Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is an attack partly on academic pussy-footedness and partly on Darwinism.  Stein opens with a half dozen or so cases of professors who were punished for showing even in a small way openness to Intelligent Design as explaining the origin of species than Charles Darwin.

The scientific community demonstrates nonsensical fear of intelligence as having a hand, apparently panicking at the thought of lending even a smidgen of respectability to the idea and forbidding scientists to do so at cost of their web sites, jobs, and careers, Stein argues through the film, which is being shown in six Chicago-area movie houses.

He goes after Darwinism itself with the point that the cell Darwin and anyone else knew about in the 1850s was a very simple item compared to the information-filled cell that scientists know about today.  The film makes the point partly with an animated display of dozens of shapes and colors and movement patterns. 

If Darwin’s cell were a tennis ball, one man told Stein when asked, today’s is a galaxy.  No comparison, in other words, but meanwhile science limps along with Darwin’s explanation, which doesn’t even hold together internally, much less explain that galaxy of data, which as accident is ridiculous on its face.  That’s what the film says, in a manner that I cannot but take seriously.