Expelled: Propaganda in a theater near you
After seeing countless blog entries about Expelled, I finally decided to watch the film for myself. I’d seen posts taking the movie to pieces but purposely refrained from reading them–except for the ones about the PZ Myers/Richard Dawkins debacle. Since I often wind up somewhere in the middle on many science-religion debates, I wanted to dig into the film on my own. This afternoon, I did.
Framing
The film opens and closes with images of the Berlin Wall. It will be the central metaphor for the premise of the documentary, that legitimate scientists are being walled off from doing their research. Freedom, honesty and the quest for truth are the repeated refrains, accompanying American flags flying proudly.
Central Claims
As I saw it, there are three central claims in the film, only two of which will I interact with here:
1. Many intellectuals have been expelled from academia merely for uttering the words “intelligent design” and daring to challenge the Darwinian Establishment. Yes, the term “Darwinian Establishment” was used in all seriousness.
2. Darwinianism was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the evils of the Holocaust. Today’s equivalent, burgeoning evil is Planned Parenthood and euthanasia, spurred on by the theory of evolution.
3. The debate we’re seeing is only purportedly about the interpretation of facts. Instead, it is a “clash of worldviews” in which a religious worldview and an atheistic worldview are impacting scientists to interpret the facts differently. The atheists really just want religion to be destroyed.
Claim #1: Academic Freedom
For a film called Expelled, it seemed to give less time and substance to the first claim, regarding the expulsion of academics. I am not familiar with the details of the cases mentioned–and after watching the film still don’t feel comfortable saying that I am. However, if you want to Google some names, the interviewed academics and journalists (because the media also polices for ID proponents) include:
Richard Von Sternberg, Caroline Crocker, Robert J. Marks II, Guillermo Gonzalez.
I will come back to one point, which is that these persecuted individuals claim that they need to take up an “intelligent design perspective to get the research done” but that wise academics will simply keep that perspective quiet. So, I wondered,when will we hear about this research and their findings, which are being suppressed? Perhaps in parts two or three?
Claim #2: The Holocaust
I came into the movie theater thinking perhaps the other attendees were also agnostics and skeptics watching out of idle curiosity. If they were, they had been converted by this point–I heard gasps and murmurs throughout Ben Stein’s visits to Hadamar and Dachau. I was, like them, sickened by the imagery. Stacks of bodies, gas chambers, film clips of a rabidly excited Hitler…none of this was pleasant. But as time went on I became more enraged by the gratuitousness of its presence in the movie.
This portion is introduced by David Berlinski, a mathematician that Stein interviews and seems to fawn over (he’s filmed lounging in his Paris apartment, gesturing idly with what looks like a Mont Blanc Pen). “No one is saying that Darwin caused the Holocaust,” says Berlinski, despite the fact that we’re about to hear precisely that implied, “but Darwinism was, though not a sufficient condition, certainly a necessary one.”
I may have that quote a bit garbled, but the sufficient/necessary distinction is correct. To review, for those who may not have the terminology at the tip of their tongue: a sufficient condition is a condition whose presence is required in order to something to happen. Only that condition needs to be there. In other terms, if I have water and the correct temperature, I have the sufficient conditions to form ice.
A necessary condition is a cause which is required for the effect, but which, by itself, won’t produce it. So, if I want to make a Sno-Cone, then water and the right temperature are necessary conditions. But without the high fructose corn syrup flavoring, I won’t have any Sno-Cones, just ice.
Berlinski (whose Wikipedia entry you really should read, since the film doesn’t indicate he was fired from the various Ivy League posts he describes) thinks evolution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Holocaust. That means that
1) Without the theory of evolution, the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred.
2) Other causes are necessary for the Holocaust to have happened.
The problem with 1) is that while Nazis did use Darwin to justify their actions, how can we prove that they wouldn’t have used any other available theory? In fact, the historical record shows that they also used religious dogma to justify their persecution of Jewish people and other minorities.
According to Berlinski and Stein’s logic, then, religion is just as much a necessary cause of the Holocaust as evolutionary theory!
Other writers have taken up this piece of Stein’s documentary, so I won’t linger here, except to say that I found his reasoning in this piece completely odious. Regardless of one’s position on abortion, euthanasia, etc., the logic used to to pair Naziism, evolutionary theory and Planned Parenthood (whose founder was interested in eugenics) is contorted.
Claim #3
After a stare-down with the statue of Darwin, Stein returns to his theme of freedom. He’s gotten our American patriotic juices going by pushing the freedom of speech button, the Nazi Germany button, and now he’ll quote Thomas Jefferson: we are endowed by our Creator with rights.
Since Darwin is dead, Stein can only confront his modern incarnation: Richard Dawkins. And he does so in an embarrassingly awkward interview. I was the only one who laughed out loud in the theater at what I saw as the appropriate points. For instance, after badgering Dawkins about whether he disbelieves in Krishna and any other god (”Of course, why would you ask that?” comes the bemused and frustrated response), Stein asks in what possible instance Dawkins could see Intelligent Design as being right.
“Well,” muses Dawkins, “perhaps if some advanced civilization, which had come about through natural selection itself, of course, came here and seeded us, you might be able to find evidence of design at the biochemical level–”
“Aha!” Stein gleefully interrupts as Dawkins continues to say, “but the civilization itself would be explainable in terms of evolution.”
See–Intelligent Design! But this is precisely the theory (seeding) that earlier in the documentary Stein had argued was a ridiculous attempt at explaining the problem of origins. Now he’s using it as demonstration that even Dawkins can see Intelligent Design as possible?
There are two connected themes here. One is that because Dawkins is so virulently evil and atheistic that he cannot see what the evidence might permit. (Will Provine, one of the evolutionary defenders interviewed is quoted as saying he would kill himself rather than die of a brain tumor–a demonstration of the ghastly morality of these scientists. Yet Provine is not saying he would put anyone with a brain tumor in a concentration camp, merely that he’d like the choice to take his own life should he wish. But I digress.) This isn’t about science, it’s about religion–and we should see through the protestations of the evolutionary Darwinian Establishment for what it is: a Final Solution against the religious.
What Research?
That claim, I think, is falsified by the white elephant in the film: Intelligent Design research. Dawkins notes that we might be able to find “evidence of design” were an intelligent alien race to have seeded us. But the problem is, what would “evidence of design” look like? Throughout the film, we’re told that evolution is a “slippery word”, but it isn’t: a quick glance at Wikipedia even will show us that natural selection “is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.”
It actually doesn’t have anything to do with the origin of life (abiogenesis), the Big Bang theory, or whether we have a free will (one of Provine’s points). But Stein keeps chasing after how life began, seemingly unaware that even if Dawkins were to grant an Intelligent Designer a la little green men, we’d still have to explain the Designer. This is why science has to make some kinds of methodological decisions in order to avoid importing too much metaphysics into its observations.
There’s a nice little (plagiarized, I understand) animation about how DNA sequencing works inside of a cell. However, there’s no discussion of ID’s research and how it has supplemented our understanding of DNA or cell structure. Perhaps this is because the ID researchers have no access to the academy, as part 1 indicates? No, we are introduced to the members of the Discovery Institute who are apparently discovering something. What, however, we’re never told.
Conclusion
I went into the film ready to be amused by some poor claims about evolution, some canned criticisms* (”Why are there still monkeys?” “Where’s the missing link?”) but instead was presented with something more insidious: cluttered reasoning and fear in the guise of appeals to freedom and patriotism. I can’t help but think that those conditions (cluttered reasoning, fear, appeals to freedom and patriotism) have never led us to good places in the past. Hopefully Expelled will not do well at the box office and the junior high youth groups that may get taken in will have their blinders lifted in college.
It would be easier to dispel its mythology, though, if it made any sense. Rhetoric is always more difficult to refute than argument.
*One claim was made in passing: that evolutionary theory cannot account for “new information” in genetic mutations. This is a claim that is pretty easily refuted and it turns on how we understand “information.”
Further Reading on Expelled
Examples of quote mining and misinformation at Scientific American
More on the use of the Holocaust in expelled at MSNBC
And of course, PZ Myers on the film (link to a search of Pharyngula)
Also, check out the website Expelled Exposed, which has more information on claim #1 above.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I’m so glad you commented on this in such detail and with such clarity. The hubby and I were just talking about this yesterday - we haven’t seen the movie yet, but from what we’ve read, one of the major flaws of the film is that it ONCE AGAIN confuses evolution with abiogenesis - evolution isn’t concerned with the origins of life. But this movie is being played in big time theaters - kind of like The Omega Code. Uggh.
Who is behind this movie? And what is Ben Stein’s motivation? I know he’s a lifelong conservative, but does he really believe in ID, or does he just want others to? I don’t know anything about his religion, but I always assumed (possibly wrongly) that he was Jewish, and I don’t know enough about Judaism as a religion to know whether it embraces ID. Very puzzling.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Did you just use wikipedia as a source of a professor’s professional track? As it turns out, my 5 year old daughter wrote that article on Berlinski’s sordid career path
It’s sad that the movie went the route of promoting ID (not that ID and neo-Darwinianism are incompatible or that I would disagree with certain forms of ID). I thought it was addressing the social-psychological problem of Darwinian elitism in academia, which I know from several friends to be alive and well. It’s not a matter of being pro-ID, but just being skeptical of full-throttle darwinian-primordial-soup-physicalist-cocktail is grounds for academic exclusion in high ranking departments.
I was hoping that there would be some exposure to the dangers of
‘groupthink’ in the technical sense and a case made that current fads in Darwinism exhibit traits of groupthink. But it sounds like they chose to go a whole other route. Oh well, that’s probably asking too much from politically oriented film makers.
I guess that this film, in the end, is just going to end up in the ever-growing heap of docu-trash (i.e. Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, et al, ad nauseum). It’s a shame because the concept of Darwinian academic elitism (as well as any closed-circle schools of interpretation) needs to be publically critiqued in order to prosper.
But as you suggested, a nuanced approach that attempts to avoid conflation won’t ever find favor with a movie-going crowd.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:32 pm
This site refutes many of the claims made in the movie:
http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/the-truth
In particular it refutes the idea that these people were “expelled” from academia or journalism. Your point 1.
In response to point 2, one important thing to realize is that science does not tell us ultimately “why” things work or how things “should” work (in a moral sense). A scientific theory is merely a description of how things do in fact work.
Further, my understanding is that nationalism/tribalism predated Darwin.
With point 3, I think I may agree with Stein somewhat. It is a clash of world views. There is the world view that truth is best approximated by iterative steps of a guess, predict, test cycle, and one that believes that this is not the case.
I presume they suggest that one should accept what Charles S Peirce called lower forms of reasoning:
1. The method of tenacity — persisting in that which one is inclined to think.
2. The method of authority — conformity to a source of ready-made beliefs.
3. The method of congruity or the a priori or the dilettante or “what is agreeable to reason” — leading to argumentation that gets finally nowhere.
Or perhaps they don’t agree with the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I guess they can see this as unfair, “people making claims supported by previous evidence have an easier time convincing people than I do, that’s unfair”
Remember even Einstein’s theories were not taken very seriously until he predicted something extraordinary would happen during an eclipse, specifically that the position of a star would appear to be wrong because light would have bent around the sun. When this prediction came true shortly thereafter (but not before) newtonian physics was dethroned.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:36 pm
dru - I might suppose that one reason the filmmakers don’t examine groupthink is because it’s not necessarily against groupthink - just against groupthink that opposes their own groupthink.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:45 pm
@ Hafhidha - Stein is touted as an intellectual and yet I’ve seen excerpts of him on YouTube saying things like “Darwin doesn’t explain gravity”, etc. (Do a search for him and you’ll find it). It seems like he’s been terribly misinformed about the scope of evolutionary theory.
@ Dru - yes, yes, I did. Actually, I used it intentionally throughout the post to show that much of this information is easily accessible, even without much digging. And yeah, I am not into physicSalism (as I’ve noted before) and talking about where science goes beyond methodological naturalism to metaphysical assumptions would have been interesting. Unfortunately, all they did was line up evolutionary theorists who are atheists (rather than ones who are not–which are many) and said, “see, look at the scary atheists.”
@ Mike - quite right about the clash of ways to get at truth–however, the movie was fuzzy on this point. Instead of challenging methodological naturalism and the formalized test/predict cycle, they claimed that ID works within that structure and that the larger problem is that of religion vs. atheism.
All in all, like I said, I was really disappointed. If I were an ID theorist, I wouldn’t want to use this movie to defend my views!
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:38 pm
If Stein offers uncertainty within science as a reason to consider religion superior, I offer this from Richard Feynman:
“Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.”
I do believe the forces of the irrational are attempting an attack on science. The Intelligent Design people believe it to be a “Wedge” they can use to invade the space of science. They themselves admit they are attempting to destroy scientific authority.
While many people see the destruction of religion as unacceptable (I see it as unfortunately impossible) I urge them to think what the destruction of this ability to doubt would cause.
April 24th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
In response to Mike - I think the quotation from Feynman is better seen as a caution against solidifying, what should always be a questioning attitude, into a dogmatic one - even if it is science itself that has become dogmatic.
I think ID is unfortunately named, because its merits arent so much in its positive component (god did it), but in its negative aspect as a critique. Even if to strike at life’s origins is a straw man, there’s still questions about how irreducibly complex features evolved, if evolution is about the gradual improvement of functionality.
I’m interested in what Dru brought up regarding groupthink. I’ve found that there’s a kind of intellectual asceticism that treats aridity as a virtue in itself - having been that way myself, I think that’s a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Jeong: Ah yes, the irreducible complexity (IC) argument by Dr Behe. I have several reservations about this argument:
1. No such systems have been found to exist. (All of Behe’s examples have been refuted that I know of).
2. How could you know for sure something is IC? IE, I see this as an argument from ignorance, or argument from lack of imagination.
3. “Gradual Improvement” is quite a simplification of the idea of evolution and natural selection. Exaptation can nicely explain one way evolution could have evolved something that seems “irreducibly complex”.
4. Even if you could prove a case of IC, proof of IC is an attack on evolution, not a proof of ID which will remain forever an unscientific theory. This is important. Even if there were no theory of evolution ID would still not be science!
I suggest reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity especially the dover trial section.
Of course, the experts who make the IC and ID arguments are very smart people. So one thinks that there might be something to those arguments, even though the scientific consensus is that these arguments are fallacious.
One course is to believe it is groupthink. I think a better course is to believe their own words (ID experts at the Discovery Institute):
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf
This is the famous wedge document that describes the intention to destroy science and replace it with Christian theology. To save our souls of course, and reverse the moral decay that scientism has brought about…
April 26th, 2008 at 2:43 am
Mike - That Wiki page has a great bibliography. I read the article by Ken Miller, “The Flagellum Unspun”, and it makes a convincing argument. The irreducible complexity argument does seem the result of a backward-looking gaze. It does seem the process of exaptation is a better way to view the process’ real workings.
I read, with interest, ‘the wedge document’, and despite the boo’s and hisses, I can sympathise with their project. I don’t agree with their forgone conclusion and cure for the ills of the world (actually, everyone should do it MY way), but, and I’m interested in any criticisms of this, I think I’m in agreement with their diagnosis.
Although, coming from Australia, we dont have concerted efforts to push creationism in schools and what not, so I can appreicate the social context of the debate in the U.S. Not feeling under siege, to me anyway, under the volleys exchanged by the religious and anti-religious, there seems good questions being asked and answered.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
@ Jeong - I think that your last point (I think you meant to say “can’t” appreciate the social context?) is the big one. That’s why “Expelled” is so troubling to me, and why Mike is so quick to dispel the “irreducible complexity” idea. Here in the US, there is a clash going on (and yes, I think the film is right to an extent there). However, it is *not* between the religious and the irreligious.
It’s being touted that way, though–there are evolutionary theorists who are Christians and members of other religions, despite the painting of scientists with the Dawkins brush. Because the push for creationism (in an ID Trojan Horse) also comes with a push for (Protestant Christian) prayer in schools, (non-historical and religious) Bible curriculums, arguments against same-sex marriage rights on religious rather than social grounds, etc., etc., it’s hard to take it as merely asking questions about science’s methodology.
Only one religious voice seems to get painted as “the religion side”, however, when there are other, perfectly religious arguments supporting the “liberal” aspect. I think Martha Nussbaum’s writings shed a lot of light onto this, and I’d suggest you pick up any of her books, but especially her most recent one, “Liberty of Conscience” to get a grasp of the US debate, if you’re curious.