I didn’t make it to see Expelled on Friday as I’d hoped, so I am going this afternoon. If I have anything intelligent to say, I’ll either post again or add a comment here. Several of my writer friends (a physicist and a lawyer included — in other words, better brains than I have) have been very praiseworthy about the documentary, both the quality of the film itself and the fairness with which it addresses the topic. Certainly more fair than those who want to silence any discussion.
Here’s a very interesting piece by David Klinghoffer that’s worth reading:
This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.
But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.
The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”
Go read the entire article here.
-rlh-
