David Klinghoffer nails the Darwinists’ noisome effort to deny Darwinism’s influence on Nazi ideology in today’s National Review Online. He knocks down the straw man arguments they employ–the pretense that the film is mainly or even substantially about this topic, or that the film blames the bulk of the Nazi enterprise on Darwin or that the film calls today’s Darwinists Nazis. But mainly he simply marshals the historians. (The very best current history, of course, is Darwin to Hitler, by Richard Weikart of Cal State.)

Last night in Dallas the official theater run of Expelled was kicked off with a gala premiere complete with red carpet, film narrator Ben Stein, and the film’s main stars, the Expelled scientists. Here’s a few pictures. (For full disclosure, I took the crummy one, the others were supplied by an attendee with a camera that far outclassed my phone.)Click for full size images.Expelled scientists, Drs. Richard Sternberg, Guillermo Gonzalez, Robert Marks and Discovery’s Dr. John West at the world premiere of Expelled.Drs. Gonzalez, West, and Marks on the red carpet.Attendees partied before the actual screening of the film.Some of the attending Expelled scientists being introduced to attendees by the executive producers. (Left to right: Robert Marks, Michael Egnor, Guillermo Read More ›

Finally, a writer known to me personally to be a smart and honest guy, no ignoramus nor a propagandist, attacks the Hitler-Darwin thesis in Expelled. Ronald Bailey, who used to write book reviews for me at National Review, comments on the movie in the libertarian magazine Reason. He complains that linking Darwinism with Nazism is the “most egregious part of the film.” He harrumphs that the Expelled filmmakers “overlook the fact that people down through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for why they are permitted to murder each other, including plunder, tribal competition, and, yes, religion.” OK, but when Muslims today commit mass slaughter in the name of their religion, or when Christians once did so, it Read More ›

Today The Seattle Times is sure to provoke a reaction from Darwinists with an article by Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman, “An Intelligent Discussion about Life.” “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a trenchant new film by actor/economist Ben Stein, the man first made famous in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He’s now tackling with humorous dudgeon the classic example of ideological science, Darwinian evolution. Stein shows Darwinists insistently misrepresenting the scientific case against their theory. Where facts and reason might fail to persuade, personal attacks are employed, sometimes even by organizations supposedly committed to civil discourse. When I was taught Darwin’s theory in college more than four decades ago, it was represented as unassailable. But I also was taught in those Read More ›