Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed has been torn down in just about every review I've seen of it. Mostly by film critics denouncing the science displayed in the film. Since when are film critics scientists? These are also the same people that love Michael Moore's "documentaries," so there you go.Expelled is a film that looks at the debate between Darwinists and intelligent design advocates. The film goes to great lengths to show that if a person in academia sides with ID, their career will be ruined. The film purports that there is no discussion about ID and that the very mention of it is subject to severe ridicule all the way up to the loss of a job.
So what is ID? Well its just simply the idea that some intelligent being created the first single celled organism on earth. They say that the cell is much too complex for it to have been created by chance. Darwinists have no concrete explanation for the very first single cell organism, and ID is just one theory.
That being said the reality of what ID is and isn't is one of the major points the film hits on. ID is often said to have come from Christians trying to force the bible into science, but that's what a creationist is, not an advocate for ID. Another point the film makes is the apparent hostility in academia against the idea of ID. Darwinism, after all, is just a theory anyway, not law. ID is just another theory.
The filmmakers interview several ID scientists and advocates as well as molecular biologists and prominent Darwinists. Of course the ID people seem sane and the Darwinists hostile as that helps further the obvious agenda of the film, but the question is how much were the interviews really manipulated? I suppose we'll never know but I doubt the interviews were as grossly edited as in any Michael Moore film or many other liberal film makers' film.
One point of ire with this film is the connection drawn between Darwinists and Hitler. Hitler was indeed a Darwinist. He wanted to keep the Aryan race pure to save it from the "mongrel" race's genes. This of course is quite an inflammatory, if true, point to bring up in this film. All it really does is give the "other side," ammunition to shoot holes into the film. I felt that the time spent on the Hitler connection could have been spent more wisely poking holes in the Darwinist theory. This bit was nothing more then sensationalism and really had no place in the film.
Another point of contention is the intercutting of Soviet and Nazi troop stock footage with the interviews with the Darwinists. Guess what? The film shows that these guys want only their point of view heard and want to shut down the ID advocates, that's fascism. What are Commies and Nazis? Fascists. Now, once again, the film draws an interesting point, but a point that's much too inflammatory for the film's own good.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is an interesting documentary that tries to jump start a dialogue about ID and the rule of Darwinists over the marketplace of ideas. It does a great job of this, but meanders in too many inflammatory points, taking away any power it would have had to cause any Darwinists to consider another theory. The film presents great information and then punches the viewer in the eye with holocaust footage. My guess is that with an already skeptical and potentially hostile audience, the viewer won't be very receptive to any points made before or after that swing.
One final word about the film, many reviewers claim the film was made by "radical" Christians trying to shove their faith down everyone's throat. Last time I checked Ben Stein was a Jew.
Overall - 7/10
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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.
'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. Despite factum est 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). 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 science a mockery!
Some edited quotes from my conference posters and articles defended and published in the field of bioethics and history of biology (and underline/edit them a 'bit'):
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Asian_Bioethics.pdf
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Haeckelianlegacy_ABC5.pdf
The marriage laws were once erected not only in the Nazi Germany but also in the multicultural states of America upon the speculation that the mulatto was a relatively sterile and shortlived hybrid. The absence of blood transfusion between "white" and "colored races" was self evident.
The first law on sterilization in US had been established in 1907 in Indiana, and 23 similar laws had been passed in 15 States and sterilization was practiced in 124 institutions in 1921 (these were the times of IQ-tests under Gould's scrutiny in his Mismeasure of Man in 1981). By 1931 thirty states had passed sterization laws in the US. Typically, the operations hit blacks the most in the US, poor women in the Europe, and often the victims were never even told they had been sterilized.
Mendelism outweighed recapitulation (embryos climbing up their evolutionary tree through fish-, amphibian- and reptilian stages), but that merely smoothened the way for the brutal 1930’s biolegislation - that quickly penetrated practically all Western countries. The laws were copied from country to country. The A-B-O blood groups, haemophilia, eye colours etc. were found to be inherited in a Mendelian fashion by 1910. So also the complex traits and social (mis)behaviour such as alcoholism, schizophrenia, manic depression, criminality, rebelliousness, artistic sense, pauperism, racial differences, inherited scholarship (and its converse, feeble-mindedness) were all thought to be determined by one or two genes. Mendelism was "experimental" and quantitative, and its exaggeration outweighed the more cautious biometry operating on smaller variations, not discontinuous leaps. Its advocates boldly claimed that these problems could be done away within a few generations through selection, persisted (although most biologists must have known that defective genes could not be eliminated, even with the most intense forced sterilizations and marriage restrictions due to recessive genes and synergism. Nevertheless, these laws were held until 1970's and were typically changed only when the abortion legislation were released (1973).
So the American laws were pioneering endeavours. In Europe Denmark passed the first sterilization legislation in Europe (1929). Denmark was followed by Switzerland, Germany that had felt to the hands of Hitler and Gobineu, and other Nordic countries: Norway (1934), Sweden (1935), Finland (1935), and Iceland (1938 ). Seldom is it mentioned in the popular media, that the first outright race biological institution in the world was not established in Germany but in 1921 in Uppsala, Sweden. (I am not aware of the ethymology of the 'Up' of the ancient city from Plinius' Ultima Thule, or the secret organ Thule Gesellschaft that introduced Adolf, however.) In 1907 the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany had changed its name to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene, and in 1910 Swedish Society for Eugenics (Sällskap för Rashygien) had become its first foreign affiliate. Today, Swedish state church is definitely the most liberal in the face of the world.
Hitler's formulation of the differences between the human races was affected by the brilliant sky-blue eyed Ernst Haeckel, praised and raised by Darwin. At the top of the unilinear progression were usually the "Nordics", a tall race of blue-eyed blonds. Haeckel's position on the 'Judenfrage' was assimilation and Expelled-command from their university chairs, not yet an open elimination. But was it different only in degree, rather than kind?
In 1917 the immigration of "defective" groups was forbidden even in the United States by a law. In 1921 the European immigration was diminished to 3% based on the 1910 census. Eventually, in the strategical year of 1924 the finest hour of eugenics had come and the fatal law was passed by Congress. It diminished immigration to 2% of the foreign-born from each country based on the 1890 census in order to preserve the "nordic" balance in population, and was hold through World War II until 1965.
Richard Lewontin writes:“The leading American idealogue of the innate mental inferiority of the working class was, however, H.H. Goddard, a pioneer of the mental testing movement, the discoverer of the Kallikak family, and the administrant of IQ-tests to immigrants that found 83 % of the Jews, 80% of the Hungarians, 79% of the Italians, and 87% of the the Russians to be feebleminded.” Regarding us Finns, Finnish emmigrants put the cross on the box reserved for the "yellow" group, until 1965.
Germany was the most scientifically and culturally advanced nation of the world upon opening the riddles at the close of the nineteenth century. And she went Full Monty.
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.
I am suspicious over the burial of the Kampf (Struggle). The idea of competition is innate in the modern society. It is the the opposite view in a 180 degree angle to the Judaeo-Christian ideal of agapee (contra epithumia, eros, filia & storge) (ahava in Hebrew), that I personally cheriss. The latter sees free giving, altruism, benevolence and self sacrificing love as the beginning, motivation, and sustainer of the reality.
pauli.ojala@gmail.com
Biochemist, drop-out (Master of Sciing)
http://www.helsinki.fi/~pjojala/Expelled-ID.htm
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