[Video Review] Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Right now I am taking an Ethics in Biological Research class, which is mostly about intellectual property, informed consent, and image manipulation.   We do, however, have a bioethics component where each of us are picking a topic and presenting on it.  I'll post later about my topic.  One of my classmates is presenting on her skepticism of evolution.  I love her to death, and everyone in the room will certainly disagree. (I can't help but think of Hawking's anecdote where "It's turtles all the way down.") To make it a little more fun, I thought I'd try to take her side.  To give me some ideas, I decided to watch Expelled, Ben Stein's intelligent design documentary.

Wow, was it bad.  I watch a lot of Entertainumentaries, and while this was very dramatic and visually appealing, Ben Stein seemed like a lay-person who was just repeating what you could hear on the street.  That is not educational.  He did things like misuse the scientific word "theory" for the common vernacular "theory," which in science is actually a hypothesis.  This stuff matters in his argument.

At some point he decides that the film isn't emotional enough and links part of a quote from Darwin to the Nazi's.  Okay, in a discussion with an intelligent adult, I will not continue if they bring up Nazi's or Communists.  One just cannot invoke those two every time their argument is lame. Well there is a lot of quiet time or dramatic music time as he tours where a lot of people were killed.  It angers me when someone is trying to provoke emotions to an issue by bringing up another issue.  Goodness.

So, the movie was bad.  Not just bad, but dangerous. It was almost like watching a Michael Moore movie *shudder*.   Next, I hit the web and found that the whole thing was bad on another level, most of which is covered here and here.

The most striking of them:

• Scientists were lied to about the subject of the film.
• Religious scientists were excluded, leaving evolution to look like an atheistic idea.
• He follows a guy who lost his job at the Smithosnian for publishing ID supporting material, but that guy was never a Smithsonian employee.  He did have a short-term contract gig with a Smithsonian-related group, and when it ended he was offered another position.

In short, this is a crappy film that has fake information in it.