Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
Encyclopedia
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a 2008 documentary
film
, directed by Nathan Frankowski and hosted by Ben Stein
. The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design
in nature and who criticize evidence supporting Darwinian evolution
and the modern evolutionary synthesis
as a mainstream conspiracy to keep God out of science laboratories and classrooms. The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to fascism
, the Nazi
Holocaust
, communism
, atheism
, and eugenics
. The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity
, Expelled examines it as a political issue.
Expelled opened in 1,052 theaters, more than any other documentary before it, and grossed over $2,900,000 in its first weekend. It earned $7.7 million, making it the 18th-highest-grossing documentary film in the United States (statistics include 1982–present, and are not adjusted for inflation). In July, the movie was re-released allowing groups of 300 to book private screenings in theaters.
The general media response to the film has been largely unfavorable. It received an 8% meta-score from Rotten Tomatoes
(later improved to 10% overall) where the film was summarized thus: "Full of patronizing, poorly structured arguments, Expelled is a cynical political stunt in the guise of a documentary." Multiple reviews, including those of USA Today
and Scientific American
, have described the film as propaganda
. The Chicago Tribune's
rating was "1 star (poor)", while The New York Times
described it as "a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry" and "an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike." Christianity Today
gave the film a positive review.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
describes the film as dishonest and divisive propaganda, aimed at introducing religious ideas into public school science classrooms. The film has been used in private screenings to legislators as part of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign
for Academic Freedom bills
.
documentary
. Ben Stein provides narrative commentary throughout the film and is depicted as visiting a sequence of universities to interview both proponents of intelligent design who claim to have been victimized and evolutionary scientists who are presented as atheists. The film makes considerable use of vintage film clips, including opening scenes showing the Berlin Wall
being constructed as a metaphor for barriers to the scientific acceptance of intelligent design. The film takes aim at some scientific hypotheses of the origin of life, and presents a short animation portraying the inner workings of the cell to introduce the intelligent design concept of irreducible complexity
, the claim that such complexity could not arise from spontaneous mutations. The intelligent design proponents shown include Richard Weikart
, who claims that Darwinism influenced the Nazis. The film also associates Hitler's ambitions of a master race
and the holocaust to Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest
through stock footage
film clips of filmed images of Nazi concentration camp laboratories as well as statements of the director of the Hadamar
Memorial, where 15,000 people with disabilities were killed during WWII. The film directly addresses intelligent design only superficially, focusing on how it is treated in academia rather than on issues involving the concept itself. It makes almost no attempt to define intelligent design or show any scientific evidence in favor of intelligent design. Instead, the film deals with the subject almost entirely from a political, rather than scientific, viewpoint.
as an alternative to evolution, and claims it deserves a place in academia. This "design theory" is defined in the film by the Discovery Institute
's Paul Nelson
as "the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a result of intelligence." Stein says in the film that intelligent design is not taught or researched in academia because it is "suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion", although the National Center for Science Education
responds with "Intelligent design has not produced any research to suppress", and by saying that "The fundamental problem with intelligent design as science is that intelligent design claims cannot be tested".
In the United States federal court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, intelligent design was judged a repackaged version of creationism and as such introducing intelligent design in public school science classrooms was unconstitutional
religious infringement. In the film, Bruce Chapman
, president of the Discovery Institute
, denied that teaching intelligent design in science classes is an attempt to sneak religion into public schools. Stein, the Discovery Institute and Expelled's publicists, Motive Marketing, have all used the film to build support for Academic Freedom bills in various states, which many view as the latest in a series of anti-evolutionary strategies designed to bring creationism into the classroom. These bills would permit educators in the public schools to independently introduce criticisms of or alternatives to evolution.
out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms. The film contains interviews with educators and scientists in which they describe this persecution. In the film, Stein says, "It's not just the scientists who are in on it. The media is in on it, the courts, the educational system, everyone is after them." Stein further accuses academia of having a dogmatic commitment to Darwinism, comparing it to the party line of the Communist Party
in the Soviet Union
, which cannot be questioned without severe consequences. Eugenie Scott
of the National Center for Science Education
stated that "the filmmakers were exploiting Americans’ sense of fairness as a way to sell their religious views" and that she was concerned that the film would portray the "scientific community as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong."
in the scientific establishment is behind the claimed suppression of intelligent design. It fails to note that the scientific method
can only deal with explanations that can be tested or empirically validated, and so logically cannot use untestable religious or "design based" explanations. Stein contends that "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power, and it can’t possibly touch God."
The National Center for Science Education
criticizes the film for representing scientists who are atheists as representative of all scientists, without discussing the many prominent scientists who are religious, and thus creates a false dichotomy between science and religion. The associate producer of the film Mark Mathis
said they had excluded scientists who are religious, such as Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth R. Miller
, because their views would have "confused the film unnecessarily." Mathis also questioned the intellectual honesty of a Catholic accepting evolution. Miller later noted that 40% of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
profess belief in a personal god
.
In its review, the Waco Tribune-Herald
said "That’s the real issue of Expelled — atheist scientists versus God — even though it wholly undercuts statements by intelligent design researchers early in the film that ID has nothing to do with religion." It described the "failure to cover how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science" as "perhaps the film's most glaring and telling omission", and said that the film rather "quickly dismissed [such proponents of theistic evolution
] by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom." Defending the movie, the producer, Walt Ruloff, said that scientists like prominent geneticist Francis Collins
keep their religion and science separate only because they are "toeing the party line." Collins, who was not asked to be interviewed for the film in any of its incarnations, said that Ruloff's claims were "ludicrous."
as responsible for Communism
, Fascism
, atheism
, eugenics
and, in particular, Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust. Film critic Jeffrey Overstreet, writing for Christianity Today
, stated that "Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany." Richard Weikart
, a DI fellow and historian, appears in the movie asserting that Charles Darwin
's work in the 19th century influenced Adolf Hitler
. He argues that Darwin's perception of humans not being qualitatively different from animals, with qualities such as morality
arising from natural processes, undermines what Weikart calls the "Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity
of human life". Nazi gas chamber
s and concentration camps figure highly in the narrative of the movie. In the film, David Berlinski
of the Discovery Institute says that Darwinism was a "necessary though not sufficient" cause for the Holocaust, and Stein presses the message of evolutionary biology being responsible.
The film's and Weikart's arguments have been criticized by political scientist Larry Arnhart who sees them as highlighting a weak putative connection while ignoring the influence Martin Luther and his Christian anti-Semitism in the 16th century had on Nazism, along with other more direct causes such as the economic ruin of Germany after World War I
and the racism
and religious antisemitism dating back over seven centuries before Charles Darwin
. Bret Carroll, Weikart's colleague in the Stanislaus history department, adds that the movie "misuses Weikart's research by mistakenly implying that Darwin led inevitably to Hitler. In fact, scientific theories, even those like Darwin's that address organic life, are morally neutral." Michael Shermer
wrote that when Stein interviewed him for the film, Stein seemed astonishingly ignorant of the many ways in which Darwinism has been misused by various political and economic ideologues, including economic conservatives who justified laissez faire
capitalism
as 'survival of the fittest corporations', and concluded that scientific theorists "cannot be held responsible for how their ideas are employed in the service of non-scientific agendas." John Rennie in his Scientific American article says the film repeatedly uses the term "Darwinism" instead of evolution to misportray science as though it were a dogmatic ideology like Marxism.
Arthur Caplan
, Hart Professor of Bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania
, wrote in his MSNBC
column that the movie is a "frighteningly immoral narrative", including "a toxic mishmash of persecution fantasies, disconnected and inappropriate references to fallen communist regimes and their leaders and a very repugnant form of Holocaust denial
from the monotone big mouth Ben Stein." Caplan sharply criticized what he described as Stein's willingness "to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed."
The Anti-Defamation League
issued the following statement condemning the film's use of the Holocaust
:
In an April interview about the film, Stein had said that science had led to the Nazi murder of children, and stated that "Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people." When Vancouver Sun writer Peter McKnight asked for Stein to comment on the Anti-Defamation League's statement, Stein replied, "It's none of their fucking business."
After watching the film, one Jewish viewer wrote an angry letter to interviewee Michael Shermer, which Shermer forwarded to fellow interviewee Richard Dawkins. This prompted Dawkins to write, as a response, "Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda".
, Guillermo Gonzalez
, and Caroline Crocker
as victims of persecution by major scientific organizations and academia for their promotion of intelligent design and for questioning Darwinism. Other intelligent design supporters such as William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson
, Pamela Winnick, and Gerald Schroeder
, along with contrarian David Berlinski
, appear in the film as well. Expelled additionally briefly features numerous anonymous people, their faces darkened to make them unrecognizable, who say that their jobs in the sciences would be jeopardized if their belief in intelligent design were made public, one of whom states that he believes most scientists equate intelligent design with creationism
, the religious right
, and theocracy
.
In addition, the motion picture includes interviews with scientists and others who advocate the teaching of evolution and criticize intelligent design as an attempt to bring religion into the science classroom. Those interviewed include PZ Myers
, William Provine, Richard Dawkins
, Michael Ruse
, Michael Shermer
, Christopher Hitchens
, and Eugenie Scott
.
, described as an evolutionary biologist and a former editor for a scientific journal associated with the Smithsonian Institution
. The film says his life was "nearly ruined" after he published an article by intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer
in 2004, allegedly causing him to lose his office, to be pressured to resign, and to become the subject of an investigation into his political and religious views. Sternberg defended his decision, stating that Intelligent Design was not the overall subject of the paper (being mentioned only at the end) and that he was attempting merely to present questions ID proponents had raised as a topic for discussion. He presented himself and Meyer as targets of religious and political persecution, claiming the chairman of his department referred to him as an "intellectual terrorist". Stein states that the paper "ignited a firestorm of controversy merely because it suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began", and goes beyond the findings of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to claim that Sternberg was "terrorized". Stein further alleges that Congressman Mark Souder
uncovered a campaign by the Smithsonian and the NCSE to destroy Sternberg's credibility, though he does not provide any details.
Sternberg, a staff scientist for the National Center for Biotechnology Information
and himself a fellow of the intelligent design advocacy group ISCID
, had resigned his position at the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington six months before publication of the Meyers paper. The Council of the Biological Society of Washington
has stated that Sternberg circumvented the journal's standard reviewing process to include the controversial paper. Although in the film Stein says the paper "suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began", it discussed the much later development of phyla
during the Cambrian explosion
and deviated from the journal's topic of systematics
to introduce previously discredited claims about bioinformatics
. The Society subsequently declared that the paper "does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings" and would not have been published had usual editorial practices been followed. Sternberg, contrary to the impression given by the film, was not an employee, but an unpaid "Research Associate" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, a post which only ran for a limited period. Also contrary to way his career was depicted in the film, Sternberg still retained this position until 2007, when he was given the offer of continuing as a research collaborator. He continued to have full access to research facilities at the museum as of April 2008.
, a former part-time cell biology
lecturer at George Mason University
who became the center of controversy over Intelligent Design. In the film Stein states, "After she simply mentioned Intelligent Design in her cell biology class at George Mason University, Caroline Crocker’s sterling academic career came to an abrupt end", and that she was blacklisted. Crocker tells Stein that before the incident she was routinely offered jobs on the spot following an interview, but afterwards she was unable to find a position in academia.
According to the university and the National Center for Science Education
, Crocker was not fired; her position was non-tenure
track and her employment was on a course-by-course basis. She taught to the end of her contract, which was not renewed.
A George Mason University spokesman said this was for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design, and that though they wholeheartedly supported academic freedom, "teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology. Does academic freedom 'literally give you the right to talk about anything, whether it has anything to do with the subject matter or not? The answer is no.'"
The NCSE also stated that she did more than merely mention intelligent design, but in fact posed many refuted creationist arguments. Crocker also did find a position at Northern Virginia Community College
, where she was later profiled by the Washington Post. The Post's article stated she claimed "that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science."
Her lecture, which she said was the same she taught at George Mason, taught students creationist claims
about evolution
and promoted intelligent design in a biology class, telling them that Nazi atrocities were based on Darwin's ideas and on science.
Crocker subsequently had a postdoctoral year at the Uniformed Services University
, and currently has a full time post as executive director of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center
which promotes intelligent design clubs at high schools and universities.
, a neurosurgery
professor at SUNY at Stony Brook, is presented in the film as the subject of persecution after writing an essay to high school students asserting that doctors did not need to learn evolution to practice their trade. Egnor, who is a signatory to the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns
A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism
and Physicians and Surgeons who Dissent from Darwinism, presents himself as the victim of online smears and a campaign to get his university to force him into retirement, following his letter. When a citizen's group in Virginia sponsored an essay contest for high school students on the topic "Why I would want my doctor to have studied evolution", Egnor responded by posting an essay on an intelligent design blog claiming that evolution was irrelevant to medicine. His essay was met with considerable criticism by medical professionals, professors and researchers.
In the film, Stein describes this as "Darwinists were quick to try and exterminate this new threat", and Egnor says he was shocked by the "baseness and viciousness" of the critical response he received. As soon as Egnor makes this statement in the film, the camera zooms in on a photo of him that is immediately stamped with "EXPELLED", implying that in the "extermination attempt" Egnor experienced more than common Internet vitriol when he engaged in an online controversy.
is a professor at Baylor University
who had his research website shut down by the University and was forced to return grant money when it was discovered his work had a link to intelligent design. The film, through footage, compares Marks to the protagonist in the film Planet of the Apes
.
The research in question was for the Evolutionary Informatics Lab
which Marks formed with Discovery Institute
fellow William Dembski, and which made use of the University's servers to host the website. The university removed the website after receiving complaints that it appeared to be endorsed by the university. Baylor officials later allowed the website back on their server but required changes be made to the website so that it did not appear to be endorsed by the University. The web site was reestablished independently of Baylor University.
, an astrophysicist who had been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University
, is interviewed by Stein, who claims that despite a "stellar" research record that led to the discovery of new planets, Gonzalez was denied tenure
because his book The Privileged Planet
argued that the universe is intelligently designed. Gonzalez claims that, prior to his tenure review, he was the subject of a campaign on campus to "poison the atmosphere" against him, and that he would almost certainly have been granted tenure had he not been an advocate for intelligent design. The film interviewed a member of the Iowa State University faculty who stated that Gonzalez was denied tenure because the university feared that if they granted Gonzalez tenure the university would become associated with the Intelligent Design movement.
Prior to the film's release Iowa State University addressed the controversy regarding Gonzalez's tenure by saying that after the normal review of his qualifications, such as his record of scientific publications (which had dropped sharply after he joined the faculty), he was not granted tenure and promotion on the grounds that he "simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy." Eli Rosenberg, the chairman of the Astronomy department, also noted that during Gonzalez's time at Iowa State, Gonzalez had failed to secure any form of substantial outside funding. In the previous decade, four of the 12 candidates who came up for review in the department were not granted tenure.
is an author, science historian
, founder of The Skeptics Society
, and editor of its magazine Skeptic
, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. He was interviewed for the movie by Stein and assistant producer Mark Mathis
to get his take on intelligent design and evolution. Shermer describes intelligent design as "three quarters of the way to nonsense", and voices skepticism at the claims that numerous academics were fired for advocating it.
Shermer, in an online column coinciding with the release of Expelled, described feeling awkward about their motives soon after the interview began.
After a break and small talk the interview resumed, but the questions continued to follow a similar vein.
Shermer has stated that he believes that the film is effective in delivering its message to its target audience.
is a British
evolutionary biologist and popular science
writer. Dawkins is portrayed as one of the leading members of the scientific establishment. Dawkins' admission that his study of evolution aided his move towards atheism is used by the film to draw a positive connection between them. In her review of the film for New Scientist
, Amanda Gefter comments on the film's presentation of Dawkins' interview, including showing him "in the make-up chair, a move calculated to demean since surely everyone else, including Stein, is powder-puffed off-camera", and describes "foreboding music" and a "low-lit room" filmed with "sinister camera angles" used as part of an appeal to "raw emotion" during his interview.
In Dawkins' interview, the director focused on when Stein asked Dawkins under what circumstances intelligent design could have occurred. Dawkins responded that in the case of the "highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would themselves have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett)." He later described this as being similar to Francis Crick
and Leslie Orgel
's "semi tongue-in-cheek" example.
head Eugenie Scott
), who say they were misled into participating by being asked to be interviewed for a film named Crossroads on the "intersection of science and religion", and were directed to a blurb
implying an approach to the documentary crediting Darwin with "the answer" to how humanity developed:
But before the interviewees were approached, the movie had already been pitched to Stein as an anti-Darwinist picture:
On learning of the pro-intelligent design stance of the real film, Myers said, "not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest." Dawkins said, "At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front", and Scott said, "I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren't."
Mathis called Myers, Dawkins and Scott a "bunch of hypocrites", and said that he "went over all of the questions with these folks before the interviews and I e-mailed the questions to many of them days in advance."
Roy Speckhardt
, executive director of the American Humanist Association
wrote a letter to the editor
of the New York Times, writing, "If one needs to believe in a god to be moral, why are we seeing yet another case of dishonesty by the devout? Why were leading scientists deceived as to the intentions of a religious group of filmmakers?"
, Ben Stein attributes the following statement to Charles Darwin
's book The Descent of Man:
The original source shows that Stein has significantly changed the text and meaning of the paragraph, by leaving out whole and partial sentences without indicating that he had done so. The original paragraph (page 168) (words that Stein omitted shown in bold) and the subsequent sentences in the book state:
According to John Moore writing in the National Post:
The Expelled Exposed website also points out that the same misleading selective quotation from this passage was used by anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan
in the 1925 Scopes Trial
, but the full passage makes it clear that Darwin was not advocating eugenics
. The eugenics movement relied on simplistic and faulty assumptions about heredity, and by the 1920s evolutionary biologists were criticizing eugenics. Clarence Darrow
, who defended the teaching of human evolution in the Scopes trial, wrote a scathing repudiation of eugenics.
In a supplement to a review of Expelled, J. Kirk Fitzhugh, Research & Collections, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
, cites Darwin's two paragraphs in their entirety, and says that in the context shown by the second paragraph "What we find is that Darwin’s position is diametrically opposed to what Stein intimated."
sequences portraying the internal functioning of cells that were seen to resemble a video from Harvard University
entitled The Inner Life of the Cell
produced by XVIVO. XVIVO issued a cease-and-desist letter, alleging infringement of copyright
and asserting further legal remedies would be pursued unless the infringed segments from the Inner Life video were removed prior to the film's distribution. Expelled's producers then filed a legal complaint for declaratory judgment, asking the court to rule XVIVO had no ownership claim to The Inner Life of the Cell and that the producers did not violate copyright law in either its resource DVD or the film itself. The complaint stated the animation sequences in its resource DVD were different from those used in the final film. XVIVO, L.L.C. and Premise Media eventually reached an agreement that no copyright infringement had occurred and the complaints were dropped.
In April 2008, the copyright holders to John Lennon
's song "Imagine
", Yoko Ono
, Julian
and Sean Lennon
, filed a legal complaint in the Southern District of New York against Premise Media and Rocky Mountain Pictures alleging copyright and trademark infringement over the unlicensed use of a portion of the song in the film. Ono came under attack in the blogosphere when critics of the film falsely assumed she agreed to license the song for use in a film defending intelligent design. Ono's lawyer claimed the use was unauthorized, while the film's producers claimed their use was protected under the fair use doctrine. Following a court motion filed by the plaintiff
s on April 30, 2008, both parties consented during conference with presiding judge Sidney H. Stein
to a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the distribution of any additional copies of the film in theaters or distribution of the film on DVD
pending a hearing set for May 19. On that date the court heard oral arguments for a plaintiff motion seeking a preliminary injunction
against any distribution of the film and a defense motion seeking to dismiss the case. The TRO remained in effect pending the judge's rulings on these motions. In June 2008 the judge ruled against both, while finding the plaintiffs failed to show the balance of hardships tipped in their favor and that the defendant
s' claim of fair use would likely succeed in a full trial. On October 8 Yoko Ono announced she would no longer pursue the lawsuit. The DVD version of the film, released in October 2008, does not contain the song segment because the decision came too late to allow the song to appear in the DVD.
system page was publicized, offering free private movie screenings. Persons filling out an online entry form were sent a reservation confirmation via email which stated that no ticket was needed and that IDs would be checked against a list of names. The producers also held invitation only screenings for religious organizations and government officials, including screenings for legislators to promote anti-evolution Academic Freedom bills
.
conservative leaders, including James Dobson
. On March 11, 2008, a preview screening was held in Nashville
for attendees at the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters
. The young Earth creationist
organization Answers in Genesis
reported that its leader, Ken Ham
, met Ben Stein beforehand to discuss promoting the film. It requested supporters to ask local movie theater managers to show the film, and to encourage their church leadership to buy out a local theater to show the film to as many people from that church as possible.
and Missouri
legislators in support of Academic Freedom bills
in those states. Such bills, often viewed as attacks on the teaching of evolution, have been introduced in state legislatures in the United States
since 2004, based on the claims by the Discovery Institute
that teachers, students, and college professors face intimidation and retaliation when discussing scientific criticisms of evolution, and therefore require protection. The Florida screening, held in the IMAX
Theater of the Challenger Learning Center
of Tallahassee
on March 12, 2008, was restricted to legislators, their spouses, and their legislative aides, with the press and public excluded. Under the Florida sunshine law
they had to watch the film without discussing the issue or arranging any future votes. Commenting on this, and the controversy over Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel viewing the film despite attempts by the promoters to withdraw the invitation they had given him, House Democratic leader Dan Gelber
of Miami Beach stated,
"It's kind of an irony: The public is expelled from a movie called Expelled." The screening was attended by about 100 people, but few were legislators, and the majority of legislators stayed away.
Shortly before the film's general release, its producer Walt Ruloff held a press conference at the Heritage Foundation
in Washington, D.C.
on April 15, and announced his plans to use the film as part of a campaign to pass academic freedom bills in a variety of American states. At least one Discovery Institute press conference on the bills has included a screening of Expelled. The issue was revived in 2009 when Florida Senator Stephen R. Wise
cited the film as one reason that he is sponsoring plans to introduce a bill requiring biology teachers to present the idea of intelligent design.
was turned away from a pre-release screening of the film by a hired security guard as Myers, fellow interviewee Richard Dawkins, and members of Myers' family waited together in line to enter the theater. Myers said that he applied for tickets for himself and his guests on the website where the film's producers were offering free passes to the screening to the general public. Dawkins and Myers' family were allowed to attend, but Myers and Dawkins both concluded Dawkins would have been turned away as well if those promoting the film had recognized who he was.
This rejection of one of the evolution supporters prominently featured in the film created a furor as critics and supporters volleyed conflicting accounts of the incident. Myers wrote, "I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled!" Prior to this screening, Myers and Dawkins were both very public in their condemnations of the upcoming film, leading them to conclude this was the reason Myers was banned from the screening. Dawkins charged "P.Z. is in the film extensively. If anyone had a right to see the film, it was him."
Premise Media partner Walt Ruloff countered that they were using the screenings to stimulate favorable publicity for the film, and its producer Mark Mathis confirmed that he ordered Myers turned away. He wrote, "In light of Myers' untruthful blogging about Expelled I decided it was better to have him wait until April 18 and pay to see the film. Others, notable others, were permitted to see the film. At a private screening it's my call." But he went on to say, "Unlike the Darwinist establishment, we expel no one."
Critics of the film publicly ridiculed Myers' ejection as a public relations blunder. Eugenie Scott
, who also appeared in the film, was quoted to say she and fellow supporters of evolution were enjoying "a horselaugh" over the episode. Myers said, "I could not imagine a better result for this. They've shown themselves to be completely dishonest and that they're trying to hide the truth about their movie, which is to my advantage. And they've shown themselves to be such flaming idiots." Dawkins described the event as "a gift" and said "we could not ask for anything better."
, with another three public relations
firms also hired. The producers spent millions on the promotion, targeted primarily to religious audiences. It provided sweepstakes and rewards to churches selling the most tickets, and offered sums of up to $10,000 to schools that sent their students to watch the film. In advance of the film's release, executive director Walt Ruloff, and producers Mark Mathis and Logan Craft provided interviews to various Christian media outlets promoting the movie and emphasizing its potential to impact the evolution debate. Motive Marketing also sent a representative to meet with religious leaders and stress the film's intelligent design creationist message, inspiring many to actively promote the film within their own religious communities. Some Christian media
outlets promoted the film as well.
Organizations affiliated with the Discovery Institute
helped publicize the film. It used its evolutionnews.org website and blog to publish over twenty articles tying its promotion of Expelled to its effort to pass the "Academic Freedom Bill" in Florida.
Stein appeared in the cable television programs The O'Reilly Factor
and Glenn Beck
to talk about the film. In his interview on O'Reilly commentator Bill O'Reilly
characterized intelligent design as the idea that "a deity created life", and Stein responded that "There's no doubt about it. We have lots and lots of evidence of it in the movie." The Discovery Institute quickly issued a statement that when Bill O'Reilly conflated intelligent design with creationism he was mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer, and lamented that "Ben referred to the 'gaps' in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses."
Stein and the producers also hosted telephone press conference facilitated by Media Matter's representative Paul Lauer in which participating journalists were required to submit their questions in advance for screening and just two questions posed by members of the press were answered. One of the journalists participating, Dan Whipple of the Colorado Confidential, contrasted Ruloff's statement that "What we're really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students, people in applied or theoretical research to have the freedom to go where they need to go and ask the questions" with the carefully staged and stringently controlled press conference, and called it "hypocritical in its supposed defense of 'freedom of expression'."
, and when the film was released it received generally negative reviews. As of April 26, 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes
reported that only 10% of its 33 top film critics gave it a positive review. Metacritic
reported the film had an average score of 20 out of 100, based on 13 reviews, while Screen Rant gave Expelled 4.5 out of 5 stars, saying that "your opinion of the film will with almost complete certainty be predicted by your opinions on Darwinism vs Intelligent Design."
Response to the movie from conservative Christian groups was generally positive, praising the movie for its perceived humor and for focusing on what they perceive as a serious issue. American Spectator said that the "only complaint about Expelled, scheduled for April release, is that its ending came all too soon."
Response from other critics was largely negative, particularly from those in the science media. The film's extensive use of Michael Moore
-style devices was commented upon, but the film was variously characterized as boring, exaggerated, and unconvincing. Others found it insulting and offensive to the religious. The Globe & Mails film review gave the film a score of 0 and called it "an appallingly unscrupulous example of hack propaganda". Vue Weekly
called it an "anti-science propaganda masquerading as a Michael Moore-ish fool's journey, full of disingenuous ploys, cheap tricks, and outright mendacity." While noting that the film is technically well made (with good photography and editing), Roger Ebert
lambasted the content of the film:
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
(AAAS) issued a statement to say it was "especially disappointed to learn that the producers of an intelligent design propaganda movie called Expelled are inappropriately pitting science against religion." It went on to say the organization "further decries the profound dishonesty and lack of civility demonstrated by this effort", and said the movie "seeks to force religious viewpoints into science class – despite court decisions that have struck down efforts to bring creationism and intelligent design into schools."
Stein received the Freedom of Expression Award for his work in Expelled from the Home Entertainment Awards at Entertainment Merchants Association
's Home Media Expo 2008.
, the best launch ever for
a documentary." While Expelled's returns were impressive for a film in the typically low grossing documentary genre, it was far surpassed by both Moore's Sicko
and Fahrenheit. Joshua Rich of Entertainment Weekly
said the movie "was a solid top-10 contender" and "[t]hat's a very respectable total for a documentary, although non-fiction fare rarely opens in 1,052 theaters."
Expelled's Blu-ray Disc
and DVD
releases distributed by Vivendi Visual Entertainment grossed over $1,850,000 in total sales.
In 2011, the company that produced the movie declared bankruptcy and is selling the rights to the movie. It was sold for $201,000 to a yet unannounced person or group.
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, directed by Nathan Frankowski and hosted by Ben Stein
Ben Stein
Benjamin Jeremy "Ben" Stein is an American actor, writer, lawyer, and commentator on political and economic issues. He attained early success as a speechwriter for American presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford...
. The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition 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." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
in nature and who criticize evidence supporting Darwinian evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
and the modern evolutionary synthesis
Modern evolutionary synthesis
The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution...
as a mainstream conspiracy to keep God out of science laboratories and classrooms. The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
, communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, and eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...
, Expelled examines it as a political issue.
Expelled opened in 1,052 theaters, more than any other documentary before it, and grossed over $2,900,000 in its first weekend. It earned $7.7 million, making it the 18th-highest-grossing documentary film in the United States (statistics include 1982–present, and are not adjusted for inflation). In July, the movie was re-released allowing groups of 300 to book private screenings in theaters.
The general media response to the film has been largely unfavorable. It received an 8% meta-score from Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
(later improved to 10% overall) where the film was summarized thus: "Full of patronizing, poorly structured arguments, Expelled is a cynical political stunt in the guise of a documentary." Multiple reviews, including those of USA Today
USA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
and Scientific American
Scientific American
Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
, have described the film as propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
. The Chicago Tribune's
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
rating was "1 star (poor)", while The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
described it as "a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry" and "an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike." Christianity Today
Christianity Today
Christianity Today is an Evangelical Christian periodical based in Carol Stream, Illinois. It is the flagship publication of its parent company Christianity Today International, claiming circulation figures of 140,000 and readership of 290,000...
gave the film a positive review.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
describes the film as dishonest and divisive propaganda, aimed at introducing religious ideas into public school science classrooms. The film has been used in private screenings to legislators as part of the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaign
Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns
Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns are a series of related public relations campaigns conducted by the Discovery Institute which seek to promote intelligent design while attempting to discredit evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism." The Discovery Institute is the...
for Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills are a series of antievolution bills introduced in state legislatures in the United States between 2004 and 2009. They assert that teachers, students, and college professors face intimidation and retaliation when discussing scientific criticisms of evolution, and therefore...
.
Overview
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is described by its promoters as a controversial satiricalSatire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
. Ben Stein provides narrative commentary throughout the film and is depicted as visiting a sequence of universities to interview both proponents of intelligent design who claim to have been victimized and evolutionary scientists who are presented as atheists. The film makes considerable use of vintage film clips, including opening scenes showing the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
being constructed as a metaphor for barriers to the scientific acceptance of intelligent design. The film takes aim at some scientific hypotheses of the origin of life, and presents a short animation portraying the inner workings of the cell to introduce the intelligent design concept of irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...
, the claim that such complexity could not arise from spontaneous mutations. The intelligent design proponents shown include Richard Weikart
Richard Weikart
Richard Weikart is a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and is a senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. In 1997 he joined the editorial board of the Access Research Network's Origins & Design Journal...
, who claims that Darwinism influenced the Nazis. The film also associates Hitler's ambitions of a master race
Master race
Master race was a phrase and concept originating in the slave-holding Southern US. The later phrase Herrenvolk , interpreted as 'master race', was a concept in Nazi ideology in which the Nordic peoples, one of the branches of what in the late-19th and early-20th century was called the Aryan race,...
and the holocaust to Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of Natural selection. The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert...
through stock footage
Stock footage
Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures and file footage are film or video footage that may or may not be custom shot for use in a specific film or television program. Stock footage is of beneficial use to filmmakers as it is sometimes less expensive than shooting new...
film clips of filmed images of Nazi concentration camp laboratories as well as statements of the director of the Hadamar
Hadamar Clinic
The Hadamar Euthanasia Centre was a psychiatric hospital in the German town of Hadamar, used by the Nazis as the site of their T-4 Euthanasia Programme, which performed mass sterilizations and mass murder of "undesirable" members of Nazi society, specifically those with physical and mental...
Memorial, where 15,000 people with disabilities were killed during WWII. The film directly addresses intelligent design only superficially, focusing on how it is treated in academia rather than on issues involving the concept itself. It makes almost no attempt to define intelligent design or show any scientific evidence in favor of intelligent design. Instead, the film deals with the subject almost entirely from a political, rather than scientific, viewpoint.
Promotion of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution
The film depicts intelligent designIntelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition 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." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
as an alternative to evolution, and claims it deserves a place in academia. This "design theory" is defined in the film by the Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
's Paul Nelson
Paul Nelson (creationist)
Paul A. Nelson is an American philosopher of science, young earth creationist and intelligent design advocate.- Biography :Nelson is the grandson of the creationist author and Lutheran minister Byron Christopher Nelson and edited a book of his grandfather's writings...
as "the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a result of intelligence." Stein says in the film that intelligent design is not taught or researched in academia because it is "suppressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion", although the National Center for Science Education
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...
responds with "Intelligent design has not produced any research to suppress", and by saying that "The fundamental problem with intelligent design as science is that intelligent design claims cannot be tested".
In the United States federal court case Kitzmiller v. Dover, intelligent design was judged a repackaged version of creationism and as such introducing intelligent design in public school science classrooms was unconstitutional
Constitutionality
Constitutionality is the condition of acting in accordance with an applicable constitution. Acts that are not in accordance with the rules laid down in the constitution are deemed to be ultra vires.-See also:*ultra vires*Company law*Constitutional law...
religious infringement. In the film, Bruce Chapman
Bruce Chapman
Bruce K. Chapman is the director and founder of the Discovery Institute, an American conservative think tank often associated with the religious right. He was previously a journalist, a Republican Party politician and a diplomat.- Political career :After graduating from Harvard University in 1962,...
, president of the Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
, denied that teaching intelligent design in science classes is an attempt to sneak religion into public schools. Stein, the Discovery Institute and Expelled's publicists, Motive Marketing, have all used the film to build support for Academic Freedom bills in various states, which many view as the latest in a series of anti-evolutionary strategies designed to bring creationism into the classroom. These bills would permit educators in the public schools to independently introduce criticisms of or alternatives to evolution.
Claims that intelligent design advocates are persecuted
The film contends that there is widespread persecution of educators and scientists who promote intelligent design, and a conspiracy to keep GodGod
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
out of the nation's laboratories and classrooms. The film contains interviews with educators and scientists in which they describe this persecution. In the film, Stein says, "It's not just the scientists who are in on it. The media is in on it, the courts, the educational system, everyone is after them." Stein further accuses academia of having a dogmatic commitment to Darwinism, comparing it to the party line of the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, which cannot be questioned without severe consequences. Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education since 1987...
of the National Center for Science Education
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...
stated that "the filmmakers were exploiting Americans’ sense of fairness as a way to sell their religious views" and that she was concerned that the film would portray the "scientific community as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong."
Portrayal of evolutionary science as atheistic
The film alleges that many scientists and the scientific enterprise are dogmatically committed to atheism, and that a commitment to materialismMaterialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
in the scientific establishment is behind the claimed suppression of intelligent design. It fails to note that the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
can only deal with explanations that can be tested or empirically validated, and so logically cannot use untestable religious or "design based" explanations. Stein contends that "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can't possibly touch a higher power, and it can’t possibly touch God."
The National Center for Science Education
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...
criticizes the film for representing scientists who are atheists as representative of all scientists, without discussing the many prominent scientists who are religious, and thus creates a false dichotomy between science and religion. The associate producer of the film Mark Mathis
Mark Mathis
Mark E. Mathis is a movie producer and media consultant. He is currently the president of Mathis Media, LLC, a media-consulting firm.-Biography:...
said they had excluded scientists who are religious, such as Roman Catholic biologist Kenneth R. Miller
Kenneth R. Miller
Kenneth Raymond Miller is a biology professor at Brown University. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is particularly known for his opposition to creationism, including the intelligent design movement...
, because their views would have "confused the film unnecessarily." Mathis also questioned the intellectual honesty of a Catholic accepting evolution. Miller later noted that 40% of the members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
profess belief in a personal god
Personal God
A personal god is a deity who can be related to as a person instead of as an "impersonal force", such as the Absolute, "the All", or the "Ground of Being"....
.
In its review, the Waco Tribune-Herald
Waco Tribune-Herald
The Waco Tribune-Herald is an American daily newspaper serving Waco, Texas and vicinity.The newspaper has its roots in five different predecessors, beginning with the Waco Evening Telephone in 1892. The Tribune-Herald took its current identity when E.S...
said "That’s the real issue of Expelled — atheist scientists versus God — even though it wholly undercuts statements by intelligent design researchers early in the film that ID has nothing to do with religion." It described the "failure to cover how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science" as "perhaps the film's most glaring and telling omission", and said that the film rather "quickly dismissed [such proponents of theistic evolution
Theistic evolution
Theistic evolution or evolutionary creation is a concept that asserts that classical religious teachings about God are compatible with the modern scientific understanding about biological evolution...
] by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom." Defending the movie, the producer, Walt Ruloff, said that scientists like prominent geneticist Francis Collins
Francis Collins (geneticist)
Francis Sellers Collins , is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project . He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Prior to being appointed Director, he founded and...
keep their religion and science separate only because they are "toeing the party line." Collins, who was not asked to be interviewed for the film in any of its incarnations, said that Ruloff's claims were "ludicrous."
Claims that the theory of evolution was necessary for the development of Nazism
The film portrays evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
as responsible for Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
, Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
, atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
, eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
and, in particular, Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust. Film critic Jeffrey Overstreet, writing for Christianity Today
Christianity Today
Christianity Today is an Evangelical Christian periodical based in Carol Stream, Illinois. It is the flagship publication of its parent company Christianity Today International, claiming circulation figures of 140,000 and readership of 290,000...
, stated that "Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany." Richard Weikart
Richard Weikart
Richard Weikart is a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, and is a senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. In 1997 he joined the editorial board of the Access Research Network's Origins & Design Journal...
, a DI fellow and historian, appears in the movie asserting that Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's work in the 19th century influenced Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
. He argues that Darwin's perception of humans not being qualitatively different from animals, with qualities such as morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
arising from natural processes, undermines what Weikart calls the "Judeo-Christian conception of the sanctity
Inviolability
In religion and ethics, inviolability or sanctity of life is a principle of implied protection regarding aspects of sentient life which are said to be holy, sacred, or otherwise of such value that they are not to be violated...
of human life". Nazi gas chamber
Gas chamber
A gas chamber is an apparatus for killing humans or animals with gas, consisting of a sealed chamber into which a poisonous or asphyxiant gas is introduced. The most commonly used poisonous agent is hydrogen cyanide; carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have also been used...
s and concentration camps figure highly in the narrative of the movie. In the film, David Berlinski
David Berlinski
David Berlinski is an American educator and author of several books on mathematics. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement. Though he criticizes the theory of evolution, Berlinski who is an agnostic,...
of the Discovery Institute says that Darwinism was a "necessary though not sufficient" cause for the Holocaust, and Stein presses the message of evolutionary biology being responsible.
The film's and Weikart's arguments have been criticized by political scientist Larry Arnhart who sees them as highlighting a weak putative connection while ignoring the influence Martin Luther and his Christian anti-Semitism in the 16th century had on Nazism, along with other more direct causes such as the economic ruin of Germany after World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and the racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and religious antisemitism dating back over seven centuries before Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
. Bret Carroll, Weikart's colleague in the Stanislaus history department, adds that the movie "misuses Weikart's research by mistakenly implying that Darwin led inevitably to Hitler. In fact, scientific theories, even those like Darwin's that address organic life, are morally neutral." Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...
wrote that when Stein interviewed him for the film, Stein seemed astonishingly ignorant of the many ways in which Darwinism has been misused by various political and economic ideologues, including economic conservatives who justified laissez faire
Laissez-faire
In economics, laissez-faire describes an environment in which transactions between private parties are free from state intervention, including restrictive regulations, taxes, tariffs and enforced monopolies....
capitalism
Free market
A free market is a competitive market where prices are determined by supply and demand. However, the term is also commonly used for markets in which economic intervention and regulation by the state is limited to tax collection, and enforcement of private ownership and contracts...
as 'survival of the fittest corporations', and concluded that scientific theorists "cannot be held responsible for how their ideas are employed in the service of non-scientific agendas." John Rennie in his Scientific American article says the film repeatedly uses the term "Darwinism" instead of evolution to misportray science as though it were a dogmatic ideology like Marxism.
Arthur Caplan
Arthur Caplan
Arthur L. Caplan, Ph.D., is Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to coming to Penn in 1994, Caplan taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. He was the...
, Hart Professor of Bioethics and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, wrote in his MSNBC
MSNBC
MSNBC is a cable news channel based in the United States available in the US, Germany , South Africa, the Middle East and Canada...
column that the movie is a "frighteningly immoral narrative", including "a toxic mishmash of persecution fantasies, disconnected and inappropriate references to fallen communist regimes and their leaders and a very repugnant form of Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
from the monotone big mouth Ben Stein." Caplan sharply criticized what he described as Stein's willingness "to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end. Expelled indeed."
The Anti-Defamation League
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States. Describing itself as "the nation's premier civil rights/human relations agency", the ADL states that it "fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, defends democratic ideals and protects...
issued the following statement condemning the film's use of the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
:
In an April interview about the film, Stein had said that science had led to the Nazi murder of children, and stated that "Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place. Science leads you to killing people." When Vancouver Sun writer Peter McKnight asked for Stein to comment on the Anti-Defamation League's statement, Stein replied, "It's none of their fucking business."
After watching the film, one Jewish viewer wrote an angry letter to interviewee Michael Shermer, which Shermer forwarded to fellow interviewee Richard Dawkins. This prompted Dawkins to write, as a response, "Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda".
People presented in the film
The film portrays several people including Richard SternbergRichard Sternberg
Richard M. Sternberg is an American scientist. Sternberg believes intelligent design should be part of the discussion about evolution and the origin of life on Earth. Although he is not a proponent of intelligent design, Dr. Sternberg has been critical of the mainstream in evolutionary biology for...
, Guillermo Gonzalez
Guillermo Gonzalez (astronomer)
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astrophysicist, proponent of intelligent design, and a professor at Grove City College, a Christian school, in Grove City, Pennsylvania...
, and Caroline Crocker
Caroline Crocker
Caroline Crocker is an American immunopharmacologist who taught creationist claims about evolution and promoted intelligent design in a biology class at George Mason University in 2005, while employed in a non-tenure track contract position as “contingent faculty”, with no guarantee of a renewal...
as victims of persecution by major scientific organizations and academia for their promotion of intelligent design and for questioning Darwinism. Other intelligent design supporters such as William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Paul Nelson
Paul Nelson (creationist)
Paul A. Nelson is an American philosopher of science, young earth creationist and intelligent design advocate.- Biography :Nelson is the grandson of the creationist author and Lutheran minister Byron Christopher Nelson and edited a book of his grandfather's writings...
, Pamela Winnick, and Gerald Schroeder
Gerald Schroeder
Gerald L. Schroeder is an Orthodox Jewish physicist, author and lecturer at Aish HaTorah's Discovery Seminar, Essentials and Fellowships programs and Executive Learning Center, who focuses on what he perceives to be an inherent relationship between science and spirituality.-Education:Schroeder...
, along with contrarian David Berlinski
David Berlinski
David Berlinski is an American educator and author of several books on mathematics. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the hub of the intelligent design movement. Though he criticizes the theory of evolution, Berlinski who is an agnostic,...
, appear in the film as well. Expelled additionally briefly features numerous anonymous people, their faces darkened to make them unrecognizable, who say that their jobs in the sciences would be jeopardized if their belief in intelligent design were made public, one of whom states that he believes most scientists equate intelligent design with creationism
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...
, the religious right
Christian right
Christian right is a term used predominantly in the United States to describe "right-wing" Christian political groups that are characterized by their strong support of socially conservative policies...
, and theocracy
Theocracy
Theocracy is a form of organization in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided, or simply pursuant to the doctrine of a particular religious sect or religion....
.
In addition, the motion picture includes interviews with scientists and others who advocate the teaching of evolution and criticize intelligent design as an attempt to bring religion into the science classroom. Those interviewed include PZ Myers
PZ Myers
Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers is an American biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and the author of the Pharyngula science blog. He is currently an associate professor of biology at UMM, works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology , and also cultivates an...
, William Provine, Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
, Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse
Michael Ruse is a philosopher of biology at Florida State University, and is well known for his work on the creationism/evolution controversy and the demarcation problem in science...
, Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...
, Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...
, and Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education since 1987...
.
Richard Sternberg
Expelled features excerpts from an interview Stein conducted with Richard SternbergRichard Sternberg
Richard M. Sternberg is an American scientist. Sternberg believes intelligent design should be part of the discussion about evolution and the origin of life on Earth. Although he is not a proponent of intelligent design, Dr. Sternberg has been critical of the mainstream in evolutionary biology for...
, described as an evolutionary biologist and a former editor for a scientific journal associated with the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
. The film says his life was "nearly ruined" after he published an article by intelligent design proponent Stephen C. Meyer
Stephen C. Meyer
Stephen C. Meyer is an American scholar, philosopher and advocate for intelligent design. He helped found the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute , which is the main organisation behind the intelligent design movement. Before joining the DI, Meyer was a professor at...
in 2004, allegedly causing him to lose his office, to be pressured to resign, and to become the subject of an investigation into his political and religious views. Sternberg defended his decision, stating that Intelligent Design was not the overall subject of the paper (being mentioned only at the end) and that he was attempting merely to present questions ID proponents had raised as a topic for discussion. He presented himself and Meyer as targets of religious and political persecution, claiming the chairman of his department referred to him as an "intellectual terrorist". Stein states that the paper "ignited a firestorm of controversy merely because it suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began", and goes beyond the findings of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to claim that Sternberg was "terrorized". Stein further alleges that Congressman Mark Souder
Mark Souder
Mark Edward Souder is an American Republican politician who was a U.S. Representative from Indiana from 1995 to 2010.During the 1980s and early 1990s, he worked as a congressional aide to Dan Coats and committee staff director. He was elected to his congressional seat in 1994...
uncovered a campaign by the Smithsonian and the NCSE to destroy Sternberg's credibility, though he does not provide any details.
Sternberg, a staff scientist for the National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Center for Biotechnology Information
The National Center for Biotechnology Information is part of the United States National Library of Medicine , a branch of the National Institutes of Health. The NCBI is located in Bethesda, Maryland and was founded in 1988 through legislation sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper...
and himself a fellow of the intelligent design advocacy group ISCID
International Society for Complexity, Information and Design
The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design was a non-profit professional society that promoted intelligent design...
, had resigned his position at the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington six months before publication of the Meyers paper. The Council of the Biological Society of Washington
Biological Society of Washington
The Biological Society of Washington is a world wide acting scientific organisation established on 3 December 1880 in Washington, D.C.. The original purpose was "to encourage the study of the Biological Sciences and to hold meetings at which papers shall be read and discussed." The current primary...
has stated that Sternberg circumvented the journal's standard reviewing process to include the controversial paper. Although in the film Stein says the paper "suggested intelligent design might be able to explain how life began", it discussed the much later development of phyla
Phylum
In biology, a phylum The term was coined by Georges Cuvier from Greek φῦλον phylon, "race, stock," related to φυλή phyle, "tribe, clan." is a taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class. "Phylum" is equivalent to the botanical term division....
during the Cambrian explosion
Cambrian explosion
The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation was the relatively rapid appearance, around , of most major phyla, as demonstrated in the fossil record, accompanied by major diversification of other organisms, including animals, phytoplankton, and calcimicrobes...
and deviated from the journal's topic of systematics
Systematics
Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of terrestrial life, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees...
to introduce previously discredited claims about bioinformatics
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, software...
. The Society subsequently declared that the paper "does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings" and would not have been published had usual editorial practices been followed. Sternberg, contrary to the impression given by the film, was not an employee, but an unpaid "Research Associate" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, a post which only ran for a limited period. Also contrary to way his career was depicted in the film, Sternberg still retained this position until 2007, when he was given the offer of continuing as a research collaborator. He continued to have full access to research facilities at the museum as of April 2008.
Caroline Crocker
Expelled profiles Dr. Caroline CrockerCaroline Crocker
Caroline Crocker is an American immunopharmacologist who taught creationist claims about evolution and promoted intelligent design in a biology class at George Mason University in 2005, while employed in a non-tenure track contract position as “contingent faculty”, with no guarantee of a renewal...
, a former part-time cell biology
Cell biology
Cell biology is a scientific discipline that studies cells – their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level...
lecturer at George Mason University
George Mason University
George Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County...
who became the center of controversy over Intelligent Design. In the film Stein states, "After she simply mentioned Intelligent Design in her cell biology class at George Mason University, Caroline Crocker’s sterling academic career came to an abrupt end", and that she was blacklisted. Crocker tells Stein that before the incident she was routinely offered jobs on the spot following an interview, but afterwards she was unable to find a position in academia.
According to the university and the National Center for Science Education
National Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...
, Crocker was not fired; her position was non-tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
track and her employment was on a course-by-course basis. She taught to the end of her contract, which was not renewed.
A George Mason University spokesman said this was for reasons unrelated to her views on intelligent design, and that though they wholeheartedly supported academic freedom, "teachers also have a responsibility to stick to subjects they were hired to teach, and intelligent design belonged in a religion class, not biology. Does academic freedom 'literally give you the right to talk about anything, whether it has anything to do with the subject matter or not? The answer is no.'"
The NCSE also stated that she did more than merely mention intelligent design, but in fact posed many refuted creationist arguments. Crocker also did find a position at Northern Virginia Community College
Northern Virginia Community College
Northern Virginia Community College, often abbreviated NVCC and colloquially as NOVA, comprises several locations in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and is both the second largest multi-campus community college in the United States and the largest educational institution in the...
, where she was later profiled by the Washington Post. The Post's article stated she claimed "that the scientific establishment was perpetrating fraud, hunting down critics of evolution to ruin them and disguising an atheistic view of life in the garb of science."
Her lecture, which she said was the same she taught at George Mason, taught students creationist claims
Objections to evolution
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution by natural selection initially met opposition from scientists with different theories, but came to...
about evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
and promoted intelligent design in a biology class, telling them that Nazi atrocities were based on Darwin's ideas and on science.
Crocker subsequently had a postdoctoral year at the Uniformed Services University
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences is a health science university run by the U.S. federal government. The primary mission of the school is to prepare graduates for service to the U.S. at home and abroad in the medical corps....
, and currently has a full time post as executive director of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center
Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center
The Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center is a Christian nonprofit organization formed originally as a student club promoting intelligent design at the University of California, San Diego . There are about 25 active chapters of this organization in the United States, Kenya, Canada,...
which promotes intelligent design clubs at high schools and universities.
Michael Egnor
Michael EgnorMichael Egnor
Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon and intelligent design supporter. He has been a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Stony Brook University since 1991...
, a neurosurgery
Neurosurgery
Neurosurgery is the medical specialty concerned with the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of disorders which affect any portion of the nervous system including the brain, spine, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, and extra-cranial cerebrovascular system.-In the United States:In...
professor at SUNY at Stony Brook, is presented in the film as the subject of persecution after writing an essay to high school students asserting that doctors did not need to learn evolution to practice their trade. Egnor, who is a signatory to the Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns
Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns
Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns are a series of related public relations campaigns conducted by the Discovery Institute which seek to promote intelligent design while attempting to discredit evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism." The Discovery Institute is the...
A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism
A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism
A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism is a statement issued in 2001 by the Discovery Institute, a conservative non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, USA, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design.The statement expresses skepticism about the ability of random...
and Physicians and Surgeons who Dissent from Darwinism, presents himself as the victim of online smears and a campaign to get his university to force him into retirement, following his letter. When a citizen's group in Virginia sponsored an essay contest for high school students on the topic "Why I would want my doctor to have studied evolution", Egnor responded by posting an essay on an intelligent design blog claiming that evolution was irrelevant to medicine. His essay was met with considerable criticism by medical professionals, professors and researchers.
In the film, Stein describes this as "Darwinists were quick to try and exterminate this new threat", and Egnor says he was shocked by the "baseness and viciousness" of the critical response he received. As soon as Egnor makes this statement in the film, the camera zooms in on a photo of him that is immediately stamped with "EXPELLED", implying that in the "extermination attempt" Egnor experienced more than common Internet vitriol when he engaged in an online controversy.
Robert J. Marks II
Robert MarksRobert J. Marks II
Robert Jackson Marks II is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University and proponent of intelligent design. From 1977 to 2003, he was on the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle...
is a professor at Baylor University
Baylor University
Baylor University is a private, Christian university located in Waco, Texas. Founded in 1845, Baylor is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.-History:...
who had his research website shut down by the University and was forced to return grant money when it was discovered his work had a link to intelligent design. The film, through footage, compares Marks to the protagonist in the film Planet of the Apes
Planet of the Apes (1968 film)
Planet of the Apes is a 1968 American science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, based on the 1963 French novel La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle. The film stars Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison...
.
The research in question was for the Evolutionary Informatics Lab
Evolutionary Informatics Lab
The Evolutionary Informatics Lab is a cyberspace entity created in 2007 by Baylor University professor Robert J. Marks II conducting research on mathematical details of evolutionary computation and purported to underlie intelligent design It defines evolutionary informatics and serves as a showcase...
which Marks formed with Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
fellow William Dembski, and which made use of the University's servers to host the website. The university removed the website after receiving complaints that it appeared to be endorsed by the university. Baylor officials later allowed the website back on their server but required changes be made to the website so that it did not appear to be endorsed by the University. The web site was reestablished independently of Baylor University.
Guillermo Gonzalez
Guillermo GonzalezGuillermo Gonzalez (astronomer)
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astrophysicist, proponent of intelligent design, and a professor at Grove City College, a Christian school, in Grove City, Pennsylvania...
, an astrophysicist who had been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University
Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology, more commonly known as Iowa State University , is a public land-grant and space-grant research university located in Ames, Iowa, United States. Iowa State has produced astronauts, scientists, and Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, along with a host of...
, is interviewed by Stein, who claims that despite a "stellar" research record that led to the discovery of new planets, Gonzalez was denied tenure
Tenure
Tenure commonly refers to life tenure in a job and specifically to a senior academic's contractual right not to have his or her position terminated without just cause.-19th century:...
because his book The Privileged Planet
The Privileged Planet
The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery is a book by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards which claims scientific evidence for intelligent design...
argued that the universe is intelligently designed. Gonzalez claims that, prior to his tenure review, he was the subject of a campaign on campus to "poison the atmosphere" against him, and that he would almost certainly have been granted tenure had he not been an advocate for intelligent design. The film interviewed a member of the Iowa State University faculty who stated that Gonzalez was denied tenure because the university feared that if they granted Gonzalez tenure the university would become associated with the Intelligent Design movement.
Prior to the film's release Iowa State University addressed the controversy regarding Gonzalez's tenure by saying that after the normal review of his qualifications, such as his record of scientific publications (which had dropped sharply after he joined the faculty), he was not granted tenure and promotion on the grounds that he "simply did not show the trajectory of excellence that we expect in a candidate seeking tenure in physics and astronomy." Eli Rosenberg, the chairman of the Astronomy department, also noted that during Gonzalez's time at Iowa State, Gonzalez had failed to secure any form of substantial outside funding. In the previous decade, four of the 12 candidates who came up for review in the department were not granted tenure.
Michael Shermer
Michael ShermerMichael Shermer
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...
is an author, science historian
History of science and technology
The history of science and technology is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world and ability to manipulate it have changed over the centuries...
, founder of The Skeptics Society
The Skeptics Society
The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit, member-supported organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs. The Skeptics Society was originally founded as a Los Angeles-area skeptical group to replace the defunct...
, and editor of its magazine Skeptic
Skeptic (U.S. magazine)
Skeptic is a quarterly science education and science advocacy magazine published internationally by The Skeptics Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting scientific skepticism and resisting the spread of pseudoscience, superstition, and irrational beliefs...
, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. He was interviewed for the movie by Stein and assistant producer Mark Mathis
Mark Mathis
Mark E. Mathis is a movie producer and media consultant. He is currently the president of Mathis Media, LLC, a media-consulting firm.-Biography:...
to get his take on intelligent design and evolution. Shermer describes intelligent design as "three quarters of the way to nonsense", and voices skepticism at the claims that numerous academics were fired for advocating it.
Shermer, in an online column coinciding with the release of Expelled, described feeling awkward about their motives soon after the interview began.
After a break and small talk the interview resumed, but the questions continued to follow a similar vein.
Shermer has stated that he believes that the film is effective in delivering its message to its target audience.
Richard Dawkins
Richard DawkinsRichard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...
is a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
evolutionary biologist and popular science
Popular science
Popular science, sometimes called literature of science, is interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is broad-ranging, often written by scientists as well as journalists, and is presented in many...
writer. Dawkins is portrayed as one of the leading members of the scientific establishment. Dawkins' admission that his study of evolution aided his move towards atheism is used by the film to draw a positive connection between them. In her review of the film for New Scientist
New Scientist
New Scientist is a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience. Founded in 1956, it is published by Reed Business Information Ltd, a subsidiary of...
, Amanda Gefter comments on the film's presentation of Dawkins' interview, including showing him "in the make-up chair, a move calculated to demean since surely everyone else, including Stein, is powder-puffed off-camera", and describes "foreboding music" and a "low-lit room" filmed with "sinister camera angles" used as part of an appeal to "raw emotion" during his interview.
In Dawkins' interview, the director focused on when Stein asked Dawkins under what circumstances intelligent design could have occurred. Dawkins responded that in the case of the "highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would themselves have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett)." He later described this as being similar to Francis Crick
Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson...
and Leslie Orgel
Leslie Orgel
Leslie Eleazer Orgel FRS was a British chemist.Born in London, England, Orgel received his B.A. in chemistry with first class honours from Oxford University in 1949...
's "semi tongue-in-cheek" example.
Claims that film producers misled interviewees
The movie has been criticized by those interviewees who are critics of intelligent design (P.Z. Myers, Dawkins, Shermer, and National Center for Science EducationNational Center for Science Education
The National Center for Science Education is a non-profit organization based in Oakland, California affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It is the United States' leading anti-creationist organization, and defends the teaching of evolutionary biology and opposes...
head Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education since 1987...
), who say they were misled into participating by being asked to be interviewed for a film named Crossroads on the "intersection of science and religion", and were directed to a blurb
Blurb
A blurb is a short summary or some words of praise accompanying a creative work, usually used on books without giving away any details, that is usually referring to the words on the back of the book jacket but also commonly seen on DVD and video cases, web portals, and news websites.- History :The...
implying an approach to the documentary crediting Darwin with "the answer" to how humanity developed:
But before the interviewees were approached, the movie had already been pitched to Stein as an anti-Darwinist picture:
On learning of the pro-intelligent design stance of the real film, Myers said, "not telling one of the sides in a debate about what the subject might be and then leading him around randomly to various topics, with the intent of later editing it down to the parts that just make the points you want, is the video version of quote-mining and is fundamentally dishonest." Dawkins said, "At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front", and Scott said, "I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren't."
Mathis called Myers, Dawkins and Scott a "bunch of hypocrites", and said that he "went over all of the questions with these folks before the interviews and I e-mailed the questions to many of them days in advance."
Roy Speckhardt
Roy Speckhardt
Roy Speckhardt, born January 24, 1973, in Carmel, New York, is executive director of the American Humanist Association, a non-profit civil liberties organization in Washington DC.-Biography:...
, executive director of the American Humanist Association
American Humanist Association
The American Humanist Association is an educational organization in the United States that advances Humanism. "Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that...
wrote a letter to the editor
Letter to the editor
A letter to the editor is a letter sent to a publication about issues of concern from its readers. Usually, letters are intended for publication...
of the New York Times, writing, "If one needs to believe in a god to be moral, why are we seeing yet another case of dishonesty by the devout? Why were leading scientists deceived as to the intentions of a religious group of filmmakers?"
Charles Darwin quotation issue
In support of his claim that the theory of evolution inspired NazismNazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
, Ben Stein attributes the following statement to Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's book The Descent of Man:
The original source shows that Stein has significantly changed the text and meaning of the paragraph, by leaving out whole and partial sentences without indicating that he had done so. The original paragraph (page 168) (words that Stein omitted shown in bold) and the subsequent sentences in the book state:
According to John Moore writing in the National Post:
The Expelled Exposed website also points out that the same misleading selective quotation from this passage was used by anti-evolutionist William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States...
in the 1925 Scopes Trial
Scopes Trial
The Scopes Trial—formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and informally known as the Scopes Monkey Trial—was a landmark American legal case in 1925 in which high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which made it unlawful to...
, but the full passage makes it clear that Darwin was not advocating eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
. The eugenics movement relied on simplistic and faulty assumptions about heredity, and by the 1920s evolutionary biologists were criticizing eugenics. Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...
, who defended the teaching of human evolution in the Scopes trial, wrote a scathing repudiation of eugenics.
In a supplement to a review of Expelled, J. Kirk Fitzhugh, Research & Collections, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County opened in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, USA in 1913 as the Museum of History, Science, and Art. The moving force behind it was a museum association founded in 1910. Its distinctive main building, with fitted marble walls and domed and...
, cites Darwin's two paragraphs in their entirety, and says that in the context shown by the second paragraph "What we find is that Darwin’s position is diametrically opposed to what Stein intimated."
Copyright controversies
Resource DVDs distributed in pre-release promotions of the film included animationAnimation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
sequences portraying the internal functioning of cells that were seen to resemble a video from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
entitled The Inner Life of the Cell
The Inner Life of the Cell
The Inner Life of the Cell is an 8.5-minute 3D computer graphics animation illustrating the molecular mechanisms that occur when a white blood cell in the blood vessels of the human body is activated by inflammation...
produced by XVIVO. XVIVO issued a cease-and-desist letter, alleging infringement of copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
and asserting further legal remedies would be pursued unless the infringed segments from the Inner Life video were removed prior to the film's distribution. Expelled's producers then filed a legal complaint for declaratory judgment, asking the court to rule XVIVO had no ownership claim to The Inner Life of the Cell and that the producers did not violate copyright law in either its resource DVD or the film itself. The complaint stated the animation sequences in its resource DVD were different from those used in the final film. XVIVO, L.L.C. and Premise Media eventually reached an agreement that no copyright infringement had occurred and the complaints were dropped.
In April 2008, the copyright holders to John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
's song "Imagine
Imagine (song)
"Imagine" is a song written and performed by the English musician John Lennon. It is the opening track on his album Imagine, released in 1971...
", Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono
is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...
, Julian
Julian Lennon
John Charles Julian Lennon is an English musician, songwriter, actor, and photographer. He is the son of John Lennon and Lennon's first wife, Cynthia Powell. Beatles manager Brian Epstein was his godfather. He has a younger half-brother, Sean Lennon. Lennon was named after his paternal...
and Sean Lennon
Sean Lennon
is an American singer, songwriter, musician, guitarist and actor. He is the only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His godfather is Sir Elton John.-Early life and education:...
, filed a legal complaint in the Southern District of New York against Premise Media and Rocky Mountain Pictures alleging copyright and trademark infringement over the unlicensed use of a portion of the song in the film. Ono came under attack in the blogosphere when critics of the film falsely assumed she agreed to license the song for use in a film defending intelligent design. Ono's lawyer claimed the use was unauthorized, while the film's producers claimed their use was protected under the fair use doctrine. Following a court motion filed by the plaintiff
Plaintiff
A plaintiff , also known as a claimant or complainant, is the term used in some jurisdictions for the party who initiates a lawsuit before a court...
s on April 30, 2008, both parties consented during conference with presiding judge Sidney H. Stein
Sidney H. Stein
Sidney H. Stein is a United States federal judge. He assumed senior status on September 1, 2010.Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Stein was a New York Army National Guard from 1969 to 1975. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967 and attended the New York University Graduate School of...
to a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the distribution of any additional copies of the film in theaters or distribution of the film on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
pending a hearing set for May 19. On that date the court heard oral arguments for a plaintiff motion seeking a preliminary injunction
Preliminary injunction
A preliminary injunction, in equity, is an injunction entered by a court prior to a final determination of the merits of a legal case, in order to restrain a party from going forward with a course of conduct or compelling a party to continue with a course of conduct until the case has been decided...
against any distribution of the film and a defense motion seeking to dismiss the case. The TRO remained in effect pending the judge's rulings on these motions. In June 2008 the judge ruled against both, while finding the plaintiffs failed to show the balance of hardships tipped in their favor and that the defendant
Defendant
A defendant or defender is any party who is required to answer the complaint of a plaintiff or pursuer in a civil lawsuit before a court, or any party who has been formally charged or accused of violating a criminal statute...
s' claim of fair use would likely succeed in a full trial. On October 8 Yoko Ono announced she would no longer pursue the lawsuit. The DVD version of the film, released in October 2008, does not contain the song segment because the decision came too late to allow the song to appear in the DVD.
Pre-release screenings
As part of the pre-release marketing for the film, a web-based RSVPRSVP (invitations)
In the context of social invitations RSVP or Rsvp is a request for a response from the invited person...
system page was publicized, offering free private movie screenings. Persons filling out an online entry form were sent a reservation confirmation via email which stated that no ticket was needed and that IDs would be checked against a list of names. The producers also held invitation only screenings for religious organizations and government officials, including screenings for legislators to promote anti-evolution Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills are a series of antievolution bills introduced in state legislatures in the United States between 2004 and 2009. They assert that teachers, students, and college professors face intimidation and retaliation when discussing scientific criticisms of evolution, and therefore...
.
Conservative Christian groups
In advance of release, the film was shown at private screenings to various ChristianChristian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
conservative leaders, including James Dobson
James Dobson
James Clayton "Jim" Dobson, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian author, psychologist, and founder in 1977 of Focus on the Family , which he led until 2003. In the 1980s he was ranked as one of the most influential spokesman for conservative social positions in American public life...
. On March 11, 2008, a preview screening was held in Nashville
Nashville, Tennessee
Nashville is the capital of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat of Davidson County. It is located on the Cumberland River in Davidson County, in the north-central part of the state. The city is a center for the health care, publishing, banking and transportation industries, and is home...
for attendees at the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters
National Religious Broadcasters
National Religious Broadcasters is an American organization that represents Christian religious broadcasters on American television and radio, including several high-profile televangelists and Christian radio show hosts. It claims a membership of more than 1700 organizations...
. The young Earth creationist
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
organization Answers in Genesis
Answers in Genesis
Answers in Genesis is a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry with a particular focus on supporting Young Earth creationism and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. The organization has offices in the United Kingdom and the United States...
reported that its leader, Ken Ham
Ken Ham
Kenneth Alfred Ham is the Australian President/CEO of Answers in Genesis USA. He is a vocal advocate for a young Earth and a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, and his cross-country speaking tours and many books make him one of the better known young-Earth...
, met Ben Stein beforehand to discuss promoting the film. It requested supporters to ask local movie theater managers to show the film, and to encourage their church leadership to buy out a local theater to show the film to as many people from that church as possible.
Screenings in support of Academic Freedom bills
Expelled was given pre-release screenings for FloridaFlorida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
and Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
legislators in support of Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills
Academic Freedom bills are a series of antievolution bills introduced in state legislatures in the United States between 2004 and 2009. They assert that teachers, students, and college professors face intimidation and retaliation when discussing scientific criticisms of evolution, and therefore...
in those states. Such bills, often viewed as attacks on the teaching of evolution, have been introduced in state legislatures in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
since 2004, based on the claims by the Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
that teachers, students, and college professors face intimidation and retaliation when discussing scientific criticisms of evolution, and therefore require protection. The Florida screening, held in the IMAX
IMAX
IMAX is a motion picture film format and a set of proprietary cinema projection standards created by the Canadian company IMAX Corporation. IMAX has the capacity to record and display images of far greater size and resolution than conventional film systems...
Theater of the Challenger Learning Center
Challenger Center for Space Science Education
' is a nonprofit educational organization with its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, and an international network of Challenger Learning Centers. The organization was founded in April 1986 by the families of the astronauts who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster on January 28,...
of Tallahassee
Tallahassee, Florida
Tallahassee is the capital of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County, and is the 128th largest city in the United States. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2010, the population recorded by...
on March 12, 2008, was restricted to legislators, their spouses, and their legislative aides, with the press and public excluded. Under the Florida sunshine law
Freedom of information in the United States
Freedom of information in the United States refers to the independent bodies of Freedom of information legislation at the federal level and in the fifty states.-Federal level:...
they had to watch the film without discussing the issue or arranging any future votes. Commenting on this, and the controversy over Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel viewing the film despite attempts by the promoters to withdraw the invitation they had given him, House Democratic leader Dan Gelber
Dan Gelber
Dan Gelber is a former prosecutor, a candidate for Attorney General of Florida and is a member of the Florida Senate, representing the 35th District. He is a Democrat and previously represented the 106th District of the Florida House from 2000 - 2008...
of Miami Beach stated,
"It's kind of an irony: The public is expelled from a movie called Expelled." The screening was attended by about 100 people, but few were legislators, and the majority of legislators stayed away.
Shortly before the film's general release, its producer Walt Ruloff held a press conference at the Heritage Foundation
Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation is a conservative American think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong...
in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
on April 15, and announced his plans to use the film as part of a campaign to pass academic freedom bills in a variety of American states. At least one Discovery Institute press conference on the bills has included a screening of Expelled. The issue was revived in 2009 when Florida Senator Stephen R. Wise
Stephen R. Wise
Stephen R. Wise is a Republican member of the Florida Senate, representing the 5th District since 2001. Previously he was a member of the Florida House of Representatives from 1989 through 2000.-External links:* official government website* profile...
cited the film as one reason that he is sponsoring plans to introduce a bill requiring biology teachers to present the idea of intelligent design.
PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins at Minnesota pre-release screening
Expelled interviewee PZ MyersPZ Myers
Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers is an American biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and the author of the Pharyngula science blog. He is currently an associate professor of biology at UMM, works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology , and also cultivates an...
was turned away from a pre-release screening of the film by a hired security guard as Myers, fellow interviewee Richard Dawkins, and members of Myers' family waited together in line to enter the theater. Myers said that he applied for tickets for himself and his guests on the website where the film's producers were offering free passes to the screening to the general public. Dawkins and Myers' family were allowed to attend, but Myers and Dawkins both concluded Dawkins would have been turned away as well if those promoting the film had recognized who he was.
This rejection of one of the evolution supporters prominently featured in the film created a furor as critics and supporters volleyed conflicting accounts of the incident. Myers wrote, "I went to attend a screening of the creationist propaganda movie, Expelled, a few minutes ago. Well, I tried … but I was Expelled!" Prior to this screening, Myers and Dawkins were both very public in their condemnations of the upcoming film, leading them to conclude this was the reason Myers was banned from the screening. Dawkins charged "P.Z. is in the film extensively. If anyone had a right to see the film, it was him."
Premise Media partner Walt Ruloff countered that they were using the screenings to stimulate favorable publicity for the film, and its producer Mark Mathis confirmed that he ordered Myers turned away. He wrote, "In light of Myers' untruthful blogging about Expelled I decided it was better to have him wait until April 18 and pay to see the film. Others, notable others, were permitted to see the film. At a private screening it's my call." But he went on to say, "Unlike the Darwinist establishment, we expel no one."
Critics of the film publicly ridiculed Myers' ejection as a public relations blunder. Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist who has been the executive director of the National Center for Science Education since 1987...
, who also appeared in the film, was quoted to say she and fellow supporters of evolution were enjoying "a horselaugh" over the episode. Myers said, "I could not imagine a better result for this. They've shown themselves to be completely dishonest and that they're trying to hide the truth about their movie, which is to my advantage. And they've shown themselves to be such flaming idiots." Dawkins described the event as "a gift" and said "we could not ask for anything better."
Promotion
The promotion of the film was primarily managed by Motive Marketing, the agency that promoted the blockbuster film The Passion of the ChristThe Passion of the Christ
The Passion of the Christ is a 2004 American drama film directed by Mel Gibson and starring Jim Caviezel as Jesus. It depicts the Passion of Jesus largely according to the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John...
, with another three public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
firms also hired. The producers spent millions on the promotion, targeted primarily to religious audiences. It provided sweepstakes and rewards to churches selling the most tickets, and offered sums of up to $10,000 to schools that sent their students to watch the film. In advance of the film's release, executive director Walt Ruloff, and producers Mark Mathis and Logan Craft provided interviews to various Christian media outlets promoting the movie and emphasizing its potential to impact the evolution debate. Motive Marketing also sent a representative to meet with religious leaders and stress the film's intelligent design creationist message, inspiring many to actively promote the film within their own religious communities. Some Christian media
Christian media
Christian media can either refer to Christians who work in secular media, or media that is Christian. Refers to various aspects of mass media which is primarily targeting the Christian demographic...
outlets promoted the film as well.
Organizations affiliated with the Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
helped publicize the film. It used its evolutionnews.org website and blog to publish over twenty articles tying its promotion of Expelled to its effort to pass the "Academic Freedom Bill" in Florida.
Stein appeared in the cable television programs The O'Reilly Factor
The O'Reilly Factor
The O'Reilly Factor, originally titled The O'Reilly Report from 1996 to 1998 and often called The Factor, is an American talk show on the Fox News Channel hosted by commentator Bill O'Reilly, who often discusses current controversial political issues with guests.The program was the most watched...
and Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck
Glenn Edward Lee Beck is an American conservative radio host, vlogger, author, entrepreneur, political commentator and former television host. He hosts the Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show that airs throughout the United States on Premiere Radio Networks...
to talk about the film. In his interview on O'Reilly commentator Bill O'Reilly
Bill O'Reilly (commentator)
William James "Bill" O'Reilly, Jr. is an American television host, author, syndicated columnist and political commentator. He is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, which is the most watched cable news television program on American television...
characterized intelligent design as the idea that "a deity created life", and Stein responded that "There's no doubt about it. We have lots and lots of evidence of it in the movie." The Discovery Institute quickly issued a statement that when Bill O'Reilly conflated intelligent design with creationism he was mistakenly defining it as an attempt to find a divine designer, and lamented that "Ben referred to the 'gaps' in Darwin's theory, as if those are the only issues that intelligent design theory addresses."
Stein and the producers also hosted telephone press conference facilitated by Media Matter's representative Paul Lauer in which participating journalists were required to submit their questions in advance for screening and just two questions posed by members of the press were answered. One of the journalists participating, Dan Whipple of the Colorado Confidential, contrasted Ruloff's statement that "What we're really asking for is freedom of speech, and allowing science, and students, people in applied or theoretical research to have the freedom to go where they need to go and ask the questions" with the carefully staged and stringently controlled press conference, and called it "hypocritical in its supposed defense of 'freedom of expression'."
Reception
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was not screened in advance for film criticsFilm criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...
, and when the film was released it received generally negative reviews. As of April 26, 2008, the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...
reported that only 10% of its 33 top film critics gave it a positive review. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...
reported the film had an average score of 20 out of 100, based on 13 reviews, while Screen Rant gave Expelled 4.5 out of 5 stars, saying that "your opinion of the film will with almost complete certainty be predicted by your opinions on Darwinism vs Intelligent Design."
Response to the movie from conservative Christian groups was generally positive, praising the movie for its perceived humor and for focusing on what they perceive as a serious issue. American Spectator said that the "only complaint about Expelled, scheduled for April release, is that its ending came all too soon."
Response from other critics was largely negative, particularly from those in the science media. The film's extensive use of Michael Moore
Michael Moore
Michael Francis Moore is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries...
-style devices was commented upon, but the film was variously characterized as boring, exaggerated, and unconvincing. Others found it insulting and offensive to the religious. The Globe & Mails film review gave the film a score of 0 and called it "an appallingly unscrupulous example of hack propaganda". Vue Weekly
Vue Weekly
Vue Weekly is an alternative weekly newspaper published in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and with new issues coming out every Thursday.Vue was founded in 1995 by former employees and owners of SEE Magazine, upset over losing control of SEE to creditors...
called it an "anti-science propaganda masquerading as a Michael Moore-ish fool's journey, full of disingenuous ploys, cheap tricks, and outright mendacity." While noting that the film is technically well made (with good photography and editing), Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
lambasted the content of the film:
This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
(AAAS) issued a statement to say it was "especially disappointed to learn that the producers of an intelligent design propaganda movie called Expelled are inappropriately pitting science against religion." It went on to say the organization "further decries the profound dishonesty and lack of civility demonstrated by this effort", and said the movie "seeks to force religious viewpoints into science class – despite court decisions that have struck down efforts to bring creationism and intelligent design into schools."
Stein received the Freedom of Expression Award for his work in Expelled from the Home Entertainment Awards at Entertainment Merchants Association
Entertainment merchants association
The Entertainment Merchants Association is the not-for-profit international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of the $32 billion home entertainment industry....
's Home Media Expo 2008.
Box office and home video sales
, Expelled had grossed over $7.7 million and was ranked fifteenth-highest-grossing in the documentary film genre in the United States from 1982 to that date. Expelled opened in 1,052 theaters earning $2,970,848 for its opening weekend with a $2,824 theater average. Prior to the film's opening Walt Ruloff, the movie's executive producer, "said the film could top the $23.9-million opening for Michael Moore's polemic against President Bush, Fahrenheit 9/11Fahrenheit 9/11
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a 2004 documentary film by American filmmaker and political commentator Michael Moore. The film takes a critical look at the presidency of George W. Bush, the War on Terror, and its coverage in the news media...
, the best launch ever for
a documentary." While Expelled's returns were impressive for a film in the typically low grossing documentary genre, it was far surpassed by both Moore's Sicko
Sicko
Sicko is a 2007 documentary film by American filmmaker Michael Moore. The film investigates health care in the United States, focusing on its health insurance and the pharmaceutical industry. The movie compares the for-profit, non-universal U.S...
and Fahrenheit. Joshua Rich of Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
said the movie "was a solid top-10 contender" and "[t]hat's a very respectable total for a documentary, although non-fiction fare rarely opens in 1,052 theaters."
Expelled's Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
and DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
releases distributed by Vivendi Visual Entertainment grossed over $1,850,000 in total sales.
In 2011, the company that produced the movie declared bankruptcy and is selling the rights to the movie. It was sold for $201,000 to a yet unannounced person or group.
See also
- Creation-evolution controversyCreation-evolution controversyThe creation–evolution controversy is a recurring cultural, political, and theological dispute about the origins of the Earth, humanity, life, and the universe....
- Flock of DodosFlock of DodosFlock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus is a documentary film by American marine biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson. It highlights the debate between proponents of the concept of intelligent design and the scientific consensus that supports evolution.The documentary was first...
, a documentary contrasting the debate between intelligent design proponents and the scientific establishment that supports evolution. - Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on TrialJudgment Day: Intelligent Design on TrialJudgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial is an award-winning NOVA documentary on the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which concentrated on the question of whether or not intelligent design could be viewed as science and taught in school science class...
, a NOVANOVA (TV series)Nova is a popular science television series from the U.S. produced by WGBH Boston. It can be seen on the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States, and in more than 100 other countries...
documentary about intelligent design and the Kitzmiller v. DoverKitzmiller v. Dover Area School DistrictTammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design...
trial. - The Root of All Evil?The Root of All Evil?The Root of All Evil?, later retitled The God Delusion, is a television documentary written and presented by Richard Dawkins in which he argues that humanity would be better off without religion or belief in God....
- documentary by Richard DawkinsRichard DawkinsClinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author... - The Voyage that Shook the WorldThe Voyage that Shook the WorldThe Voyage That Shook The World is a 2009 dramatised documentary film commissioned by Creation Ministries International, a Christian Young Earth creationist organisation, and produced by Fathom Media...