Last week, Roger Ebert finally got around to destroyingreviewing Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Ebert’s rant is as cerebral as it is merciless, and it’s worth a read even if you haven’t seen the film. He makes some good points about how the film completely misunderstands the concepts of probability and selection, forming flashy but ultimately useless argument.
Ebert’s rage is thinly veiled. He’s obviously upset that clear logical fallacies can go unnoticed by so many people. Sure, misreading Darwin while attempting to refute him is a lame move when engaging in scientific debate, but the practice is quite common when it comes to filmmaking. When movies deal with evolution, there’s an unspoken understanding that they can completely distort the theory beyond recognition. It’s kind of like calling someone a pedophile during a Friar’s Club Roast, everyone knows it isn’t true, and it’s all in good fun.
When you look at it in this way, Expelled is just the latest in a long line of films that distort the theory of evolution to make a buck. Here are 5 more that are guilty of crimes against the origin of humanity:
The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!
Scientific American has put together a list of Six Things In Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know. Ominous, right? Most damning, as far as I’m concerned: the film’s selective editing of a passage written by Charles Darwin, in order to suggest that Darwinism is fundamentally responsible for the Holocaust. Via Digg.
The National Center for Science Education has put together a site called Expelled Exposed, with details on the producers’ quasi-ethical interview tactics, and fleshed-out stories on “what really happened to the people [the film claims] were persecuted for their views.” Via Kate Coe.
Fox News gossip columnist/finger-on-the-pulse cultural critic Roger Friedman lashes out at Expelled for being “sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring)” and declares that Stein “is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.” After pausing twice to make fun of Ben Stein’s “whiny” voice, Friedman rails against the release plan for the film, which will put prints in front of “rural and poor” viewers at the expense of the Beverly Hills elite. “If I lived in the Deep South, I’d boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated.” Hint hint, Mississippi!
From the department of Bloggy Frenzies We Missed While We Were Out: The Playlist has an excellent post on the music used within Ben Stein’s aforementioned intelligent design propaganda film, Expelled. It all started on Monday, when James Boyce posted a story on the Huffington Post titled, “Yoko Ono Sells Out John Lennon To Creationist Manufactroversy.” We assume that’s a contraction of “manufactured controversy”, even though as far as I’m aware, the film’s opponents have done a better job of promotingExpelled via fuss than the filmmakers themselves. Ack! Maybe i09 is right––maybe Expelled is actually a reverse-psychology conspiracy designed to bring down the intelligent design movement. Or maybe not.
Above: a nearly eight-minute “trailer” for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, an anti-Darwinism documentary starring and produced by Ben Stein (yes, that Ben Stein). The independently-financed doc will hit theaters in mid-April. According to Variety, Stein and friends have hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing firm behind The Passion of the Christ, who are the go-to guys for projects looking to tap into the elusive but potentially lucrative Christian conservative market.
What’s interesting is how aggressive the film seems to be about appealing to the audience’s latent desire to rebel against the establishment. The trailer focuses on Darwin-defaming scientists and professors who have been “shunned and discredited” for “suggesting that we aren’t merely mud animated by lightning after all.” Stein works hard to paint these guys as outlaws whose ideas are so “dangerous” that a giant conspiracy has sprung up to suppress him, led by insecure bureaucrats like…Richard Dawkins? He even warns the viewer that the very act of watching the film “could land you in a heap of trouble.” Sounds sexy, right?
I assume the hope is that college kids are so eager to embrace anything that has anything to do with saying “fuck you” to authority, that they’ll hop on the intelligent design band wagon just to be contrarian. And who knows…there isn’t any decent music for kids with a hardon for rebellion to get behind these days, maybe they’ll buy the Nixon speechwriter-as-institution smashing rockstar just out of desperation.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The vast left wing conspiracy against Expelled has kicked into high gear! Behold the arguments from heretics, like Scientific American! And, um, Fox News!
