Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Expelled No Intelligence Allowed is a 2008 documentary film directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring Ben Stein. The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design in nature and who criticize evidence supporting Darwinian evolution and the modern evolutionary synthesis as a scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nations laboratories and classrooms. The scientific theory of evolution is portrayed by the film as contributing to fascism, the Holocaust, communism, atheism, and eugenics. The film portrays intelligent design as motivated by science, rather than religion, though it does not give a detailed definition of the phrase or attempt to explain it on a scientific level. Other than briefly addressing issues of irreducible complexity, Expelled examines it as a political issue.

Expelled No Intelligence Allowed is described by its promoters as a controversial satirical documentary. Ben Stein provides narrative commentary throughout the film. He is depicted as visiting a sequence of universities to interview 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 Hitlers 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 sociologist Uta George, 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.The film depicts intelligent design as an alternative to evolution, and claims it deserves a place in academia. This design theory is defined in the film by the Discovery Institutes Paul Nelson as the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as a resul

Source: Wikipedia