Expelled: No Intelligence,... excerpts from movie reviews

[Dardedar]

DAR
It's getting roasted and toasted. Some of the best bits from the few I read. Excerpts from movie reviews of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:

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"Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

...

They’re hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here, since there’s a visit to a concentration camp and the raised idea — apparently typical of the intelligent design community — that somehow the theory of evolution is so evil that it caused the Holocaust. Alas, this is such a warped premise that no one’s biting.

The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this. Who cares, really, if "Expelled" is anti-Semitic? It will come and go without much fanfare.

--Roger Friedman FOX News

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Screengrab Exclusive Preview: EXPELLED - NO INTELLIGENCE ALLOWED

Excerpt:

"Expelled's central thesis is that an arrogant cabal of Marxist academics, politically correct leftists, and scientific ideologues are conspiring to keep the teaching of "Intelligent Design" — a non-theory that is essentially creation science dressed up and given a new set of buzzwords — off of college campuses. In aid of this theses, Stein wanders around with a camera crew, engaging in Moorean antics that involve him drawing calculated outrage and obnoxious bluster from a number of scientists, academics, and other detractors of ID.

...

However, if you want to see what the movie actually promises — a genuinely successful argument over why Intelligent Design should or should not be taught in schools — you'd best look elsewhere. The movie spends very little time in discussing the actual hypotheses of ID, no doubt because they're largely open-ended and unfalsifiable, and thus poor science. It's not so much a theory as it is a loosely slapped-together, multi-pronged critique of other theories, and is no more science than the man in the moon or the tooth fairy. (Curiously, for all the film's bluster about "academic freedom" and First Amendment rights — which, of course, have nothing to do with what should be taught in science classes — Stein is never seen arguing that Babylonian creation myths or the theories of Scientology should be given equal time. Apparently, only his favored form of nonsense suffers from exclusion.) Since any legitimate confrontation between Intelligent Design and actual science would end badly for ID, the movie focuses on making ID's opponents look like censors (as if the teaching of science was a democratic practice, where all possible ideas are presented and then people vote on which one they like the best) or anti-Christian bigots or wordy, incomprehensible windbags.

It's a pure hatchet job, plain and simple, without any scientific merit and very little artistic merit. Worse still, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a fundamentally dishonest film: it's funded by right-wing think tanks, its marketing materials urge the formation of politically-motivated 'street teams' to push for screenings of the movie before they've even seen it (a tactic likely motivated by the fact that no one would book the thing based on its qualities as a film), and hosted by a political hack for either mercenary or ideological reasons. Stein does deliver a few amusing moments with his deadpan delivery, but it's nothing you couldn't get in equal amounts from one of his Clear Eyes commercials in less than thirty seconds and without the added burden of vast, pseudoscientific nonsense."

Screengrab

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Common Sense 'Expelled' in New Movie

By Benjamin Radford, LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist

Excerpt:

"Ben Stein freely admits he isn't a scientist. He's a lawyer, an actor with a signature deadpan delivery, and an eye-medication pitchman.

...

One refrain is "teach the controversy," but among scientists there is no controversy about whether evolution is true. Evidence of evolution is all around us; for example, flu vaccines need to be reformulated each year because the flu viruses are constantly evolving and adapting to older vaccines.

Other than Ben Stein and a handful of other activists, relatively few people of any expertise, stature, or authority seem particularly concerned about the issue. In fact, when the issue was addressed in a 2005 courtroom (Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District) Judge John Jones III rebuked the intelligent design promoters, citing their "breathtaking inanity" and dishonesty: "Witnesses either testified inconsistently, or lied outright under oath on several occasions." In 1997, Pope John Paul II stated that "New knowledge leads us to recognize the theory of evolution [as] more than a hypothesis," and declared that there was no conflict between faith and evolution.

"Expelled" tries to criticize the theory of evolution for not providing answers to the origin of life. Yet that is a red herring; neither Charles Darwin nor his theory of evolution by natural selection ever claimed to explain life's origins. The question of how life first emerged on our planet remains unanswered, but that has nothing to do with evolution. It's puzzling that Ben Stein and "Expelled" don't seem to understand that. Then again, Ben Stein is no scientist."

Live Science

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TIME

Ben Stein Dukes it Out with Darwin

Thursday, Apr. 10, 2008

By JEFFREY KLUGER

There is nothing so tiresome as an argument that no one will ever concede--particularly if the participants don't seem to know it. And there's no place the fighting is growing more pointless than in the ongoing smackdown between evolutionists and advocates of intelligent design--the theory that the emergence of life must have been guided by a sentient planner.

...

The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could have possibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing. More dishonestly, Stein employs the common dodge of enumerating all the admittedly unanswered questions in evolutionary theory and using this to refute the whole idea. But all scientific knowledge is built this way. A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.

It's in the film's final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and--wait for it--Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it's claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler's killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We've always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

TIME magazine

DAR
Pretty interesting movie eh Galt? Links to many more reviews here.

[Dardedar]

DAR
Oh, just one more:

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Science Sunday: Intelligent Design Goes to the Movies

by: Dan Whipple

According to Of Pandas and People, a textbook outlining the essentials of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary biology:

"Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency with their distinctive features already intact: Fish with fins and scales; birds with feathers, beaks and wings; etc. Some scientists have arrived at this view since fossil forms first appeared in the record with their distinctive features intact and apparently fully functional rather than gradual development."

But you'll stay awake through the one-hour-and-forty-five-minute film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" - if you can manage it -- without ever hearing this or any other definition of intelligent design. This seems a curious omission in a movie seeking to poke holes in evolutionary theory and by doing so establish some scientific credentials for ID."

...

You won't hear a coherent definition of evolution in the "Expelled," either, even though it bashes this scientific theory incessantly. So we'll offer this one as a public service:

Evolution is descent with modification. Random changes in the genetic makeup of an organism result in changes in the phenotype. The organism interacts with its environment. If the changes to the phenotype give it an advantage over others - the vast majority of genetic changes are deleterious -- it leaves more offspring, who are also endowed with this advantageous genetic makeup for dealing with their environment. This latter is known as "natural selection." This simple but powerful process leads to new species through separation of organisms in time and place.

The above is the ten cent course in evolution, but it's more than you'll get from "Expelled." In fact I've even already told you more about both intelligent design and evolutionary theory than you'll get from "Expelled."
...

"Expelled" trots out several martyrs to the Darwinist inquisition. The poster boy is Richard Sternberg, whom the movie says was ousted from his position at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and from his editorship of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington when he published in that publication a peer-reviewed article of scientific evidence that supports intelligent design. There is some dramatic if unfocused footage of Ben Stein being denied admission to the upper floors of the Smithsonian by a security guard when he tries to grill muckety-mucks at the museum about these injustices.

This repression of scientific thought, we can all agree, is horrible if true. But it isn't true.
...

The allegations made in "Expelled" are wrong. Sternberg never worked for the Smithsonian, so the Smithsonian couldn't threaten his job there. He was a visiting scholar with research privileges, assigned an office. He still has both the office and the research privileges. He wasn't deprived of his editorship. His term as editor had expired so he was stepping down anyway in favor of another editor when the controversial ID article was published.

...
After a half hour or so, "Expelled" wanders off to blame the theory of evolution for Communism, the Berlin Wall, Fascism, the Holocaust, atheism and Planned Parenthood....

There are so many topics picked up, misrepresented and abandoned unresolved by "Expelled" that it is impossible to deal with them all. But they are typical of the intellectual dishonesty of the creationist-Intelligent Design cabal that wants to have this bankrupt hypothesis taught in the public schools.

For instance, the assumption by IDers is that if neo-Darwinian evolution can be shown to be largely incorrect, ID and creationism triumph. But this isn't so. There are other hypotheses besides design or God or Darwin that could replace it, if they were supported by the evidence. The trouble is that only evolution is so supported. "Expelled" doesn't try to build up a coherent alternative theory. It simply bashes evolution.
...

Other presentations of "Expelled" display intellectual dishonesty. For instance, most evolutionary biologists do not deal with the origins of life. Evolution acts on organisms that already exist. The question of how life came about is not something that Darwinian evolution deals with. "Expelled" acknowledges this, then proceeds to ignore this acknowledgement and fault evolutionary theory for misinterpreting the origins of life. Sigh.
...

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" may be the first volley in the next battle by creationists to give their movement intellectual weight. But its cartoon version of evolutionary theory, Its remarkable lack of evidence for its case, its unbalanced and hysterical portrayal of the "martyrs," its dismal and depressing musical score, and its lack of genuine humor will persuade only the already persuaded.

Colorado Confidential

[Savonarola]

The Orlando Sentinel's review is pretty damn damning.

I'd like to make special note of my avatar for this one.

[Savonarola]

From freethoughtpedia.com

[Doug]

The Orlando Sentinel's review is pretty damn damning.

That review by Roger Moore (not the actor) is pretty scathing. Friday's Democrat-Gazette had a shorter but equally scathing review by Moore also from the Orlando Sentinel.

[Doug]

This is a pretty good roast too, with special attention to examples of how Stein's movie is blatantly dishonest.

Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn't Want You to Know...about intelligent design and evolution

1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.
...Darwin explicitly rejected the idea of eliminating the "weak" as dehumanizing and evil. Those words falsify Expelled's argument. The filmmakers had to be aware of the full Darwin passage, but they chose to quote only the sections that suited their purposes.

2) Ben Stein's speech to a crowded auditorium in the film was a setup.
...Only a few of the audience members were students; most were extras brought in by the producers. Judge the ovation Ben Stein receives accordingly.

3) Scientists in the film thought they were being interviewed for a different movie.
As Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer and other proponents of evolution appearing in Expelled have publicly remarked, the producers first arranged to interview them for a film that was to be called Crossroads, which was allegedly a documentary on "the intersection of science and religion."

4) The ID-sympathetic researcher (Sternberg) whom the film paints as having lost his job at the Smithsonian Institution was never an employee there.
...This selective retelling of the Sternberg affair omits details that are awkward for the movie's case, however. Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator...Sternberg had always been planning to step down as the journal's editor—the issue in which he published the paper was already scheduled to be his last.

5) Science does not reject religious or "design-based" explanations because of dogmatic atheism.
Expelled frequently repeats that design-based explanations (not to mention religious ones) are "forbidden" by "big science." It never explains why, however. Evolution and the rest of "big science" are just described as having an atheistic preference.

6) Many evolutionary biologists are religious and many religious people accept evolution.

[Dardedar]

DAR
And check out the howlers in this laughable and absurd review from right-wing loon Brent Bozell (the third). Brainless and without a conscience.

Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering Atheists

And this is the review getting read. It's all over my yahoo news.

[Doug]

Ben Stein Vs. Sputtering Atheists

DOUG
It's pathetic. Bozell says:

That's disturbing enough, but what Stein does next is truly shocking. He allows the principal advocates of Darwinism to speak their minds. These are experts with national reputations, regular welcomed guests on network television and the like. But the public knows them only by their careful seven-second soundbites. Stein engages them in conversation. They speak their minds. They become sputtering ranters, openly championing their sheer hatred of religion.

[Dardedar]

DAR
More review snippets (from the huge wiki article):

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Based on the movie's ten-minute online preview, John Patterson of The Guardian writes that due to Stein's involvement, "you'd expect a dishonest documentary, and apparently, we've got one". From his brief exposure "it seems to deploy all the loaded-dice arguments, the overdog's deep-seated sense of victimhood and conventional rightwing hysteria", "[a]nd yes - you get all that in the first 10 minutes." He expresses regret that Stein has moved from comedy, where he is talented, to "political apologias, where his talents simply die".

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Tom Bethell, of The American Spectator says that the film brought tears to his eyes and that the film is the "best thing that has been done on this issue, in any medium". Bethell asserts that the position of Ken Miller of Brown University and Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and by many religious figures, "puts diplomacy before truth".[129]

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American conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh states that the film is "fabulous" and "powerful". Limbaugh asserts that Darwinism does not allow for a belief in God, and that it has taken hold at every major intellectual institution.


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Roger Friedman of FOX News writes that "Expelled is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) 'exposé' of the scientific community" and echoes Patterson's concerns about Stein's career direction, stating that he "is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he's abandoned all good sense to make a buck" and "like some other celebrities, [he] finally has shown his true colors and they aren't so pretty." Friedman criticizes the film's exploitation of the Holocaust, "hoping someone will latch onto an anti-Semitism theme here" but that it is "such a warped premise that no one's biting", and Stein's involvement, as a Jew, is "so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God's name — he was thinking when he got into this". Ultimately he concludes that "It will come and go without much fanfare" and that were the film to be shown in his area he'd "boycott the filmmakers for thinking of me as this gullible and unsophisticated."

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Sean P. Means, movie reviewer for the Salt Lake Tribune wrote that the producers of Expelled are "hiding" the film from movie critics and "Every semi-knowledgeable moviegoer and reader of movie criticism knows what the words 'not screened for critics' means: The movie is a dog."[117] Though Means withholds judgement on the content since he has not seen the film and was not invited to a screening, he explained that when producers do this it usually means the films are targeted to "teenagers and morons".[117] ....
Three days later Means reviewed the film and wrote it is "a slick but intellectually dishonest documentary".[132] He concluded of the tactics employed in the film: "Perhaps the intelligent-design proponents know that in a truly open debate, their argument isn't fit enough to survive."

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Matt Stevens, of E!, called the movie "a flunkout of a documentary" that "pretends it wants to encourage debate but shuts down and edits around every Darwinian scientist who attempts to explain complex issues."[133] In the Chicago Tribune, Roger Moore wrote the movie was "poor" which uses "under-credentialed academics dismissed from lesser colleges" to argue against evolution.[134] Stephen Whitty, of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, rated the movie "1/2 out of four stars" calling it "a hard-core, fundamentalist bit of right-wing propaganda".[

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John Serba of The Grand Rapids Press commented on the movie explaining "Maybe there's a case to be made for the rejected researchers, but Stein diverges from the path into something increasingly vaporous, using straw-man arguments that worthwhile thinkers avoid."[137] He concluded, "Now, I'm all for a good discussion. Debate exists at the heart of all healthy inquiry. But ' Expelled ' is slick and slimy, and anyone wanting a proper response to the onslaught of leftist documentaries -- or harboring a similar viewpoint of man's origins -- likely will be put off by Stein's smug tone and his disigenuous suggestion that not just Darwinism, but science itself is a dangerous tool of evil minds."[137]

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Arthur Caplan, Professor of Center for Bioethics University of Pennsylvania, wrote in his MSNBC column that the movie is a "frighteningly immoral narrative" and wrote that "this film is a toxic mishmash of persecution fantasies, disconnected and inappropriate references to fallen communist regimes and their leaders and a very repugnant form of Holocaust denial from the monotone big mouth Ben Stein."[138] He criticized the substance of the movie, saying the "startling and monumentally deceptive is that the movie never bothers to tell us what Intelligent Design actually is."[138]

[Savonarola]

Tom Bethell, of The American Spectator says that the film brought tears to his eyes and that the film is the "best thing that has been done on this issue, in any medium". Bethell asserts that the position of Ken Miller of Brown University and Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and by many religious figures, "puts diplomacy before truth".[129]

Let us recall that Bethell writes for the PIG series. (That's "Politically Incorrect Guide," but we've previously discussed why PIG really means Positively Idiotic Guide to [whatever].) Creationist hack Jonathan Wells has written the PIG ignorant book "Darwinism and Intelligent Design," and Bethell himself exposes his complete ignorance of science in his PIG to Science in general. (Bethell is of the ilk that denies not only global warming but also that HIV causes AIDS.) When Bethell agrees with something "scientific," there's a good chance that you'd have to be an idiot to agree with him.

[Savonarola]

Ben Stein went on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS tonight. When Craig asked what the main idea of the movie was, Stein said that (I'll have to give an indirect but nearly direct quote):

"We love Darwin, but Darwin didn't explain gravity or why the planets stay in their orbits. ... We just want people not to be fired for saying that Darwinism isn't what keeps planets in their orbits."

This is ridiculous in both directions.
1) As soon as Stein or Mathis or anyone at the Disco Institute can show me anybody making the claim that Darwinism doesn't keep the planets in orbit and getting fired for it, I'll eat my shorts.
2) As soon as Stein or Mathis or anyone at the Disco Institute can show me anybody making the claim that Darwinism purports to explain planetary motion, I'll show you somebody who deserves to be fired for being an utterly incompetent boob.

What this comes down to is Stein's knowledge that the actual claims made by the movie are so laughable to even remotely educated people that he won't share them with the general public. Instead, they've catered to unlearned students and conservative groups and have gone so far as to expel learned professionals.
The only people who can't see through this are the ones blind enough to be swallowing it whole to begin with. It's a vicious cycle.

[Dardedar]

Bump.