Read More @HJ Reviews: Propaganda Or Fresh Perspective? Yo Ben Stein Cries Out for Freedom Darrel Manson Expelled from Narnia Mark Sommer Previews: Telecon Q & A HJ The Aims of Production HJ The Personal Impact HJ Darwinism and Nazi Germany HJ Atheism and the New Orthodoxy HJ Philosophy, Science, and Religion HJ Expelled is About... What? HJ Telecon Introductions HJ The Battle Is Joined? Greg Wright Smartbombing Darwinianism Jack Cashill Do The Origins Of Life Matter? Yo SteinWatch HJ Myers Gets Some Airtime Greg Wright Trailer, Photos, Prod Notes, Overview By David Bruce, Webmaster March 28th Telecon Audio Greg Wright Mathis Gets Some Airtime Greg Wright

Paul Lauer:  You mentioned that Darwinism appears to be lacking on certain fronts.  From your research, and your travels, and interviews with many different scientists, what are some of the areas that scientists are, perhaps, increasingly saying are problematic with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution?  

Ben Stein:   Well, just a couple of them. One I’ve already hit is:  Where did life come from?  Second one is:  How did the cell get so complex?   Third one, which I think is overwhelming, and just sort of blows the whole theory of Random Mutation out of the water, is—at least, let me say, raises big questions, that is—assuming it all did happen by Random Mutation and Natural Selection, where did the laws of gravity come from? Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from?  Where did the laws of motion and, of heat come from? (I guess that’s the same as thermodynamics.)  Where did all these laws that make it possible for the universe to function—where did they all come from?   Why isn’t it just chaos and everything collapsing in on itself and killing everything?  I think that’s where the universe works.  Who created these perfect laws that keep the planets in motion, keeps the blood pumping through our bodies?  So, I think, all these are giant questions that need answers.  

Walt Ruloff: Yeah. Beyond the very fundamental questions that Ben raised, we have this one great story where we interviewed a head of a large genomics research company who basically said that. “Look, here’s how the game is played: we get X millions; you know, the NIH allocates billions of dollars.” If you look at NSF and NIH, I believe it’s well over 35 billion dollars.   “Look, we get tens of millions of dollars, we do our research, and we find a large percentage, sometimes as high as 30, 35 percent of evidence that suggests other mechanisms going on here in the cell.  We have to shelve that evidence; we have to retro-fit our findings back into a Darwinian Paradigm, to be able to publish. If we fall outside these basic mechanisms, we will not receive funding anymore.” So, this is really problematic, and that’s where I think people will really start to get disgusted about what’s happening out there in the academy. 

Paul Lauer:  Back to you, Ben.   It seems like what you’re asking for in this film—namely Freedom of Speech—is something that all of us Americans can agree to. Why would there be some kind of an establishment that would be opposed to an open discussion, or even the exposure of flaws in a current scientific theory like Darwinism?  What’s driving this establishment to allow—

Ben Stein: Well, it is just self interest, I think.  The people in Big Science, at least in the evolutionary end of it, owe their jobs to their prominence in Darwinian thinking and Darwinian ideology; and if the Darwinism ideology is overthrown or even questioned seriously, then they lose some of their power and their prestige, and nobody wants to lose power and prestige. So that’s part of it, if it’s revealed that their theory is a “house of cards” or even that it has very large flaws. (And, maybe it won’t be, by the way; maybe it’ll turn out to be totally correct, even when it’s thoroughly questioned.) Then they lose a lot of their status in life; status is a big part of life. And then also there’s a giant metaphysical implication which is: if there is an intelligent designer, if his is name is God, if [there] is a spark of the divine by virtue of being chosen by God, then there are consequences to killing us; there are consequences to murdering us before we’re born —as fetuses. There are consequences to all kinds of behavior which are lacking if we’re just descendants of a mud puddle. 

Paul Lauer:  You made the argument earlier that Darwinism can, in fact, lead to something like Nazi Germany; can you elaborate on that a little bit more? 

Ben Stein:  Sure.   Darwinism said, and it was very, very, very quickly picked up enthusiastically in Germany, that there were certain species that were superior to other species, and within species there were certain groups within species that were superior to other species and that all were competing for a scarce supply of food and resources. And that if you let the inferior race have a big share of the food and other resources, there was less left for the superior, and, therefore, the superior races would not evolve as quickly, or could be as powerful, as quickly as they should; and therefore, you owe it to the master race to kill the inferior races.  This is explicitly a part of Nazi ideology from Darwin and Malthus, and it’s explicitly the base of Nazi ideas of killing races and species and parts of the human race that they considered inferior to them: Jews, Gypsies, Eastern Europeans, all different kinds of people that they considered inferior and competing with them for the basics of life.  

Thanks to Motive Entertainment for providing the transcript of their January 22 teleconference with Ben Stein and Walt Ruloff. The full, unabridged telecon is available from Gotham Conference in podcast form. Expelled is scheduled to release in April.