Thursday, April 10, 2008

Expelled Intelligence

Soon, Ben Stein's new "documentary" on intelligent design, Expelled, will hit theaters across the country. Over the past weeks, pre-release screenings have been shown across the country in order to drum up grassroots support for the controversial film.

Some people with scientific backgrounds have been able to see the film. The staff at Scientific American were treated to a private screening in their office. Minnesota biology professor, P.Z. Myers, who was also an unwitting guest in the film, was kicked out of a screening at the Mall of America. His guests, family members and friend Richard Dawkins were allowed to stay for some reason. Dawkins was also an unwitting interview subject in the film and is the most famous (or infamous) evolutionary biologist in the world today. Dawkins wrote about the experience in an essay called "Lying for Jesus."

The initial reports and reviews aren't encouraging. It appears the film spends little time actually defining evolutionary theory or even intelligent design. They do everything they can to connect evolutionary science to Nazi ideology and atrocities. Ben Stein actually appears at Nazi death camps in the film to underscore the point. The film gets its title from the notion that academics who have the audacity to question evolutionary theory and inquire into intelligent design get expelled from their jobs and profession. Some in the science community have begun to gather evidence that questions whether these are really intelligent design "martyrs."

Several of the scientists interviewed describe being bamboozled into participating in the film. A front company to the Canadian parent film company was presented to them. They were told the name of the film was something more balanced, despite the recent discovery that the domain name expelledthemovie.com was registered even before the interviews were conducted. So it's unlikely that the producers changed the name and focus of the film halfway through.

Dawkins and Myers discuss their film experience and impressions

1 comment:

Ojalanpoika said...

Ben(jamin) Stein is under heavy artillery for 'exaggerating' or 'going easy' on the influence of evolutionism behind Nazism and Stalinism (super evolution of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Russia). But the monstrous Haeckelian type of vulgar evolutionism drove not only the 'Politics-is-applied-biology' Nazi takeover in the continental Europe, but even the nationalistic collision at the World War I. It was Charles Darwin himself, who praised and raised the monstrous German Ernst Haeckel with his still recycled embryo drawing frauds etc. in the spotlight as the greatest authority in the field of human evolution, even in the preface to his Descent of man in 1871. If Thomas Henry Huxley with his concept of 'agnostism' was Darwins bulldog in England, Haeckel was his Rotweiler in Germany. Haeckel was also the first one to propose a systematic answer to the Judenfrage: To EXPEL all the Jews from their chairs at the universities.

'Kampf' was a direct translation of 'struggle' from On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859). Seinen Kampf. His application.

Catch 22: As an indication of the evolutionary 'PUS', Haeckel's 140 years old fake embryo drawings have been mindlessly recycled in most biology text books until this millennium. This despite the fact that Haeckel's crackpot raging Recapitulation/Biogenetic Law and functioning gill slits of human embryos have been at the ethical tangent race hygiene/eugenics/genocide, infanticide, and Freudian psychoanalysis (subconscious atavisms). It was the second to most cross/scientific paradigm in the 20th century. Dawkins is the Oxford professor for PUS - and should gather the courage of Stephen Jay Gould who could feel ashamed about it. Text book authors are making a mockery out of science.

Today, developmental biologists are anticipating legislation of laws that would define the do’s and dont’s. In England, they are fertilizing human embryos for research purposes and pipetting chimera embryos of humans and monkeys, 'legally'. The legislation should not distract individual researchers from their personal awareness of responsibility. A permissive law merely defines the ethical minimum. The lesson is that a law is no substitute for morals and that dissidents should not be intimidated.

More from conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology:
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf

pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm