Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed - Overview

Overview

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is described by its promoters as a controversial satirical documentary. Ben Stein provides narrative commentary throughout the film and is depicted as visiting a sequence of universities to interview both proponents of intelligent design who claim to have been victimized and evolutionary scientists who are presented as atheists. The film makes considerable use of vintage film clips, including opening scenes showing the Berlin Wall being constructed as a metaphor for barriers to the scientific acceptance of intelligent design. The film takes aim at some scientific hypotheses of the origin of life, and presents a short animation portraying the inner workings of the cell to introduce the intelligent design concept of irreducible complexity, the claim that such complexity could not arise from spontaneous mutations. The intelligent design proponents shown include Richard Weikart, who claims that Darwinism influenced the Nazis. The film also associates Hitler's ambitions of a master race and the holocaust to Darwinian ideas of survival of the fittest through stock footage film clips of filmed images of Nazi concentration camp laboratories as well as statements of the director of the Hadamar Memorial, where 15,000 people with disabilities were killed during WWII. The film directly addresses intelligent design only superficially, focusing on how it is treated in academia rather than on issues involving the concept itself. It makes almost no attempt to define intelligent design or show any scientific evidence in favor of intelligent design. Instead, the film deals with the subject almost entirely from a political, rather than scientific, viewpoint.

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