From Dr. Tom Schmid (UNCW Department of Philosophy and Religion):
Ben Stein has turned to "swiftboating" evolutionary biology in his newest film, which links Darwin to Nazism, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," <http://www.expelledthemovie.com/> according to this article.
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/04/29/950658.aspx.
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From Dr. David Sepkoski (UNCW Department of History):
This is a good piece, although Alan Boyle's article is a little more moderate with some of its criticisms of the film than I (and other commentators) would be.
The one-stop resource about the movie is the NCSE's site here: http://www.expelledexposed.com/ There are a huge number of reviews online, but a couple of the best were published by Scientific American here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=sciam-reviews-expelled
There are two points that I think need to be made more clearly. First, the producers of Expelled do not simply stretch the truth. They deliberately lie. This can be seen in their portrayal of the so-called 'victims' of 'Big Science' who have been 'expelled' from the academy. For example, one of their martyrs, Richard Sternberg, is presented as an "employee" of the Smithsonian who was "fired" for supporting Intelligent Design. In fact, he never had a paying job at the Smithsonian, a fact Sternberg and the producers deliberately obscure, and nor was he 'fired.' He is in fact still an unpaid research associate there.
The second, more troubling point, is the movie's obscene use of the Holocaust to promote a political agenda. In a move that has been labeled by some as a species of Holocaust denial, the film omits mention of the centuries of Christian antisemitism, German nationalism, etc. that preceded the rise of the Nazis, and attempts to pin the entire thing on Darwin. While Boyle argues that "in fact, a perverted view of Darwinism was one of the ingredients that produced the horrors of Nazism," this is not even partially 'in fact.' 'Darwinism' played no role in the Holocaust or Nazi ideology. For example, Hitler made no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf, although he did cite Luther and Christianity many times. The homicidal eugenics program of the Nazis has nothing to do with Darwin or evolutionary theory; eugenics is based on the principle of ARTIFICIAL, not NATURAL selection. There is something disgusting about a group of evangelical Christians (see the Expelledexposed site for a description of the movie's producers) using one of the greatest examples of evil in human history to support their ideological attack on science.
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