Scientist: Ben Stein's 'Expelled' should really be 'Flunked Out'

by Muriel Kane

Comedian and former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein's new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, will not open until this Friday, but it has already been widely blasted for its alleged dishonesty and looseness with the facts.

Stein has recently emerged as a prominent spokesperson for so-called "intelligent design," a pseudo-scientific gloss over the religious philosophy of creationism. Using film-making techniques clearly borrowed from Michael Moore, Stein set out to confront scientists and educators about their alleged persecution of supporters of intelligent design, whom Stein claims have been "targeted for retaliation and harassment."

However, the National Center for Science Education has performed an extensive investigation of the "martyrs" profiled in Stein's file and has found a consistent pattern of misrepresentation.

"We reviewed public records and reports on the intelligent design promoters who were supposedly discriminated against, and we discovered that the claims that they lost their jobs over intelligent design are unsupported," biologist Josh Rosenau explained. "That said, professors who aren't making advances in their field, editors who disregard their journal's established practices, and lecturers who repeat creationist falsehoods shouldn't be surprised if they have trouble holding jobs. These people weren't expelled; they flunked out."

The controversies over Expelled began last fall, when two supporters of evolution who are interviewed in the film, Professors Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, claimed that they were tricked into appearing by being told the film would present a serious debate about the "controversy that exists in America between evolution, creationism and the intelligent design movement."

"At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front," Dawkins complained. Stein countered, "I don't remember a single person asking me what the movie was about."

Myers recently noted that the producers of Expelled appear to have stolen some of their sequences from PBS and from a small animation company, XVIVO. Those producers have now counter-sued XVIVO, alleging that its claims are "part of an ongoing campaign attempting to discredit the film and its producers."

Expelled has also come under fire for its attempt to link a belief in evolution to Nazi genocide. When its producers offered a private screening to Scientific American, hoping for some sort of positive -- or at least newsworthy -- reaction, editor-in-chief John Rennie was withering in his criticism.

"We could simply ignore the movie," Rennie wrote. "Unfortunately, Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film's attacks — all recycled from previous pro-ID works — would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency."

Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, who also appears in the film, expanded further on the Holocaust issue: "Cleverly edited interview excerpts from scientists are interspersed with various black-and-white clips for guilt by association with: bullies beating up on a 98-pound weakling, Charlton Heston's character in Planet of the Apes being blasted by a water hose, Nikita Khrushchev pounding his fist on a United Nations desk, East Germans captured trying to scale the Berlin Wall, and Nazi crematoria remains and Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves. This propaganda production would make Joseph Goebbels proud."

Shermer pointed out in contrast that Darwinian theory has often been used as the unpinning for a belief in Stein's preferred doctrine of free market capitalism, a fact of which he found Stein to be "astonishingly ignorant." In fact, Shermer notes, Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, has said that his favorite book while at Harvard Business School, "was Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene ... a form of Darwinism that Skilling badly misinterpreted."