Review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) by Jennifer W — 28 Feb 2009

It's hard to separate the content of the movie from the quality ratings. Not a huge ID fan, and Stein clearly has an agenda in this pseudo-documentary.

I actually agree with him that science is not a democracy, and there are many ideas which are shunned by the masses.

However, philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn referred to this phenomenon years ago, as the way that science 'works'. Paradigm shifts in science come slowly, with a few advocates of new ideas slowly gaining ground within the mainstream. However, this usually doesn't come without some pain from those advocates of new ideas.

I doubt ID will ever be the source of a paradigm shift in biology, but this movie, which sets up science as a big bad version of 'the Man', seems a little melodramatic. There was a particularly disturbing portion where Ben explores the relationship between Darwinism and the Nazis. Really, Ben? That is beneath you. The fact that Ben used a lot of cheap manipulative movie things (like very blatant editing for the 'right' incriminating comments from Darwinists), really made me want to smack him.

That being said, it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I'm not a huge fan of Michael Moore either, but I suppose that after all of his movies, the left, the scientific community, and all of us currently unaffiliated, had it coming.