April 17, 2008...3:49 am
Win Ben Stein’s Credibility
Cranky conservative curmudgeon Ben Stein’s (Bueller?) anti-Darwin film is getting slammed for some lapses of integrity. Surprise surprise.
Six Things in Expelled that Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…
…about intelligent design and evolution
1) Expelled quotes Charles Darwin selectively to connect his ideas to eugenics and the Holocaust.
When the film is building its case that Darwin and the theory of evolution bear some responsibility for the Holocaust, Ben Stein’s narration quotes from Darwin’s The Descent of Man thusly:With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
This is how the original passage in The Descent of Man reads (unquoted sections emphasized in italics):
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
And much, much more.
Michael Moore was rightly called out for similar dishonest parts in his films, but this is definitely much more brazen.
UPDATE:
Pal Ninah sends us the following link:
Expelled Exposed
3 Comments
April 17, 2008 at 5:57 pm
See also http://www.expelledexposed.com/ (website run by the folks I work for, which is causing a huge tizzy to the ID folks, as you can imagine, *chuckle*)
April 17, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Thanks, Ninah!
April 19, 2008 at 7:25 am
u bet! Glad to be ov service, my friend
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