April 21, 2008

A Moral Trainwreck

When I first saw the trailer for Expelled I was excited. I like Ben Stein. If scientists are being 'expelled' for asking questions, then that ought to be international news. At least, it would be a big deal to me! It's disappointing then that so much dishonesty went into the film. It fails to even foster a discussion, as it fails to define the terms of its own topic. In a morbid kind of way, I am also disappointed the handful of 'expelled' scientists weren't even expelled as Stein claims.

If you'd like an in-depth review of Expelled, this one by the Colorado Confidential will do. I'm going to talk about much of the controversy and dishonesty in the film, because that was the most disappointing to me.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, you can jump to the end.

UPDATE

The Anti-Defamation League, "the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism," issued a statement on April 29 condemning Ben Stein and his film for trivializing the Holocaust. Stein's immorality and dishonesty should not go unnoticed.

Gag Orders are Kinky

It's interesting to note that after the early screenings began receiving atrocious reviews, the producers started asking the press to sign Non Disclosure Agreements. Ironic that a documentary about freedom of expression tries to place legal gags on the audience. Even more ironic, given its title, that the film's producers would expel a scientist from the theatre for trying to watch it.

At one of the early screenings of the film, the public was invited to attend provided they signed up on the theatre's Web site. P.Z. Myers signed up for himself, his whole family, and his friend Richard Dawkins. Myers is a scientist who is interviewed in the film, and is even given a special thanks in the credits. Myer's showed up to the theatre with his party, but he,

The NY Times had a blurb about the weirdness of the expulsion of a contributor from the documentary, and Myers has written quite a bit about it. Dawkins and all of Myers family got into the film, only Myers, whose name was on the reservation, had to be escorted out by the police.

Expelled for Plagiarism

Very poor behavior, but not surprising considering the producer is facing a copyright lawsuit for using other people's work (the cellular-level CG animation that has been illegally used by the Discovery Institute before).

Evolving Lies

The producers also lied to the scientists they interviewed, telling them (in writing):

• That they were from a different film company than they were.
• That the movie was going to be very different in tone and theme than it is.

The reason for the deception is most likely that a number of the scientists, particularly Dawkins, have stated in the past that they will not participate in any pro-intelligent design film, especially any done by the film group they really represented.

Particularly sad on the producer's part is how after they were questioned about these lies, they said (also in writing) that the final theme and title for Expelled was a last minute thing, advised to them by their PR team, and that they had originally been this other film company, but they got absorbed by the one funded by the Discovery Institute (the group Dawkins has specifically said he won't work with). Due to the magic of the interwebs, we can look at domain registration information, company registration info, and interviews with Ben Stein that all demonstrate Expelled's theme was concrete and well-formed by the DI film team years before they contacted the scientists. You can find all that info nicely cataloged here.

Hack Job = Documentary

As an example of the Michael Moore-style of editing interviews to ridicule the interviewee is Stein's treatment of Michael Ruse. Stein makes a recurring joke of Ruse. There's a clip of Ruse saying the origin of life could have come from "replicating patterns on the surfaces of crystals in inorganic clays." Stein sarcastically mocks this as being absurd.

But what really happened in the interview is that Stein asked Ruse how life originated. This has nothing to do with evolution -- evolution is about the variation of species, not where life came from. But Ruse answered the question and chose a theory as an illustration of what such a scientific theory of the origin of life might look like. Ruse never said or implied that he believed that theory, or that it was a good theory, or that it had any evidence for it. He was quite clear in saying it was an example of the kind of theories that scientists are researching for the origin of life, and that right now science has no good theory for how life started. This was just one quick soundbyte theory, given in response to an irrelevant question for a documentary about evolution. All of that was cut from the film though, and instead we get to see Ruse appearing to say he believes life started in mud. A point Ben Stein returns to repeatedly for laughs.

This was the standard treatment for all the scientists interviewed. Get them to say something silly, purely as a hypothetical example, remove the bit about it being an example, and play the laugh track.

Not so surprising they expelled Myers when they saw him in line.

As they say on Expelled Exposed,

Why Do You Care?

This is worth writing so much about because I'm excited to see a film that gives great arguments about evolution, fosters discussion, and looks cool doing it. Because of the unethical acts of Expelled's producers, such a film is now less likely to be made. Scientists now have good reason to turn down interviews and to be wary about talking on camera. This chills debate.

Perhaps more importantly, the irresponsible arguments made in this film are going to reach people. The strongest and most visible 'argument' in the film is that the theory of evolution is directly responsible for Hitler's crimes against humanity. This promotion of hate and intolerance will only lead to truly pathetic scenarios like this, where people have feelings of intolerance and hatred justified by Stein's dishonest and factually wrong bullshit

This is a letter Michael Shermer received. The author had just seen Expelled.

That's why pernicious tripe like Expelled is worth spilling some ink over.

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