I don’t know how many of you have been following the Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed movie, a “documentary” featuring Ben Stein spouting conspiracy theories that would make the Area 51 nuts blush. I’ve been following the whole thing pretty closely for the past couple of months, but apparently it has been news for almost a year now. In the movie Stein, who we all grew up loving as the monotone teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, makes the claim that the “scientific intelligentsia” has been expelling and persecuting anyone who so much as mentions the idea of Intelligent Design. He goes on to attack Darwin, going so far as to blame him for the holocaust.
The movie is supposedly coming out today, opening in 1000 theaters, which is pretty big for a documentary; compare it to the less than 900 that Fahrenheit 911 opened in. While I have been following the whole thing pretty closely there is no way I’m going to see the movie until I can see it without helping to fund such a despicable organization. The makers of Expelled went out of their way to deceive some of today’s leading scientists and Intelligent Design skeptics (such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers) to appear in the film and then selectively cut from their interviews to make them sound as bad as possible. The makers even ironically expelled PZ Myers from a screening of the movie while he was waiting in line to get in, even though he followed the same online ticket application as everyone else, then claimed PZ had tried to sneak in uninvited. Somehow they missed Richard Dawkins who was standing right next to him, and were quite surprised when Dawkins started asking questions at the Q & A session at the end of the screening.
There are several other silly things done by the makers, such as using music from The Killers and John Lennon without getting permission and copying an animation produced at Harvard without permission; as well as the normal things you’d expect from any conspiracy theory makers, like planting people in the audiences of screenings to make sure they asked the right questions. Some of the people who got blindsided by the film makers have compiled a website, Expelled Exposed, dedicated to showing the truth on the subject. There you can see the real stories about the people claiming that they’ve been thrown out of science, and read about some of the other stupid things the filmmakers did.
Now, I know I’ve made many claims about how ridiculous this whole thing is, but let me just tell you why. The spark that ignited the flame of this post came from a Ben Stein interview on CNN that I saw while I was at the gym. I was on the stair maste… punching bag, minding my own business, and I look up on the TV and see Ben Stein’s beautiful mug staring at me.
I had headphones on, and the volume on the TV was turned off, but CNN was providing us with closed captioning, so I turned my attention to the TV for a bit. CNN played a little snippet of the movie, showing someone who claims to have gotten thrown out of science for believing in Intelligent Design, and then the interviewer started asking Stein the normal questions about the movie. Stein referred to the movie as promoting free thought in science, and said that it brought light to all the gaps present in the Theory of Evolution. Some of these gaps he mentioned were how life began, where matter came from, thermodynamics, and other forces of the universe. He claims that these can’t be explained by evolution but they can be explained through Intelligent Design.
Well…at least that’s what I think he said. I’d prefer to think the people in charge of providing the closed captioning were on acid or something, because Stein is supposed to be an intelligent person who would know that evolution doesn’t explain these things because they HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EVOLUTION! The beginning of life is abiogenesis, the origin of matter can be explained through quantum mechanics, thermodynamics has to do with heat, and other forces in the universe can be explained through other scientific explanations. Evolution is the theory of plant and animal life all being descendants of a common ancestor, getting to where we are now by natural selection and mutation. This is SIMPLE stuff Ben, c’mon now.
Furthermore, the science is not organized into a group of people who make all the big decisions. We don’t have an agenda against Christians, we don’t have group atheist meetings where we plot how to plant more fossils into the Earth to make it look like Jesus was a zombie raptor, we don’t worship Satan, and we’re not angry at God. The truth is anyone who could provide enough evidence against any scientific theory (including the Theory of Evolution) would be awarded with a huge medal and would go down in history as someone who changed science forever. This applies to Intelligent Design too. If you can provide substantial evidence for it, awesome! If not, stop wasting my time. The reason Intelligent Design isn’t and shouldn’t be taught in school science classes around the world is that it’s not science! In order for it to be science it has to follow the Scientific Method, as seen here:
1) Ask a Question
2) Do Background Research
3) Construct a Hypothesis
4) Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
5) Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
6) Communicate Your Results
Now kids, can we apply the idea that an “Intelligent Designer” (aka God) created the world and species as we see them today to all six steps here? No? THEN IT’S NOT SCIENCE. It is not a testable or falsifiable idea, so no matter how much evidence there is against it proponents of Intelligent Design can just claim that “the designer made it that way” or “the designer is hiding from us and he’s so much more powerful than us we could never find him.” I really don’t see why there’s any more of an argument than that. To bring Intelligent Design into the science class is to teach pseudo-science, to accept data even with a lack of empirical evidence, and to promote even more dumbing down of the culture.
Also, while we’re on the subject, for any of you who are thinking “But Evolution is just a theory isn’t it?” let me give you some insight as to what a scientific theory is. A scientific theory is a hypothesis that has a substantial set of facts and data based on empirical evidence supporting it. The Theory of Evolution isn’t questioned in science any more than Atomic Theory, the Theory of Gravity, or the Germ Theory of Disease. These are as close to fact as you can get in science. We can’t just create evolution in a test tube from single-celled organisms all the way up to humans. Creationists have been claiming that it’s “just a theory” and that there are “too many gaps” since Darwin first published his book, but the fact is that in the past 150 years all of Darwin’s predictions have come true, and there hasn’t been a single scientific discovery that goes against evolution. Scientists have had to make some changes to certain aspects of evolution, but that doesn’t mean the theory as a whole is wrong. The things that have been changed are things like which route a butterfly’s wings took to evolve. Other than the small things like that scientists do not disagree with the Theory of Evolution. The idea that evolution has too many gaps may have been valid 100 years ago, but today we have filled in most of those gaps with transitional fossils, as well as research in new fields of science such as genetics. The truth of it is fundamentalists will claim there are too many gaps until we’ve found a fossil from each generation from the first protein to humans. Even then there are some fundies who claim that the fossils were put there by Satan to confuse us.
Intelligent Design is not science. It is a scapegoat for religious people who refuse to think we evolved from monkeys and are desperately trying to cling to the notion that their 2000 year old book is still valid and that anyone who has wronged them will pay in the fiery depths of hell. I’m still hoping Ben Stein will pop up any day now and go “Just kidding!” Although, with all the terrible publicity they’re getting from all over for all their deception, this might do more to hinder the Intelligent Design movement than to help it. At least we can hope.
Abbr. Enth.