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In the wake of last week's controversial telecon, coordinated by marketing Motive Entertainment, I took up P.Z. Myers' invitation to email him. I requested an interview with him over the phone, which he very graciously agreed to. We talked about Expelled and its marketing for a little under fifteen minutes. Below is the full transcript of the interview, which Mr. Myers and I have both reviewed for accuracy. (A separate interview segment recorded for Past the Popcorn will run at that site later this month.)

Greg Wright: I've got three specific questions that I'd like to ask you about Expelled, (plus, of course, anything else that comes up along the way) about the film and the marketing of the film. It seems to me that the way that Motive Entertainment and the producers of Expelled have gone about marketing the film is reasonable enough; what they're trying to do is to spin as positive a light as they can on the film, building buzz through word-of-mouth screenings, and then follow on later with general screenings for press. Now, that may or may not happen; I'm not privy to those plans. But from where I sit as an editor and a critic, it doesn't seem that the publicity for the film is being conducted on an outrageous basis. What's your perspective on that?

P.Z. Myers: Well, I don't know what you mean by "not on an outrageous basis." From a purely money perspective, sure, I can understand. What they're trying to do is they're trying to get some good word out there about their bad movie, and let's ignore the content. Let's just pretend it's a good movie; all we want is to get people in the seats. And in that sense, sure. That's what they're doing. I'm more interested in the content.

GW: Right.

PZM: And I disagree strongly with their subject, so what I see happening here is that I'm actually helping them a little bit; I'm fueling the controversy, and I kind of expect that what's going to happen as the end result of all this stuff is that there are going to be more people in the seats watching their movie. But you see, from my perspective, I don't care how much money they make. They can get as filthy rich as they want. I don't care. What I want is for people to go to that movie and see how bad it is; I want them to come in prepared to be critically-minded and skeptical, and look at it and see some of the awful things that they're doing with that particular movie.

GW: And that leads me to my next question, which is about the content of the film. You mentioned in you blog post at Pharyngula yesterday that, from your perspective, the "premise at the heart of the movie is that the Holocaust was a consequence of evolutionary theory." Now, I saw the movie, and it didn't seem to me that that was the central premise of the film at all, but that the central premise of the film is that people are losing their jobs over disputes about Intelligent Design. So—

PZM: And that's actually the proximate issue that they're discussing. But I saw the clips, and I talked to people who have seen it, and the interviews of me and of Dawkins are all larded with this nonsense about Hitler. And they have actually promoted it using footage of goose-stepping Nazis marching down the street and so forth. So that does become a rather central issue. I can also criticize— I can criticize both parts. I agree that there are both parts there. So the one bad part is the Nazi business, which is total nonsense: Darwin is not a necessary prerequisite for Nazism because we've got a long history of persecution of minority ethnic groups in cultures everywhere; it doesn't take Darwin to fuel that. But then when you say that it's mainly about being people getting fired for this argument, I would say that there have actually been very few incidents like that; I know Carolyn Crocker was mentioned, and Guillermo Gonzales, and that's about it. But you see, the thing is, they weren't fired for disagreeing with someone. They were fired, if they were fired at all, for incompetence. And I see no problem with maintaining standards in academia, and only allowing people with expertise and with some perspective on the actual issues to be in that particular elite group.

GW: Right, right. I agree with that. But my question with regard to that: it seemed to me—and, of course, the question of how well they make the argument is another issue entirely—that the central premise of the film is this core issue. The Nazi imagery and the sequence in which Ben Stein goes to Germany to visit those places are, I think, very bad choices; but that didn't strike me as being the central premise of the film at all.

PZM: But it quickly becomes the central premise of the film.

GW: Because of the baggage, you mean?

PZM: Well, you can't sit there and accuse someone of being like Hitler and then say, "Well, that's not really my complaint." That's kind of going over the top.

GW: Okay, so that's a good question, though. So you felt that [because of that connection] the movie was saying you were actually like Hitler, then.

PZM: Oh, it's accusing evolutionary biologists of being like Hitler.

GW: I didn't get that feeling from it.

PZM: So if somebody made a movie of you, and intercut it with shots of Nazis and tanks and artillery, and made a visit to Dachau, and deplored your actions, you would not feel like you'd been compared to Hitler?

GW: Well, no. And specifically, let me explain. Because, as I see it, another necessary component of Hitler's Germany was the Lutheran Church. So there were a lot of necessary components for the Holocaust to come about, because they needed to marshal every aspect of their society against certain ethnic groups in order to purge them. So they had to marshal the Church, they had to marshal the academy, they had to marshal the common man, and everybody, to get behind the program. So you can say that about the Church, but that doesn't make me an evil monster because Hitler misused the Church, simply because I'm a Christian. That's not logic that follows.

PZM: I would say that's not logic that follows for evolutionary biology, either.

GW: No, it isn't. And that's why I say I don't think that's what they're trying to [say when they] make—as I read it, and of course, that's just me—the distinction between necessary and sufficient. No, on its own, its not going to lead to that at all. But was it a component in leading to what happened in the Holocaust? It seems to me that that's a very reasonable argument, just like it's very reasonable to say that the Church was, also.

PZM: And then I can say that's an unreasonable argument because what they were doing was— Well, for instance, if the Nazis had said that one of the dogmas, the doctrines of the Lutheran Church was child sacrifice, and they started burning babies, you'd be saying, "Wait a minute! No, that's not a doctrine of the Lutheran Church at all." And that they're making a false comparison. You'd say that that's not an indictment of the Lutheran Church; and I would say the same thing here. What they've done is conflate this stuff called Social Darwinism—which has nothing to do with evolutionary biology, and really has nothing to do with Darwin's theories at all. Social Darwinism was something that was spawned out of agricultural movements that you can find in the Bible, in the Old Testament, where God tells his chosen people to go out and exterminate the other neighboring towns. So that's a confusion of the names. People applied Darwinism to that, and it's just not there.

GW: So it's an insufficient and misleading distinction that the filmmakers are failing to make.

PZM: Correct.

GW: I would agree with that.

PZM: So if they had made a movie that left out the Nazis, we would be having an argument about what you're saying is the central premise of the movie. But they didn't.

GW: I agree with that, definitely. I believe it was a quote from you early on in the film—and I didn't take adequate notes on that section of the film, so you can correct me on this if I'm wrong—that the debate over Intelligent Design is "merely a skirmish in a much larger war." Was that your quote or somebody else's?

PZM: I think that's got to be somebody else's. I didn't say that. [Ed.: Another critic attributes the quote to Richard Dawkins.]

GW: Okay, good, then I won't attribute it to you. But they start off the film there as part of the argument about why this is all important. Do you agree with that statement, that the squabble over Intelligent Design—well, not the "squabble," but the very legitimate debate—is merely a skirmish in a much larger war, or is it the issue itself?

PZM: Well, it's kind of both. The war that we're fighting is the war against Intelligent Design, and that's the conflict that's been brought to the forefront. It's the one that's being fought in the academy right now. I agree that there is a larger cultural issue: this whole problem of religion in society. But that's a war that you find fought in books like Dawkins' The God Delusion, and so forth; and it's not clear to me if that's really the issue here, in this particular movie.

GW: Okay. Yeah, and I wasn't clear on that either, because when they used that quote they didn't seem to follow up on it or explain what that "larger war" was. So that's why I asked, because I wasn't clear on what "larger war" they were referring to.

PZM: And I'm at a disadvantage because they wouldn't let me see the movie, so I can't really criticize the rest of it.

We expect to follow up with a more detailed interview with Mr. Myers after he has had a chance to see the film.