Expelled: the movie

I took my 8-year-old to see this documentary yesterday. It was really good. I know I could have waited for the DVD and bought it for the price I paid for the movie tickets, but I wanted to support Ben Stein with my dollars. This is the kind of thing that is valuable to have open to the general public.

The movie started with scenes of the Berlin Wall, and it is used throughout the film as a metaphor of the intellectual wall in science intended to keep ideas of intelligent design out of discourse. Mr. Stein interviewed scientists who have lost their jobs in universities for even mentioning intelligent design. He also talks to scientists who feel that anyone who believes that way is stupid. The main question seems to be, not evolution in terms of species change, but the origins of life and species transmuting (i.e. reptiles into mammals etc.). Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist biologist, conceded that life could possibly have been designed by aliens (who had themselves evolved), but no God could ever have been involved because he doesn't exist.

Mr. Stein also pursued the logical consequences of Darwinian evolution as a philosophical system. That led him to Hitler. Multiple people talked about how Hitler, while evil, was not crazy. He honestly believed that he was benefiting the human race by improving the gene pool. Darwin was quoted as saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, that "civilized society" is dooming itself by allowing imbeciles to survive and breed, and that no farmer would breed inferior stock. (The movie didn't mention that Darwin (go to November 2005 and the article, "Darwin's Skrink") was married to his cousin, and was himself the offspring of several generations of cousins marrying. Most of his children died very young of genetic diseases that would have been eradicated through not inter-marrying. It is also interesting to note that Darwin didn't lose his faith in God because of his science, but after the death of his favorite daughter.)

My daughter thought the best part was a computer simulation of the inner workings of a cell. It was very beautiful and shown to demonstrate the irreducible complexity of the cell. One of the interesting points brought up was that if evolution were true, DNA would continue expanding and getting more complex, but the evidence seems to point to the opposite. It appears as though the DNA were programmed and over the millenia, it's been losing information and becoming more compact.

There were several disturbing photos of concentration camps and a tour of a facility that killed "mentally impaired" people in Germany, so I would recommend not taking extremely sensitive children to this film, or at least waiting for the DVD so it can be skipped.