[Ed note: The documentary Expelled, starring Ben Stein, premiers today. It purports to show that views on the origins of life and species that dissent from orthodox evolutionary theory have been systematically, well, expelled from the academy. Sahotra Sarkar, Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, finds the film unpersuasive. His piece is presented as a counterpoint to Discovery Institute Fellow David Klinghoffer's interpretation of the lessons of Expelled, available through the link at right.]

If you can’t argue for your position on intellectual grounds, try politics. If you can’t succeed with legitimate political argument, resort to ad hominem attacks. That’s what the Intelligent Design (ID) movement has been reduced to, especially in Expelled. ID creationists have produced no credible argument against the theory of evolution, let alone positive evidence for design, a point to which I’ll return. Politically their fortunes have been devastated ever since the 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania court decision in which a George W. Bush-appointed Church-going judge found ID to be religious dogma that cannot legally be introduced in public school science classes. So now we are presented with a new line of attack: because natural selection was invoked by the Nazis in support of genocide, the theory of evolution must be false. To this, David Klinghoffer adds a new twist: if you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite.

We Have Moral Faculties *Because* We Evolved Them That evolutionary theory, especially natural selection, has been abused by various groups for nefarious political ends is old and well-worn history. In the United States it inspired Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century which was used to justify the greed of the robber barons and the appalling conditions in which the poor were forced to live. In many regions of the world it was used to promote eugenics, including the involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.” In the United States, such sterilization continued until 1981. And, yes, natural selection was invoked by the Nazis.

What this history tells us is that science does not occur in a socio-political vacuum. The results of science may be abused, just as they may be used to benefit society. Biology is particularly prone to such use and abuse because its domain includes humans. Scientists should recognize their moral responsibility to guard against the misuse of their work. By and large, biologists have acted responsibly in this respect. In the 1930s, the great British evolutionary biologist, J.B.S. Haldane exposed the fallacies of eugenics and anti-Semitism in his brilliantly argued Heredity and Politics. In the 1980s, Not in Our Genes, by Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Leon Kamin, played the same role after illegitimate political claims began to be reintroduced in the name of behavioral genetics and sociobiology. When the Human Genome Project was initiated in the early 1990s, biologists took care to ensure that adequate resources were deployed to address its ethical, legal, and social implications.

Returning to the theory of evolution, there is no “inner logic” of natural selection that leads to any moral or political implication. It is value-neutral. We have evolved a mind and, with it, culture as well as moral capacities and what we think of as free will. Some biologists think that this was all due to natural selection. Others suspect that a variety of natural mechanisms were involved in mental evolution. This is one of the exciting unresolved issues in evolutionary biology, and the subject of ongoing research. Biology may constrain our physical and mental capacities but, in normal individuals (those whom the courts would consider as “legally competent”), biology has never been shown to determine moral choices. We are responsible for our actions. For instance, if we choose to use our religious or political dogmas to harm science education for children, we must bear the moral responsibility that entails.

Note, moreover, there was antisemitism before Darwin and it persists today in many religious fundamentalist circles which are entirely hostile to the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution is thus obviously not the source of antisemitism. Given the long history of Christian antisemitism, is particularly odd that apologists for Christianity, as most ID creationists are, should try to use disgust with antisemitism for their own rhetorical and political purposes. Note, also, that what inspired Hitler in Mein Kampf as much as biology was the example of the United States. By Klinghoffer’s logic, we should also reject much of our own heritage simply because it inspired Hitler.

The evidence for evolution is overwhelming and available from a wide variety of sources including the National Center for Science Education. ID creationism has presented no viable alternative. Its main argument has been that complex life forms could not have evolved. In response, biologists such as Jerry Coyne, Richard Lenski, Ken Miller, H. Allen Orr, and many others have routinely pointed out the variety of mundane mechanisms by which complex systems can emerge through natural selection. I have recently summarized these arguments in Doubting Darwin? Creationist Designs on Evolution. In fact, what has surprised most of us is how rapidly complexity can evolve: For instance, it took less than seventy years for bacteria to evolve resistance to some pesticides even though it required concerted changes in several different enzymes.

Worse, ID creationists have never laid out what their theory is supposed to be, besides vague mystical invocations of “design.” We have never been given an exact definition of design, or the laws it is supposed to obey. These creationists have not even been able to generate a research program. This is one of the reasons why the Templeton Foundation stopped funding the Discovery Institute.

Let us return one last time to the logic of Expelled (and Klinghoffer). Let us suppose for the sake of argument that the theory of evolution really led to some undesirable political consequence, which, as we have seen, is simply not true. From this assumption, it is supposed to follow that evolutionary theory is false and we should replace it with ID. Let us see where this takes us. From the usual rules of chemistry many nations, including the United States, have designed chemical weapons. From this, should we conclude that chemistry is false and we should replace it with Intelligent Alchemy? From the principles of molecular genetics, many of these same nations have designed biological weapons. Should we declare molecular genetics false and replace it with Intelligent Pangenesis? From quantum mechanics came the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Therefore, quantum mechanics is false and should be replaced by Intelligent Ether Theory?

[Ed note: The documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring Ben Stein, premiers today. The film purports to show that views on the origins of life and species that dissent from orthodox evolutionary theory have been systematically, well, expelled from the academy. Previous Jewcy coverage of Expelled is here. David Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, presents one view of the lessons to be drawn from the film below. Sahotra Sarkar, Professor of Philosophy and Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, presents a counterargument through the link to the right.]

Hitler understood something about Judaism that even many Jews today don’t grasp.

I mention this because you’re soon going to be hearing a lot about a new movie, Expelled, which understands something about Hitler that, in turn, many Jews and non-Jews don’t or don’t want to understand.

Starring comic actor Ben Stein, Expelled is a snarky theatrical documentary about the suppression of American scientists who dissent from Darwinist evolutionary orthodoxy. Controversial stuff. What’s really turning critics apoplectic, though, is the case made in the film that Darwinism inspired the Nazis.

Which, in fact, it did. In Mein Kampf, Hitler used Darwinian language to make hisIs it time to reconsider Darwin? case for racial war against the Jews. He rallied the millions of Germans who bought his bestselling book with an appeal to biology, which, as he argued, revealed certain iron laws of Nature – principally the struggle for supremacy pitting the superior races against the inferior.

Defy Nature, he wrote, and then “whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, might be ruined with one blow.” The major Hitler biographers – Toland, Fest, Kershaw, Bullock -- all agree on Hitler’s debt to Darwinism.

A gentle soul, Darwin himself never advocated genocide. But in The Descent of Man, he predicted that the logic of natural selection made inevitable something like what Hitler attempted against the Jews:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.”

What you would not readily foresee from reading Darwin’s writings is that the race requiring extermination would turn out to be us Jews. But Hitler perceived an inner logic in Darwinism that even Charles Darwin didn’t.

In the same chapter of Mein Kampf where the Darwinist flavor is most pronounced – Chapter XI, “Nation and Race” – Hitler comments that while his philosophical outlook is based on respecting Nature’s laws, the Jews with their “effrontery” say the opposite: that “Man’s role is to overcome Nature!”

Hitler notes with disgust that, “Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense and end up by really imagining that they themselves represent a kind of conqueror of Nature.”

There is, in other words, a Darwinian case for seeing the Jews as the ultimate Enemy. Darwin’s portrait of reality in his books is one where Nature determines all. In The Descent of Man, he explains that even our morality is a product of natural selection just like everything else about us.

The Jews, Hitler wrote, defy nature and call others to do so. This is the characteristic “Jewish nonsense.”

Which bring us to Hitler’s insight into Judaism. He had put his finger on a profound theme in rabbinic literature. The greatest sages of the Jewish past – from the the Maharal of Prague to Moshe Chaim Luzzatto to Samson Raphael Hirsch – taught that overcoming Nature is indeed the Jewish mission.

Practically, this means overcoming our own nature, bending it God’s will. As the Maharal (1525-1609)and others explained, the symbol of this unique Jewish mission is circumcision, a most unnatural thing to do.

We perform the bris specifically on the eighth day of an infant’s life. That’s because in the system of Jewish number symbolism, seven signifies the natural order of the world, which in the Bible’s narrative was created in seven days. The transcendence of this natural order is represented by seven plus one, or eight.

The bris on the male organ became, then, a most logical symbol of Jews and Judaism. A remarkable rabbinic image in the ancient midrashic work Tanchuma tells how the archetypal enemy of the Jews in Scripture, the wickedly nihilistic tribe of Amalek, abused the bodies of slain Jewish males. They would “cut off the circumcised organs and fling them upward,” a sign of contempt for Heaven. (See Rashi’s note on Deuteronomy 25:18.)

Comparing the Nazis with Amalek is common in modern Jewish thought, but some Nazis too saw themselves that way. When Julius Streicher was hung, his last words were to cry out bitterly, “Purim Festival 1946!” It was a reference to the Jewish holiday commemorating the events recounted in the book of Esther.

In the story, a minister in the Persian royal court, Haman, descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, seeks to exterminate the Jews but is executed himself in the end, by hanging. As historian Robert Conot writes in Justice at Nuremberg, this demonstrates Streicher’s “fascination with and knowledge of Judaism.”

Indeed. We could say the same of Hitler.

Ben Stein: Schoolboy rebel Ben Stein has worn many hats throughout the course of his professional life.He has been a writer, a professor, a lawyer, a Hollywood consultant, and, famously, an actor and gameshow host.He even had a stint as a speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.Now Stein is simultaneously taking on some new roles: Documentary filmmaker, self-proclaimed rebel of our generation, and…Intelligent Design proponent? Beginning April 18, he’s bringing his rebellious self to a theater near you with his new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a documentary about the freedom of speech (or lack thereof) surrounding the Intelligent Design/Darwinism debate.

Stein lays the foundation for his quest in the opening to the film’s impending-doom-filled trailor:

Like most people, I also have questions.Very big questions, like how did we get here? Where are we going?Is there a meaning and purpose in life?Or are we, the universe, and everything in it, merely the result of pure dumb fate and chance?For most of my life, I believe the answers to these questions were fairly straightforward.Everything that exists was created by a loving God.

Fair enough. Respecting that very smart people, namely Darwinist scientists, believe otherwise, Stein remained untroubled by the matter, acknowledging that Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Inquiry entitles everyone to express his own opinion and to pursue his own research.But then the primordial soup hit the fan.Stein heard about Richard Sternberg, former managing editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a scientific journal affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute, who lost his job and suffered academic and professional persecution simply by allowing an article by Discovery Institute mastermind Stephen C. Meyer to be published.Stein regarded this event as a tragedy, with dangerous implications.

“We believe in a free society,” Stein says.“This isn’t Nazi Germany.”He claims that we are living in a “Era of Darwin” in which people must learn to shut up and play along with the paradigm of evolution, or to face dire consequences.And, according to Stein, everyone is in on the conspiracy, including the media, the academy, and the court systems.The logical conclusion: Darwinists are afraid and are hiding something.

The Mouse Trap: Too complex to work without one of its parts His main argument is that in the time of Galileo, Intelligent Design theorists would have had no problem propagating and vocalizing their ideas.Too bad that in making such an argument, Stein completely overlooks the fact that Galileo was placed under house arrest, had his books banned, and was forced to discredit all of his research, simply for having the audacity to say that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around.

Ultimately, Stein concludes that “Darwinism is not only improbable, it might actually be dangerous.”In a November 2007 interview with Bill O’Reilly, Stein says that he sees gaps in Darwinism that no one is attempting to fill except for Intelligent Design Theorists.Whether or not these theorists turn out to be right is irrelevant, he says—the simple fact that they attempt to provide a counterpoint is noble in itself.

Even if this is a fair argument, it is hard to pick out amid Stein’s use of Design-smattered terminology.In the interview, he refers to Darwin’s theory as a “relic” left over from 19^th century imperialism which states that humans evolved from monkeys (Darwin never said this, by the way) and that life started when some lightning hit a puddle of mud, a theory about which Stein says, “that has never struck me as convincing.”When he says that the cell’s perfectly moving thousands of parts can only be explained by the hand of a benevolent God, he sounds like Michael Behe in “Irreducible Complexity.”These little comments makes it seem like Stein has already made up his mind about which camp is emitting the most truth.

With the releasing of Expelled, Stein sets himself up to be the voice of the subjugated Intelligent Design theorist.And he’s expecting to change some opinions and to raise some controversy.He says:

I now realize that it was my duty to get the word out, to warn others before it’s too late.So I’m gonna begin by warning you.Feel free to watch this film if you must, and I hope you do.But you’ve got to know that doing so could land you in a heap of trouble.Some of you are gonna lose your friends for watching this film.Some of you may even lose your jobs.In fact, if you’re a scientist with any hope of a future, I suggest you leave right now…but if you do leave, will anyone be left to fight this battle?Anyone?Anyone?

Advanced screening reviews are, uh, mixed – according to the Expelled newsroom, Richard Dawkins gave it a thumbs down, but Rush Limbaugh thought it was great! But the question remains: Is it even possible to criticize the movie without being written off as narrow-minded?I guess we shall see, starting April 18.