Expelled: no reasoning or integrity allowed
The other day I was browsing Kerasotes’ website and I noticed that the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” was featured prominently in the “Coming Soon” section, receiving billing above even the next Chronicles of Narnia movie.
This was hardly the first exposure to this movie that I have had. I’ve been following it’s progress through other blogs and websites for a while now. But it suddenly made it a lot more real, and close to home. Would we really be getting Expelled shown here in Richmond?
The synopsis of the movie is this: Intelligent Design is the position that everything we see around us in the natural world must have been the product, at some level, by an unidentified supernatural designer, and that traditional solely-naturalistic explanations are insufficient to explain the complexity we see around us. Those individuals who support Intelligent Design are constantly being suppressed by the proponents of “Darwinism” (Stein’s word for “Evolution / Naturalistic worldview”). Darwinism is also “necessary, but not sufficient,” in the words of David Berlinski, for the horrible atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.
But of course, this movie really isn’t a documentary so much as a propaganda film. With recent reviews done by Michael Shermer & John Rennie of Scientific American, and a very fresh Copyright Infringement lawsuit pending, the contents of the movie are almost moot compared to the details surrounding it.
Fallacious premises
According to Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic magazine and writer of several books), the basic premise of the movie that supporters of Intelligent Design are being silenced everywhere, is completely bogus. Shermer focuses on three main examples that the movie highlights as martyrs for the cause:
- Stephen Meyer, whose article “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” was published in a Peer-Reviewed Journal by Richard Sternberg (Editor at the time)
- Richard Sternberg, the editor mentioned, who was allegedly fired from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for approving Meyer’s article
- Guillermo Gonzalez, an Astronomer at Iowa State who was denied tenure allegedly because of his support for Intelligent Design.
But what really happened?
Stephen Meyer is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, the central nervous system of Intelligent Design advocacy. His article was published in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (June 2004 issue) and was solely reviewed by Sternberg, who approved it. It may be germane to note that Sternberg is hardly impartial in this matter: He is on the editorial board of Occasional Papers of the Baraminology Study Group, is a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, and is listed on the Discovery Institute’s “100 Scientists that doubt Darwinism.” So impartial discretion on a paper regarding biological origins, coupled with a unilateral decision under the radar, makes this whole situation look very dubious.
Shermer also points out that as the paper is apparently more about Paleontology than Taxonomy (Sternberg’s forte), it would have been more appropriate to have one of the other editors do the review, or at least run it by them in tandem. But instead, Sternberg elected to choose himself as the sole reviewer. Did he really get fired over this and have his “reputation smeared” as Stein claims? Shermer writes: “According to Jonathan Coddington, his supervisor at the NMNH, Sternberg was not discriminated against, was never dismissed, and in fact was not even a paid employee, but just an unpaid research associate who had completed his three-year term!” So in a nutshell, the movie lied deceptively about this.
And what of Gonzalez, the tenuer-denied Astronomer? Was he really denied tenure due to his views / beliefs? Did his book Privileged Planet cause him to lose his inevitable tenure? Shermer writes:
“Although Gonzales was apparently a productive scientist before he moved to Iowa State, Scott says that “while there, his publication record tanked, he brought in only a couple of grants—one of which was from the [John] Templeton Foundation to write The Privileged Planet—didn’t have very many graduate students, and those he had never completed their degrees. Lots of people don’t get tenure, for the same legitimate reasons that Gonzalez didn’t get tenure.”
So again, another example of the producers / writers outright lying about what really happened. [All quotes and content in the section sourced from Shermer’s original article]
Interview Trickery?
One of the common claims from the interviewees in this film, which include Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Eugenie Scott, Michael Shermer, William Provine, and many others, is that they felt deceived with regards to what the movie was about. PZ Myers is the most notable case (simply because he’s so vocal) and his story begins here. Keep these two things in mind: He was told the movie was entitled “Crossroads: the intersection of science and religion,” and he received the letter in April.
Mark Mathis, the producer, has since been giving his canned response that “Crossroads” was the working title, which is a common thing in filmmaking. This statement is technically true, and yet simultaneously deceptive.
Let’s make a hypothesis: If the filmmakers were indeed using “Crossroads” as a working title until they decided what the final title would be, then there shouldn’t be anything to prove that they not only had thought of expelled as the title, but also committed to it as the title, right? Check the whois information for expelledmovie.com. Specifically this part:
Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 16-Feb-2008.
Record expires on 02-Mar-2009.
Record created on 02-Mar-2007.
Note the “Record created on” date. The domain “expelledthemovie.com” has identical registration dates. (As a control, “Crossroadsmovie.com” is registered by Viacom, in reference to the Britney Spears film, and “Crossroadsthemovie.com” is registered to someone else entirely.) This domain was registered on March 2nd of 2007. That’s a full-month before PZ claims he received his letter from Mark Mathis. The line of questioning that Ben Stein had asked his interviewees, documented in Michael Shermer’s comments on Richard Dawkins’ review, further supports this hypothesis.
The producers knew what the title was - they knew what they were shooting about, the producers outright lied to their interview subjects in order to deceive them into lowering their defenses and saying things that could easily be taken out of context.
Oh, the Irony!
On March 20th, PZ Myers, a Scienceblogger, outspoken critic of this movie, and also one of the featured interviewees in this film, attempted to see a pre-showing of this film at the Mall of America. He RSVP’d through their system, was informed that no ticket was necessary since the box office would have a list of names, and attended with his daughter, her boyfriend, and a couple friends.
It’s important to note that whether or not he was completely legitimate in RSVP’ing is up for debate, as he self-admittedly had not explicitly received an invitation, but RSVP’d through their system. So his registration was legitimate, even if the invitation was not. I would venture that if it were anyone else, they would likely not have cared, but I can’t say that for certain.
As he says on his recap of the account from the Apple store in the mall:
I was standing in line, hadn’t even gotten to the point where I had to sign in and show ID, and a policeman pulled me out of line and told me I could not go in. I asked why, of course, and he said that a producer of the film had specifically instructed him that I was not to be allowed to attend. The officer also told me that if I tried to go in, I would be arrested. I assured him that I wasn’t going to cause any trouble.
…
They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn’t notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn’t recognize him. My guest was:
Richard Dawkins.
He’s in the theater right now, watching their movie.
The irony is, of course, that PZ was expelled from expelled (although given that the subtitle is “No Intelligence Allowed” I suppose it’s more “fitting” than ironic), although Dawkins being allowed in at the expense of PZ is in an awfully close second place.
In the week that followed this debacle, a windstorm of spinning, recapping, and back-and-forthing occurred. The Expelled crowd’s statement was that PZ was attempting to infiltrate the movie, and that Dawkins had snuck in by registering with his surname, Clinton (I think they mean “middle name” though). However, PZ attests that he merely wrote “1 Guest” on his registration. I think that’s pretty reasonable, although at this point it’s just hearsay. The Expelled camp was trying to spin PZ as one of the “evil Darwinists hellbent on keeping you from seeing the truth!”
Also - the blog “Matt’s Notepad” has a rather lengthy writeup about this event and offers this bit:
Of course, the screenings themselves are rather questionable themselves. People going in have to sign non-disclosure agreements, show photo ID, not take in any bags or purses and so on. Rather odd all in all. The screenings are patrolled by off duty police officers using night vision goggles. How is this known? Well, people have gotten in and had a look at a screening and reported back on the whole affair. ‘Nomad’ made a lengthy review of the whole thing, Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel also saw it and gave it a damning review. And here’s another review of Expelled, just to make it a trio of them. This is actually very interesting since the films makers are, as seen, actively filtering who actually gets to see screenings and who doesn’t; making sure that positive crowds get the chance to see it. Again, extremely eyebrow raising considering the supposed point of the film being academic freedom.
Additionally, their latest strategy has been to screen the list of RSVP’s, and send “cancellation notices” to undesirables, and then moving the actual film time back from 7pm to 6pm. They are quite obviously trying to actively control any possible dissent or negative reviews of the movie, which suggests, to me anyways, that they’ve got something to hide.
Copyright Infringement
In a quite recent development, a recent letter drafted to the company that produced the movie has claimed damages for copyright infringement. The letter itself is a bit lengthy, but you can read it at that link. The key portion is here:
… To our knowledge, this film includes a segment depicting biological cellular activity that was copied by computer-generated means from a video entitled “The Inner Life of a Cell.” XVIVO holds the copyright to all the models, processes, and depictions in this video, and has not authorized Premise Media or Rampant Films to make any use of this material.
We have obtained promotional material for the “Expelled” film, presented on a DVD, that clearly shows in the “cell segment” the virtually identical depiction of material from the “Inner Life” video. We particularly refer to the segment of the “Expelled” film purporting to show the “walking” models of kinesic activities in cellular mechanisms. The segments depicting these models in your film are clearly based upon, and copied from, material in the “Inner Life” video.
What’s really strange about this is that it’s not the first time the Intelligent Design community has illegally used this specific copyrighted video unauthorized. Abby Smith, also known as “ERV” by her blog, has chronicled the specific history of William Dembski’s unauthorized use of the “Inner Life” video. Originally the video was produced by Harvard (the “XVIVO” folks) - Dembski used it with a different over-dubbed audio track. You can read more about it on her site (warning: she can be a bit vitriolic) and on Austringer’s.
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| Top: Harvard’s version Bottom: Expelled’s version |
At this time, the best they have been able to respond with is to simply reiterate the obvious, via Jonathan Wells:
Expelled does NOT use the Harvard animation. The producers paid a professional to create a new animation that is more accurate than the Harvard one (based on current knowledge of cellular processes). Any similarities between the Expelled animation and the Harvard one are due to the fact that both animations depict many of the same processes.
But what’s interesting about this is something that PZ Myers had pointed out a while back: there’s a unique phenomenon noticed in duplicates called “plagiarized errors”. I’ll let PZ tell it:
… the idea that the real tell-tale of a copy is when it’s the mistakes that are duplicated, in addition to the accuracies. In this case, I previously criticized the Harvard video for a shortcut. That kinesin molecule is illustrated showing a stately march, step by step, straight down the microtubule. Observations of kinesin show it’s more complex, jittering back and forth and advancing stochastically. That’s a simplification in the Harvard video that is also present in Expelled’s version.
Ok — so it’s not important that you understand the difference, or even know what a kinesin molecule is — just that you understand that plagiarism can result in copied errors as well. It’s sort of like if you were plagiarizing a paper for a school assignment, would you bother to fact check all the points it makes? Or just change it enough that it’s not a word-for-word copy? Right.
So here we have Jonathan Wells saying that the Expelled version “is more accurate than the Harvard one,” and yet the video shows the same shortcut inaccuracy that the Harvard version does. Which is more plausible? (1) The producers of expelled changed just enough about the video that it’s not a pixel-for-pixel copy? Or (2) The producers of expelled made an original video that looks nearly identical, and just so happened to make the same mistakes regarding kinesin’s behavior? (And remember, this particular video has been used unauthorized in the past by Wm. Dembski!)
UPDATE:
- (April 15 2008) There is a very tongue-in-cheek comparison at DarwinCentral. It makes the similarities quite clear.
- (April 17 2008) The “Inner Life” infringing clip has been removed from the movie.
What You Can Do
Well, for starters, pass the link to this article around. While it’s true that all publicity may be good for the movie, as a good controversy is sure to fill seats — if we can at least arm people with some foreknowledge of the background behind the movie, and the film maker’s unethical (and allegedly illegal) behaviors, it should at least make people realize the Emperor has no clothes.
I don’t know if we’ll be getting the movie here in Richmond or not, but I have written an email to the manager of our theater and she has forwarded my concerns on to the booking manager. So we’ll see, I suppose.
The best weapon we have is to educate people about the between-the-lines details of this movie. They may still choose to see it, but hopefully they will see through deception.
What do you think?
UPDATE : Further reading
- Salt Lake Tribune: Movies: Hiding ‘Expelled’ from critics a not-so-intelligent move
- Huffington Post: Ben Stein: Front Man for Creationism’s Manufactroversy
- Expelled Exposed: Expelled