flat Earth, or the authenticity of astrology, or any discredited pseudoscience other than intelligent design.
Since the movie doesn´t care enough about what the theory of evolution actually says to take any time discussing it, I won´t take much time writing about it here. What I found interesting was what the filmmakers chose to fill their running time with instead. The presentation is similar, at least stylistically, to a Michael Moore film, with narration illustrated by bits of stock footage or animation, though the makers of Expelled aren´t nearly as good at it as Moore; many of their cut-to illustrations are meaningless non sequitirs. The argument that Big Science is damaging intellectual freedom comes through loudest at the opening and closing of the film. In between, there are long stretches belaboring both the supposed unlikelihood of Darwinian evolution, and its connection to, even culpability for, the rise of Nazism in Germany prior to World War II. To viewers who are already onboard the pro-creationism/anti-evolution bandwagon, these sequences will feel like a reassuring arm around the neck. To people familiar, even a little, with what the theory of evolution actually says, they will be a waste of time.
Stein and his collaborators spend long minutes hammering home the complexity and intricacy of the human cell, claiming that for such an elaborate and complicated structure to have developed without intelligent design is next to impossible. The computer animations depicting the operations of the inner cell and explaining the structure and function of DNA are actually very cool. The cell, it turns out, is far more complex than Darwin could possibly have dreamed when he wrote his seminal works on evolutionary theory. The filmmakers and a few of their sympathetic interview subjects point this out, ignoring the fact that neither Darwin nor any modern evolutionist claims that anything like a modern cell would have existed at the dawn of life on Earth. The first living things were single-cell organisms far cruder than anything that exists today; thanks to natural selection, those original life forms are long extinct.
The second, and longer and more outrageous of the two sequences is devoted to the idea that Darwinian evolutionary theory was somehow responsible for the rise of the eugenics movement in the United States, and Nazism in Germany. Clips of Nazi propaganda films and speeches delivered by Hitler are played to suggest that the Holocaust was inspired and justified by Darwinian ideas. Ben Stein visits two sites where Hitler´s genocide was carried out – the Hadamar Clinic, a former insane asylum where 15,000 physically and mentally handicapped people were murdered; and the infamous concentration camp at Dachau, where hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and killed. Taken by themselves, the visits to the Holocaust sites are sobering and moving. To see the tragedy of the Holocaust exploited so crassly in an effort to tie together the disparate threads of evolutionary biology and Nazi atrocities is offensive.
And I can´t help but wonder, as I did about the dismissals of Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, et al, what the reaction would be if someone made a film blaming Christianity for some horrific crime of history. Christopher Hitchens ruffled plenty of fundamentalist feathers when he blamed religion for broad social woes in his book God is Not Great; what if he had tried to link the doctrines of Christianity directly to, say, the purges of Stalin, or the genocide throughout the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda?
I remain a fan of Ben Stein. Since his small role as the monotonous teacher in Ferris Bueller´s Day Off, he´s built a respectable career as an actor and a commercial pitchman, based mostly on his charm and willingness to be self-deprecating. I defy anyone who ever watched it to say one bad thing about Win Ben Stein´s Money. It´s disappointing to see him put his effort into something like Expelled, which at its best is merely untruthful, and at its worst is brazenly misleading. Toward the end, Stein reads a quote by Charles Darwin, from his book The Descent of Man. The quote, as read by Stein, says "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Stein´s reading stops there, but, as many critics of the film have pointed out already, Darwin did not stop writing. A more complete quotation of the passage reads:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
The Nazis would likely have preferred Stein´s quote-mined version to the genuine article.
There are other misdirections, other misrepresentations, other convenient omissions. Expelled would have us believe that there are two clearly defined sides in the debate, that the parties involved are either atheistic evolutionists, or freedom-loving intelligent design advocates. The image repeatedly called upon to illustrate the situation is that of the Berlin Wall, with the evil followers of Big Science on one side, determined not to let anyone through from the other. What this simplistic and stupid false dichotomy ignores is the significant segment of the scientific community who would be more accurately described as theistic evolutionists. These men and women, who are entirely dismissed by the film (which cleverly cuts to a snippet from an interview with Richard Dawkins, wherein Dawkins seems to suggest that many Christian evolutionists are actually atheists who want friendlier relations between the scientific and religious communities), accept evolutionary biology, and believe in God at the same time. The most prominent theistic evolutionist, Francis Collins, was not interviewed for the film.
It isn´t hard to guess why – Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project, who has debated Richard Dawkins on questions of faith and science, has rejected intelligent design in favor of a concept of natural evolution within a God-created universe. The mere existence of a scientist like Francis Collins, in such a prominent government-funded position, is enough to shatter Expelled´s notion of a hostile, close-minded, dogmatic, atheistic scientific establishment.
I walked into the theater this afternoon a believer in natural evolution, and that is what I remain. It´s hard to imagine anyone being convinced of the validity of intelligent design by this film. Instead, it will resonate the loudest with those who have agreed with its unscientific ideas all along. Ben Stein and his fellow filmmakers claim that their film is not an argument for creationism, not an attempt to slip religious doctrines into scientific discussions, but by preaching to the choir they show they have much more in common with Christian apologists than scientists.
Despite being one of the most intellectually dishonest films I´ve ever seen, it was not quite everything I expected. One of my fears going into the film was that it would be little more than a retread of the creationist/intelligent design arguments I´m already all too familiar with. I had a naïve hope that it might have something new to offer the debate, but spent little thought on this hope, since I knew it would only break my heart. As it turns out, Expelled brings to the discussion of evolution vs. intelligent design neither the same old arguments nor anything remotely fresh. It pulls off the impressive trick of arguing for an hour and a half in favor of intelligent design, without ever actually discussing what intelligent design is, or what it says.
The film gives similar treatment to the theory of evolution, which is just as well, since most of the few explicit discussions of evolution are misrepresentations or misinterpretations. Rather than attempting to build a scientific case in favor of intelligent design (or contrary to evolution), Expelled spends most of its time railing against what it presents as the unfair treatment of adherents to intelligent design in the scientific community, offering as evidence the stories of people like Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Caroline Crocker, all eminently credentialed scientists and college professors who claim to have been fired or denied tenure as a result of their sympathetic attitudes toward intelligent design. Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, and others, are depicted as martyrs punished unfairly for their beliefs; the dark specter of secular, atheistic Big Science (one of the flimsiest straw men to whom I´ve ever been introduced) is blamed for trying to suppress freedom of inquiry and protect what Stein refers to as "the gospel of Darwinism." I wonder, though, what the reaction would be had these same people had been dismissed or sanctioned by serious academic institutions for advocating, say, geocentrism, or a flat Earth, or the authenticity of astrology, or any discredited pseudoscience other than intelligent design.
Since the movie doesn´t care enough about what the theory of evolution actually says to take any time discussing it, I won´t take much time writing about it here. What I found interesting was what the filmmakers chose to fill their running time with instead. The presentation is similar, at least stylistically, to a Michael Moore film, with narration illustrated by bits of stock footage or animation, though the makers of Expelled aren´t nearly as good at it as Moore; many of their cut-to illustrations are meaningless non sequitirs. The argument that Big Science is damaging intellectual freedom comes through loudest at the opening and closing of the film. In between, there are long stretches belaboring both the supposed unlikelihood of Darwinian evolution, and its connection to, even culpability for, the rise of Nazism in Germany prior to World War II. To viewers who are already onboard the pro-creationism/anti-evolution bandwagon, these sequences will feel like a reassuring arm around the neck. To people familiar, even a little, with what the theory of evolution actually says, they will be a waste of time.
Stein and his collaborators spend long minutes hammering home the complexity and intricacy of the human cell, claiming that for such an elaborate and complicated structure to have developed without intelligent design is next to impossible. The computer animations depicting the operations of the inner cell and explaining the structure and function of DNA are actually very cool. The cell, it turns out, is far more complex than Darwin could possibly have dreamed when he wrote his seminal works on evolutionary theory. The filmmakers and a few of their sympathetic interview subjects point this out, ignoring the fact that neither Darwin nor any modern evolutionist claims that anything like a modern cell would have existed at the dawn of life on Earth. The first living things were single-cell organisms far cruder than anything that exists today; thanks to natural selection, those original life forms are long extinct.
The second, and longer and more outrageous of the two sequences is devoted to the idea that Darwinian evolutionary theory was somehow responsible for the rise of the eugenics movement in the United States, and Nazism in Germany. Clips of Nazi propaganda films and speeches delivered by Hitler are played to suggest that the Holocaust was inspired and justified by Darwinian ideas. Ben Stein visits two sites where Hitler´s genocide was carried out – the Hadamar Clinic, a former insane asylum where 15,000 physically and mentally handicapped people were murdered; and the infamous concentration camp at Dachau, where hundreds of thousands were imprisoned and killed. Taken by themselves, the visits to the Holocaust sites are sobering and moving. To see the tragedy of the Holocaust exploited so crassly in an effort to tie together the disparate threads of evolutionary biology and Nazi atrocities is offensive.
And I can´t help but wonder, as I did about the dismissals of Sternberg, Gonzalez, Crocker, et al, what the reaction would be if someone made a film blaming Christianity for some horrific crime of history. Christopher Hitchens ruffled plenty of fundamentalist feathers when he blamed religion for broad social woes in his book God is Not Great; what if he had tried to link the doctrines of Christianity directly to, say, the purges of Stalin, or the genocide throughout the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, or the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda?
I remain a fan of Ben Stein. Since his small role as the monotonous teacher in Ferris Bueller´s Day Off, he´s built a respectable career as an actor and a commercial pitchman, based mostly on his charm and willingness to be self-deprecating. I defy anyone who ever watched it to say one bad thing about Win Ben Stein´s Money. It´s disappointing to see him put his effort into something like Expelled, which at its best is merely untruthful, and at its worst is brazenly misleading. Toward the end, Stein reads a quote by Charles Darwin, from his book The Descent of Man. The quote, as read by Stein, says "With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed." Stein´s reading stops there, but, as many critics of the film have pointed out already, Darwin did not stop writing. A more complete quotation of the passage reads:
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.
The Nazis would likely have preferred Stein´s quote-mined version to the genuine article.
There are other misdirections, other misrepresentations, other convenient omissions. Expelled would have us believe that there are two clearly defined sides in the debate, that the parties involved are either atheistic evolutionists, or freedom-loving intelligent design advocates. The image repeatedly called upon to illustrate the situation is that of the Berlin Wall, with the evil followers of Big Science on one side, determined not to let anyone through from the other. What this simplistic and stupid false dichotomy ignores is the significant segment of the scientific community who would be more accurately described as theistic evolutionists. These men and women, who are entirely dismissed by the film (which cleverly cuts to a snippet from an interview with Richard Dawkins, wherein Dawkins seems to suggest that many Christian evolutionists are actually atheists who want friendlier relations between the scientific and religious communities), accept evolutionary biology, and believe in God at the same time. The most prominent theistic evolutionist, Francis Collins, was not interviewed for the film.
It isn´t hard to guess why – Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project, who has debated Richard Dawkins on questions of faith and science, has rejected intelligent design in favor of a concept of natural evolution within a God-created universe. The mere existence of a scientist like Francis Collins, in such a prominent government-funded position, is enough to shatter Expelled´s notion of a hostile, close-minded, dogmatic, atheistic scientific establishment.
I walked into the theater this afternoon a believer in natural evolution, and that is what I remain. It´s hard to imagine anyone being convinced of the validity of intelligent design by this film. Instead, it will resonate the loudest with those who have agreed with its unscientific ideas all along. Ben Stein and his fellow filmmakers claim that their film is not an argument for creationism, not an attempt to slip religious doctrines into scientific discussions, but by preaching to the choir they show they have much more in common with Christian apologists than scientists.
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