Expelled Eviscerated!

And here I was, hoping for a nice, quiet night in which I could work on my upcoming primer for John "Sunni, Shi'a, What's the Difference?" McCain. No such luck. Expelled is getting itself paddled all over the blogosphere. I of course had to grab my solid oak bottom whacker and join in.

We begin with legal woes: Expelled is getting spanked with threat of a lawsuit for shameless copyright violation. ERV has the full text:

Dear ____:

This letter will constitute notice to you, as Chairman of Premise Media Corporation, of the copyright infringement by your corporation, and its subsidiary, Rampant Films, of material produced by XVIVO LLC, in which XVIVO holds a copyright.

PZ Myers originally mistook Expelled's ripoff of "Inner Life of a Cell" for the real thing. Now, anyone who knows anything about plagiarism and copyright knows that you can't just change a few minute details of a piece and pass it off as an original. You also can't take a copyrighted video and bung it into your manifestly for-profit movie and expect to get away with it. Some cretinists are trying to claim this is fair use. I'd just like to refresh them on the definition of fair use:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107, bitches. Wikipedia has a good explanation of what all that legal stuff means, but let me put it in plain terms: the Expelled crew is fucked.

Henry Neufeld said it best when he said, "It is just too ironic that a movie produced to tell us about the moral problems of atheism and 'Darwinism' includes plagiarized material. Just amazing."

The above legal licking is delicious enough, but just as I was settling in to truly savor it, here comes PZ with the news that Scientific American has absolutely eviscerated the movie. Ye gods, have they ever. First we have John Rennie's article "Ben Stein's Expelled: No Integrity Allowed." I somehow get the impression that, you know, he maybe fucking hated the film:

Expelled wears its ambitions to be a creationist Fahrenheit 911 openly, in that it apes many of Michael Moore's comic tricks: emphasizing the narrator's hapless everyman qualities by showing him meandering his way to interviews; riposting interviewees' words with ironic old footage and so on. Director Nathan Frankowski is reasonably adept at the techniques, although he is not half the filmmaker Michael Moore is (and yes, I do mean in both senses of the phrase).

Has anybody else noticed this about fundamentalist Christians? They're so fucking unoriginal. It's like their creative faculties were sucked out with a vacuum cleaner hose, and all that's left for them is to try to ape their betters. Which they suck at, because they just don't understand how art works. I mean, fundie Christian rock sucks, fundie Christian death metal blows goats, fundie Christian comedy is horrifically bland and about as funny as getting a wasabi enema, and now you have this screaming chunkfest of a notumentary. The harder they try to be "hip," the more they look like Dr. Evil.

Then there's the little matter of Michael Shermer. Let us recall the early days of En Tequila Es Verdad, when I said this:

Michael Shermer? Michael Shermer? Seriously Michael Shermer, you mean, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine? ....That Michael Shermer? Oh, yeah. I'll bet he enjoyed the film. It must have been the same sort of life-changing experience as being interviewed for it by those two assclowns.

And we now return to the future, wherein I was right:

The film's visual motifs leave no doubt in the viewer's emotional brain that Darwinism is leading America into an immoral quagmire. We're going to hell in a Darwinian handbasket. Cleverly edited interview excerpts from scientists are interspersed with various black-and-white clips for guilt by association with: bullies beating up on a 98-pound weakling, Charlton Heston's character in Planet of the Apes being blasted by a water hose, Nikita Khrushchev pounding his fist on a United Nations desk, East Germans captured trying to scale the Berlin
Wall, and Nazi crematoria remains and Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves. This propaganda production would make Joseph Goebbels proud.

Oh, yes. He wuved the movie! It's changed his entire outlook!

Both articles in SciAm do a wonderful job pointing up Expelled's ignorance, complete lack of comprehension for what science is, and their breathtaking intellectual dishonesty. I've read a lot of pieces debunking lie after lie told by the Expelled crew, but these articles contain the antidotes to a myriad of lies I hadn't even heard before.

From Rennie:

"It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don't know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don't know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists' curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It's one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers."

And Shermer on Expelled's opening scene:

According to Lee Kats, associate provost for research and chair of natural science at Pepperdine, "the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus" but that "the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and a staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein's lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university." And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

Gee. I wonder why one gets the impression that Expelled is nothing but a pack of lies rubber-banded together with misleading stock footage and tied up with an elaborate bow of obfuscation? Couldn't possibly be because it is.

Now, all of this is delightful. I would have been well-satisfied putting my fork down here, but Fox News, of all people, came bearing an unbelievable dessert:

Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But it does show that Stein, who’s carved out a career selling eye drops in commercials and amusing us on sitcoms, is either completely nuts or so avaricious that he’s abandoned all good sense to make a buck.

To wit: Stein, Frankowski and pals say in "Expelled" that perfectly good scientists and educators are being stigmatized for wanting to teach their students creationism and "intelligent design" — in other words, junk science — in addition to or instead of conventionally accepted Darwinism. [emphasis in original]

Are you fucking kidding me? Even Fox News - Faux News?? - calls it a crappy movie and ID junk science? Bliss!

You know, I still don't believe in Intelligent Design, but I can almost believe in heaven now.