Unintelligently Designed

Ben Stein stars in Expelled. (Photo courtesy Motive Entertainment)

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a new documentary from first-time director Nathan Frankowski, features Ben Stein (of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and “Win Ben Stein’s Money”) as the film’s main narrator, allegedly uncovering the conspiracies of Darwinists and the staunch prejudices they hold against intelligent design (ID) scientists. But while Expelled had the potential to discuss the opposing perspectives of evolution, creationism and intelligent design, it fails to do so, leaving the viewer confused by propaganda.

Naturally, one would expect a documentary about intelligent design to explain what ID actually is, but Expelled staunchly refuses to summarize the current state of the debate—inasmuch as there is one—on the theory of evolution. Not once does the audience receive even the slightest explanation of ID or why it’s so controversial. Nor does the film even touch the fundamentals of evolutionary theory that it seeks to debunk.

For practical purposes, let me fill in some blanks. According to the Discovery Institute, a leading organization for ID research, “intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” The conflict between ID and evolution stems from ID’s refutation of the emphasis evolutionary theory puts on natural selection as fueled by random genetic mutations. ID, in short, is a direct descendant of creationism, and there’s nothing creationists hate more than the idea of randomness. Once creationists, stung by a number of court rulings, realized they wouldn’t be able to teach their version of creation in public schools, they morphed their argument into a coyer version—from the assertive “God created every living creature” to the more passive, winking, “certain features…are best explained by an intelligent cause.”

Expelled spends much of its time arguing that there exists an institutionalized prejudice against intelligent design in the “big science” community. As such, the many contemporary scientists who have denounced ID as religiously motivated pseudoscience are portrayed as persecutors, drunk on—and clouded by—their staunch love of Darwinism. But what the film fails to highlight is that ID simply isn’t science. Any scientific theory, by definition, has to be falsifiable—otherwise it can’t be tested and isn’t science. ID isn’t falsifiable: How would one go about proving a complete lack of intelligent design in any biological apparatus, anywhere? This partly explains the lack of peer-reviewed research published in reputable scientific journals to support it. When journals like Darwinism, Design, and Public Education have sprouted up, claiming to be “peer-reviewed,” they have quickly been disavowed by many scientists. Unfortunately, none of this is explained coherently in Expelled.  The film simply doesn’t provide an accurate overview of the subject at hand.

What Expelled does provide is smarmy scaremongering via misinformation. Initially, the film runs through a list of six or so scientists who have had their lives “nearly ruined” by the omnipotent heads of “big science” for researching, or even considering, intelligent design a viable option over evolution. This is supposed to be the film’s strongest, most damning point: Look, those scientists are being persecuted as we speak! But one of the film’s main examples of this, which involves researcher Richard Sternberg, is presented in a thoroughly misleading way.

Expelled claims that Sternberg was wrongfully fired from his post at the Smithsonian Institution in 2004 after publishing an intelligent design article by Dr. Stephen Meyer in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal he was editing at the time. But Expelled fails to explain the controversy that surrounded this occurrence. Sternberg claimed that the article went under the appropriate processes of peer review by appointing himself as sole reviewer—a no-no that eventually resulted in the article’s retraction. The film argues that Sternberg’s reputation in the scientific community was henceforth ruined, as he was forced out of his position, but it fails to mention Sternberg’s planned resignation prior to publishing the article in question. In also fails to mention that Sternberg wasn’t fully employed by the Smithsonian, but was working at an unpaid research position at the time. In addition, he was offered another unpaid research slot in 2006, two years after the controversial article was published. Granted, the debacle raised serious questions about the peer review process, and was investigated by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel and the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform. But the facts are grossly distorted in Expelled, as are all the other cases of “big science” persecution presented in the film. (In an effort to clear up these similar manipulations, the National Center for Science Education launched a comprehensive website, Expelled Exposed, to provide the public with accurate information regarding the film’s flimsy examples.)

Many others have noted the factual inaccuracies and incoherence of Expelled, but the film is even harder to take seriously once you find out how it was made and once you’re exposed to Stein’s infuriating style of “inquiry.” Many scientists who appear in Expelled were initially told they were being questioned for a documentary entitled Crossroads: The Intersection of Science and Religion. This comes through in the interviews: The subjects sound as if they’re being asked questions for an entirely different documentary. Stein is brusque and badgering as a narrator who continuously asks mind-numbingly abstract and aggressive questions of his many guests. Interviews from either side seldom make sense because the producers tend to switch the film’s train of thought on almost a second-by-second basis like some interrupting toddler with ADHD. "But is what is so evil about intelligent design anyway?" Stein asks, followed immediately by clips of scientists laughing about ID research as a waste of time. This overproduction backfires, leading to a narrative that is noticeably muddled and messy.

Another strike against Expelled is its marketing company: Motive Marketing. Responsible for the widely lucrative Passion of the Christ marketing campaign, Motive was enlisted by Expelled to create buzz and revenue through their website, getexpelled.com. The site offers—in addition to free resources for youth leaders, ministries, and educators—a $10,000 prize drawing for schools that submit their groups’ ticket stubs to the site before May 30. The purpose of this giveaway, quoted on the site, is blunt in its religious motivations: “to engage Christian schools and home school groups to get as many students, parents and faculty from their school/group out to be educated on today’s issues discussed in Ben Stein’s new movie EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.” After reading about the contest—which seems to be marketed to a very specific audience—I wondered if Expelled was even meant to persuade those who aren’t already firm subscribers to its central message. Others, apparently, need not apply.

But setting aside the filmmaker’s motives and its numerous instances of factual inaccuracies—either of which would be enough for me to suggest you spend your ten bucks on a more scientifically accurate film, like Iron Man—the film functions in the basest realm of propaganda. The opening credits set us up with stock footage of Berlin Wall-era Germany to signify the wall which “big science” has constructed to rob all scientists who question evolution of their American freedoms. This subtle-as-a-jackhammer metaphor is beyond contrived, and the film returns to it over and over.

In the same vein, Expelled indicts Darwinists and evolutionary biologists as the unpatriotic zealots and staunchly capitalistic robber barons of science (hence the play on “big business” or “big oil”). And eventually—inevitably?—Stein likens contemporary scientists to Nazis. That’s right, Darwin was the ultimate enabler of Hitler, and eugenics is synonymous with evolution. The film tries to argue that the theories of evolution—that inferior species are systemically weeded out by natural selection—ultimately enabled and inspired Hitler to eradicate what he thought were inferior species. (Just as Newton’s explanation of the laws of gravity later allowed the Japanese to harness this force to drop bombs on Pearl Harbor.) The research Expelled uses to establish this connection is all but absent. Instead, the film follows Stein to concentration camps where he ostensibly mourns the deaths of his ancestors at the cruel hand of Charles Darwin. This appeal to emotions doesn’t work well for a film that is supposedly grounded in science, and is, to say the least, disgracefully manipulative. (I also couldn’t help but notice the religious irony in concentration camps being used to proselytize the coded, but certainly present, fundamentalist Christian connotations of the film).

Perhaps most annoying is the film’s insistence on its own radicalism in any way, shape or form. Stein wants to conjure a modern scenario in which a new sort of McCarthyism has infected science, a field once based on objectivity and questioning. This comes across in the stock footage from 1940s and ’50s propaganda films that try—failingly and predictably—to serve as hilarious interjections throughout. Intelligent design is painted as the underdog—despite its strong Christian ties, and despite the fact that so many Americans already harbor doubts about evolution—and Expelled and Stein try desperately to market themselves as open-minded and rebellious. Maybe they seem that way to those who already believe in ID. But for people looking to learn more about the debate at hand (which really is more cultural than scientific), Expelled is of little value. Its “hidden” agenda is brazenly on display and it leaves out almost all scientific information and signs of critical thought. As such, “No Intelligence Allowed” would be a much more apt description of Expelled’s muddled arguments than of the state of modern life science.

Mike Berlin is a recent graduate of Ithaca College and the former arts & entertainment editor for Buzzsaw magazine, part of the Campus Publications Network. He can be reached at mberlin2@gmail.com

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