Movies

Droning funnyman Ben Stein monkeys around with evolution with the new documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they're losing the "intelligent design" debate because of academic "prejudice."

Expelled is a full-on, amply budgeted Michael Moore-styled mockery of evolution, a film that dresses creationist crackpottery in an "intelligent design" leisure suit and tries to make the fact that it's not given credence in schools a matter of "academic freedom."

Using loaded language and loaded imagery, Stein and Co. (Nathan Frankowski is the credited director) equate evolution with atheism, lay responsibility for the Holocaust at the feet of Charles Darwin, interview and creatively edit biologists and others to make them look foolish for insisting that science, not religion, can explain creation.

Their goal? Create just a sliver of doubt about evolution. It's a classic Big Tobacco/Inconvenient Truth denial tactic. Stein and friends use scientists' need to speak in terms of probabilities, rather than absolutes, to undercut a scientific theorem that withstands test after test, from Darwin to the Scopes Monkey Trial.

Shockingly, the "experts" Stein hurls up against evolution are disgruntled, under-credentialed academics dismissed from lesser colleges, they say, because they wanted to teach creation rather than science.

Credentialed scientists who also describe themselves as Christian have attacked the film for suggesting they are persecuted for their beliefs. They say they aren't. Others interviewed for the film have complained of dishonest editing, misrepresentations and about not having the pleasure of having actually met Stein.

Expelled relies on the viewer's inability or unwillingness to wrestle with a complex corner of science, double-talking its way toward a "must be a miracle" solution to anything that science may not claim to have an answer for. Dismiss that for having no basis in fact, and you're infringing on "academic freedom."

That's not it at all, Ben. And really, when academia, the courts, the opinions of the educated have all weighed in on this subject on that "other side," who's the real monkey in this "debate"?