The sound of zero hands clapping

I'll discuss Expelled in several posts. In this one, I'd like to discuss the scientific content of the movie. This will be short. Amazingly for a movie about intelligent design and evolution, in the entire movie there is no discussion at all about the content of either intelligent design or evolution.

Since this is a movie about ID, you would expect that at some point they would actually say what it is. They do not. There is not so much as a definition of intelligent design given. At one point, an ID proponent complains about an inaccurate boilerplate description of ID, but they do not explain how it is wrong or offer anything in its place. Another complains about being called a creationist, but no attempt is made to discuss how it differs from creationism in content. There are a few people at the Discovery Institute who explain that it does not involve God, but the rest of the movie is about how discrimination against ID is discrimination against religion, so that doesn't hold up very well. They do not discuss irreducible complexity or any of the other arguments of ID. If a person went into this movie not knowing what ID is, the only thing they would come out knowing is that it is opposed to evolution and that it is a terribly oppressed idea.

I guess the closest they come to an argument is an animation without any explanation. At one point they discuss how much more complicated we now know the cell to be compared to the time of Darwin. They then show the semi-pirated video of processes in the cell. It is not explained or narrated. There is no attempt to show how ID explains it, or how evolution fails to explain it, or even of the idea of irreducibly complexity. The entire argument is "see how complicated things are? Therefore, evolution is false", and even that is only implicit.

Of course, ID doesn't really have any content to present, since it is almost entirely negative arguments against evolution, so maybe they have some of that? Surprisingly, there is no description of what evolution is, no attempt to deal with the evidence for it, nothing at all. The closest they come, the absolute only time in the entire movie in which they deal with science, is the origin of life. Amazingly, they first have Jonathan Welles telling us, correctly, that evolution doesn't deal with the origin of life. It deals with what happened once the first cell formed and how the rest of life arose from that. I was surprised to see Welles get it right, and then Stein ignores him and looks at the origin of life anyway.

First, they describe the Urey-Miller experiment. The description is OK, but they then say that it was a failure--we didn't get any cells. They honestly seem to believe that Miller expected to see cells arise in a few weeks in his apparatus. He wasn't trying to form cells, just to show how organic material could have formed, and in that he was successful.

Next they explain how the simplest cell today would have about 250 genes. This is our estimate of the smallest genome that could work in a living bacteria. There isn't a biologist on the planet that thinks that this 250 gene organism arose by a single step by chance, but this is creationism and it wouldn't be complete without an incorrect argument from chance. So they show some fourth-rate animation of Richard Dawkins trying to get a jackpot on 250 slot machines simultaneously. I wonder if there will ever be a time when I see creationist material that represent the probabilities correctly? Do they enjoy disproving scenarios that no human on earth believes?

Finally, there is Michael Ruse trying to explain one of the theories about the origin of life, in which simple reactions occur on the faces of crystals. The only reason this is done is so they can make fun of it, by references to crystal balls and mud. No time is given for him to explain the theory or for any evidence for it or against it to be given. Since it seems odd, it must be false.

That's it. You now have a complete summary of all of the discussion of the content of ID, evolution, and the origin of life in the movie. Notice that the only place with any content at all is the origin of life, which they admit isn't within the realm of evolution. I'm sure based on that, the viewers will be well armed to weigh the relative strength of the opposing views.

At one point in the movie they talk about the sound of one hand clapping. They claim that is what we get when we only get one side of the story, the evolution side, and ID is oppressed. Dr Lang laughed next to me at the irony, watching a movie that is so amazingly one sided. However, when it comes to the scientific content, this movie doesn't even give one side. It is the sound of zero hands clapping.