Blue Collar Scientist

(The title of this post is best explained here.)

The box-office results for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed were pretty mixed. The opening weekend was far lower than producers’ expectations, but still pretty high. Yet the high earnings were mainly a result of the number of theaters the movie opened in - the per-theater earnings were pretty low. I’ve covered all this here, and concluded that Expelled is bad news, but not anywhere near as bad as it could be, and not nearly the success the creationists are making it out to be.

This balanced assessment is not what you would get if you were reading science framist Chris Mooney’s blog. He leads with:

Expelled a Box Office Success

I merely report the facts: Expelled, opening at over 1,000 theaters this weekend, has raked in $ 3.15 million, placing it ninth at the box office. In terms of political documentaries, it is already the eighth highest grossing of all time.

This does a lot to show that for Chris, “framing” means “misleading people with data and statistics.” First, it isn’t clear to me that this documentary should be categorized as a political one - it’s a religious documentary, if you ask me (though it could also be considered science fiction and fantasy). Second, he says nothing about the demographics of where the movie is screening. Third, he says nothing about the per-theater receipts, which are dismal. Despite having all that information available to him, he says “I merely report the facts.” Not so, Chris, you report a carefully selected and edited set of facts. And isn’t it funny - that’s just what the makers of Expelled did.

In any case, the figures Mooney apparently cites (but neglects to link to) can be compared to figures for documentaries in general (the only two categories available), where Expelled is currently number 26.

Another weird voice about the impact of the movie is that of Randy Olson, maker of A Flock of Dodos, a documentary about evolution and creationism that took a neutral point of view. Despite having previously said that Expelled was no problem…

I had heard about “the Ben Stein movie,” over a year ago when a friend in Toronto told me her best friend’s boyfriend was a cameraman on the movie. I had tried to warn everyone, “if this thing turns out to be entertaining, the evolution world is in trouble.”

It isn’t. Crisis averted. Thanks to Ben Stein. We can now throw this on the scrap heap alongside the growing mountain of boring global warming documentaries. And folks, warn your children, don’t use film to try and educate people. It’s an entertainment medium.

…he now says that Expelled is a massive problem and a huge success for the creationists:

This weekend Ben Stein’s anti-evolution movie, “Expelled,” had a HUGE opening, estimated to rake in over $3 million dollars.

Again, no mention of the number of screens the movie was on, or the low per-theater receipts. He goes on in condescending fashion:

To counter the blockbuster power of “Expelled,” the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.

That should probably take care of the problem.

You know what? I’m really fed up with the bureaucratic approach to communicating science. So much so that the International Year of Astronomy still strikes me as a potentially pointless exercise (but I have an open mind, and am heartened by Pamela Gay’s involvement - we’ll see how it goes). And I’m a frequent vocal critic of activism by institutional committee, which is what Olson describes here.

But really, this is a bit over the top, even for me. Olson is criticizing institutions that are sharply limited by their funding sources over what they are allowed to do. It’s an unfair slur. He should be agitating to change the rules, not condemning these institutions for following them.

Moving into the comments, Olson tells us who to blame:

You should focus your anger on the people who are paid to communicate evolution broadly. They should have created a voice for evolution so loud and powerful that disinformers like Ben Stein are drowned out. There should be five popular pro-evolution movies at the box office right now, instead of none.

Does anyone else find it funny that a filmmaker, who has never made a pro-evolution film, is criticizing those of us who aren’t filmmakers for not having made a bunch of pro-evolution films?

Having gotten the matter of blame out of the way, he then tells us what to do:

why doesn’t somebody run a film festival for pro-evolution films?

I suppose because doing that is expensive, and the people paid to do science communication work on shoestring budgets. I also suppose it is because people who know evolutionary biology don’t generally know how to run a film festival. But I’m only guessing. A commenter to the blog makes another cogent point, responding to Olson’s suggestion that a high-school kid who made an evolution movie would have nowhere to send it to:

A high-school kid? Youtube of course. And that has the potential to reach an audience larger than Flock of Dodos and Expelled combined.

I find the idea of a “film festival of pro-evolution films” as outreach hopelessly naive, if not just self-important. 99.9% of the public couldn’t name a single major international documentary film festival (let alone a specialized one), and a vast majority probably don’t even know documentary film festivals exist at all.

Olson then goes on to piss all over people like me:

It’s called supporting innovation. It DOES NOT HAPPEN in the world of science communication right now.

Right, Randy. I go into the schools 60-70 times a year and communicate science. Half the time I’m linking up to a school above the Arctic circle while I’m in southcentral Alaska using my broadband internet and a camera on my computer. I’m using 3-D models in my presentations. I teach in a roundtable format. I get funding for supplies and models for the classrooms I support by hook or by crook. Everything I do is based on how we know various scientific facts, and everything I do has students design an experiment so we can learn more about the subject. Everything I do can be part of at least two, sometimes three or four areas of study (astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology).

This is not the science classroom you attended if you were raised in the United States at any time prior to about 2003. I’m so innovative that the teacher’s union isn’t sure they love me or hate me. Half the time I’m teaching a subject in a classroom that the teacher isn’t rated “highly qualified” to teach. Half the teachers interested in having me in their classrooms can’t figure out how to get the job done with the resources they have to hand. What I teach is way beyond the curricular requirements of the districts I teach in.

And I do this all for free, not necessarily because I’m a good guy and generous with my time - but because there is no money to get subject matter experts to bring this kind of innovative science communication into the classroom. What could I do if I could spend even the meager salary of a classroom teacher on my efforts each year? Probably quite a lot - the problem being, of course, that if you have that much money to spend, you are going to spend it on a teacher, not on me. And I perfectly understand why that is the case - so I go on doing what I do pro bono.

But all this isn’t good enough for Randy Olsen. I’m guessing he’s never heard of me¹, and doesn’t have the first idea about what I do.

Perhaps we science communicators could get some constructive criticism from supposedly expert pro-science communicators for a change? Eh? Please?

1. Yes, I’m calling him ignorant. Anyone who doesn’t understand what grassroots activists do, and how many of us there are, and still says the kinds of things Olson says, is profoundly ignorant. [↩]

(Update: Although I posted on Monday, the box office numbers cited below were revised, showing a very sharp drop in Expelled attendance on Sunday. The upshot is that Expelled failed to reach the $3.2 million previously reported on its opening weekend. The revised figure, now available on the page I link to, is $2,970,848.)

The box office numbers for the creationism propaganda movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, are (like any other set of numbers that measures something) interesting. Expelled barely achieved $3 million in its opening weekend, despite the producers’ expectation of $12 to $15 million.

The high opening weekend is mainly the result of getting Expelled released in lots of theaters - 1,052 of them - on a weekend when no major films were being released. And it probably doesn’t hurt that they are paying people to watch the movie, either - not something I’ve noticed on offer on any other movie I’ve wanted to see.

Through its website, Team “Expelled” is offering goodies to entice group sales in the Bible Belt and beyond, a move some call borderline bribery.

The ” ‘Expelled’ Challenge” urges schools and home-schooling groups to get students, parents and faculty to show up in force, promising donations of $5 to $10 per ticket stub for those who register.

“In speaking with Christian schools, we’ve found that hosting a school-wide ‘mandatory’ field trip is the best way to maximize your school’s earning potential,” the site explains.

Despite these advantages, on opening day, it did a dismal $1,145 per theater, and plummeted after that to less than $950 per. Compare this to the per-theater figures for An inconvenient Truth ($70,000), Super Size Me ($12,000), and Roger and Me ($20,000).

Also compare opening weekend figures: Expelled did 3.2 million in 1,052 theaters, while Sicko earned $23.9 million in just 441 theaters. Fahrenheit 9/11 earned $23.9 million in 868 theaters.

If you do some simple math, and assume four screenings per day, and that the ticket price is $7, then each showing attracted somewhere around 37 people. That’s not a lot.

Another way to evaluate this is to do actual statistics, which S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has kindly completed. Go there to look at the chart. After an initial mathematical mistake, he corrected his analysis and concludes:

As you can see based on the number of theater’s that expelled opened in, it is a flop of extraordinary proportions. Although this isn’t the best way to do it (I don’t have time to sit and play with this), the residual of the expelled data is -16 standard deviations away from the predicted line.

Another question we should be asking concerns the demographics. My impression is that this movie will mainly preach to the converted - that is, closed-minded, extremist science-hating religious radicals. Most mainstream people won’t go see it. A list of states in which the movie is screening is interesting (just scroll down to the last list of states, updated April 16 - most of Lippard’s predictions are at this point moot) - you’ll note the strong bias placing the screenings in as many theaters as possible in states having a high proportion of fundamentalist Christians and Mormons. Even Alaska got two theaters, which was not the case for opening weekend on a lot of other documentaries - I think we had to wait about two weeks for An Inconvenient Truth, and longer for some other documentaries that had similar earnings.

So, to conclude: Expelled’s numbers were not very good. It appears they preached mainly to the choir. Still, Expelled is bad news. Anytime you see a big block of people conspiring to lie like this, and demonize innocent people as responsible for the Holocaust, in an appealing pop-cultural way, you’ve got a society with serious problems, and Expelled is not going to make those problems better. But it is at least clear that Expelled is not on track to being much of a success as a movie - certainly not the success that many of us were worried about leading up to the release.

Back at the end of last month, I posted briefly on victims of creationist persecution, suggesting that I might work on finding sources and additional details for some of the cases I posted about.

Well, I never did, because I’m lazy, and because I’m approaching the deadline of a major software development and deployment project, accompanied by a trip to astronomical observatories, at the end of April - there has simply been no time. However, prominent Boston-area skeptic Blake Stacey took up the task, and has done yeoman work completing it.

So please head on over to Science after Sunclipse for the full story of ten people who have been harassed, threatened, assaulted fired, or killed by creationists who were upset that they were teaching or promoting evolutionary theory.

Then head over to Bug Girl’s blog for some additional cases of creationists threatening scientists with violence, and this post on the Kanawha Texboook incident, in which Christians led by a local reverend burned down elementary schools, planted bombs in school busses, and shot at people because they were upset over a recommended reading list for schoolchildren.

And as you do this, think about this for a moment: It is the creationists who shrilly insist that only through their god can anyone have any morality. Yet they are the ones burning elementary schools down, killing their enemies, getting them fired from their jobs, and threatening them with violence when they don’t get their way. This is wrong. If you are reading this, you are learning about the wrong-ness of all this behavior from a scientist; it isn’t coming out of the bible and I don’t claim any particular religious inspiration for this realization. What we have here, folks, is the moral and ethical result of my simple, straightforward, evolved sense of altruism: it is wrong to resort to violence against people you simply disagree with.

And also consider that the creationists - the same ones who resort to harassment, threats, and violence - have made allegations that scientists are the ones making the threats and getting people fired. But of course, that isn’t true - and it makes perfect sense: why would we be surprised that the kind of people who would set fire to an elementary school when they don’t get their way would shrink from lying?

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Richard Wagner, the 46 years old youth pastor at Kenai Bible Church in Kenai, Alaska, has been arrested on charges that he molested a young boy.

Wagner has worked as a volunteer at the nondenominational Kenai Bible Church for about two or three years, teaching Sunday school to the children, said Vance Wonser, the church’s pastor. Church officials learned of the allegations Thursday night, he said.

He was charged with Second Degree Sexual Assault of a Minor. Reports are that at least two children spent the night unsupervised at his house, and that one of them accused him of molestation.

“As soon as we were made aware of the allegations, we immediately removed him from contact with the youth,” [Pastor Vance] Wonser said. “The one allegation that was made was not anything that occurred at the church … it was on his own time and away from the church.”

It is interesting that the church pastor, when responding to these allegations (whether true or not), takes pains to emphasize that if this was done, it was done on his own time, and not on church grounds. I’m puzzled what I’m supposed to think of this. What I’m actually thinking is almost certainly not what the pastor would want: that ethics and morals are the things you do when you are alone and nobody else can see, that a church’s moral teaching should be taken beyond the doors of the church, and that the pastor’s remarks seem to presuppose that this church has failed at that enterprise. The veritable storm of sanctimonious claims that religion provides morality seems, from this perspective, to be yet another a load of baloney.

My pal over at Dinosaurs and the Bible: A Creationist’s Fairy Tale is hosting an Expelled carnival, including posts from around the blogosphere offering tons of reading about this Nazi propaganda movie¹. It is up as of a few minutes ago - go check out To Hell with Expelled!

And thanks for getting my submissions in even though I sent them in way late!

1. Er, wait - did that come out right? Hmm. Not sure I care. [↩]

Never challenge stork theory. It can only get you in trouble.

Hat tip to loyal reader Scott Hurst, who I met at TAM 5.5 earlier this year.

I’ve said a number of times here that Christian creationists, whether ID or otherwise, who deny science are religious extremists. At various times, I’ve pointed out Ken Miller, the Clergy Letter Project (which has 11,000 religious leaders affirming evolution), and other examples to support my claim that creationists are minority radicals.

(Of course one reason that I promote this meme over and over is to marginalize creationists and assist any split that may develop between them and more mainstream religionists. But don’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t want to be accused of doing framing wrong, or anything.)

Today there’s another example of how radical creationism is a fringe view. Reasons To Believe is an non-denominational Christian think tank, and they take Christian apologetics pretty seriously. They are also among the more thoughtful such groups. Some time back, they posted some tentative comments on Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which opens today:

Many people have asked Reasons to Believe (RTB) to make a statement about the movie. For the sake of integrity, we cannot offer an assessment until our scholar team has had a chance to view the movie.

RTB views the scientific enterprise as a vital component of carrying out one of God’s first recorded commands to Adam and Eve. Without the understanding derived from scientific investigation, it would be impossible to take care of this home God provided for us.

I’m quoting selectively. They have some questionable material up there, but on the whole these are reasonable people that you could talk to. They understand their own shortcomings, and they understand the value of science.

Now some of the Reasons To Believe leaders have seen the movie, and sources say they have released this statement:

After previewing the promotional materials provided by the movie’s marketers, we were concerned that the movie took an adversarial approach to the scientific community. A number of RTB scholars and staff attended a prerelease screening in Los Angeles recently and confirmed that EXPELLED definitely does take such an approach…. EXPELLED implicitly argues that the scientific community deems certain questions off-limits, particularly any question about the legitimacy of neo-Darwinian evolution. The movie further argues that academia, the media, and the courts all conspire as “thought police” to oppress any and all dissent from the party line.

Clearly some oppression and discrimination have occurred, but the experience of RTB scholars and many of their contacts refutes the movie’s premise that the scientific community systemically and unilaterally fosters these injustices.

They end with a policy decision:

Therefore, we ask all chapter members and volunteers to refrain from endorsing EXPELLED in any official way.

Reaction to this has been favorable:

Kudos to them. This is outstanding.

And again:

indeed. this is an excellent response!

is this on the web anywhere? I would like to direct others to read this.

And yet again:

Yes. It is posted prominently on the front page of the RTB site at www.reasons.org.

I am very proud of them for this response.

I could go on - the favorable reaction to Reasons To Believe’s stance against the movie continues.

The point of all this? Expelled isn’t even appealing to all of its expected core audience. Expelled is so extremist that it has split their demographic.

Hat tip to Panda’s Thumb.

I just did a quick google search on reviews of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and have come up with the following gems for your entertainment. And I have to say, my respect for movie reviews has gone up a lot in this process - not that I disrespected them before, but I did not have a lot of (ahem) faith that movie reviewers would be able to engage with the scientific issues as well as they have. In my searchings, I didn’t find any positive reviews that weren’t associated with religious or right-wing political publications - and then only two of those.

The Star Tribune gives it one-half out of four stars:

According to “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” the source of all evil in the modern world is Darwinism, a philosophy that, the film posits, is responsible for everything from atheism to abortion, euthanasia to the Holocaust.

The New York Times leads with:

One of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” is a conspiracy-theory rant masquerading as investigative inquiry.

Mixing physical apples and metaphysical oranges at every turn “Expelled” is an unprincipled propaganda piece that insults believers and nonbelievers alike. In its fudging, eliding and refusal to define terms, the movie proves that the only expulsion here is of reason itself.

From Time:

It’s in the film’s final third that it runs entirely off the rails as Stein argues that there is a clear line from Darwinism to euthanasia, abortion, eugenics and–wait for it–Nazism. Theories of natural selection, it’s claimed, were a necessary if not sufficient condition for Hitler’s killing machine to get started. The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. We’ve always been a lustily fratricidal species, one that needed no Charles Darwin to goad us into millenniums of self-slaughter.

From the LA City Beat:

One might accuse Michael Moore of similarly facile, manipulative techniques – and I have – but Moore has never gone to lengths nearly as outrageous as the makers of Expelled. (For what it’s worth, he’s also funnier.)

In the third act, Stein and company move beyond mere visual associations, when they build a case linking Darwinism to Nazism – which is not merely insultingly lame, but also ranks as one of the cheapest, most offensive exploitations of the horrors of the Holocaust I’ve ever witnessed (and I’ve witnessed plenty).

Expelled is another expression of the right wing’s victim complex. It’s classic paranoid thinking: Since we’re pure and correct, any setbacks we suffer must be the result of an Evil Conspiracy. Communists are fluoridating our water. Purity of Essence. We couldn’t be doing substandard academic work. Our poor advancement must have to do with a blacklist! (Stein himself used this idea to bully Norman Lear into giving him a writing job.)

From the New York Post:

After all of his efforts to unhook the ID caboose from the creationism train, Stein makes it clear that his beef with Darwinism is that it weakens religion.

In a long, greasy detour, Stein shows that the Nazis were Darwinists. So what? They also liked skiing. Having Nazi fans doesn’t make Darwin wrong.

From Slant Magazine:

For a film about American freedom of expression and the necessity for open dialogue, it’s hard to imagine Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed being more one-sided, narrow-minded, and intellectually dishonest.

To their film’s catastrophic detriment, Stein and director Nathan Frankowski fail to provide concrete examples of the flaws in Darwin’s theory, content instead to simply have speakers (many with impressive credentials) state that it’s problematic and then treat such unsupported statements as verifiable truth. Nor, ultimately, do they examine the obvious and crucial religious underpinnings of the “intelligent design movement,” whose onscreen adherents deliberately refuse to speculate on the source of this creative “intelligence” because their opinion on the identity of this fundamental biological architect—God—would conclusively reveal Expelled as propaganda for a Christian-right movement whose own champion, Ronald Reagan, Stein ultimately depicts as his spiritual counterpart.

From E! Reviews:

A flunkout of a documentary, this features Ben Stein—still best known for his monotone “Anyone…anyone?”—advocating creationism, er, intelligent design, in science classrooms. Stein’s credibility is blown on this poorly constructed diatribe, and you’d be smart to save your bucks.

Plus, he’s tedious and unfunny.

With a heavy, heavy hand, the pic punctuates every scene with over-the-top archival footage—the Berlin wall, Stalin and other Cold War imagery.

Despite insisting “intelligent design” isn’t pro-God propaganda, Stein argues we’re waging a religious war (cut to cannon fire) with Darwinists smiting the faithful with—gasp!—atheistic ideas. Most outrageously, he plays the overused Nazi card—he tours an old concentration camp and notes Hitler himself was influenced by Darwin. Yes, kids, studying evolution leads to this (cut to dead prisoners).

Expelled pretends it wants to encourage debate but shuts down and edits around every Darwinian scientist who attempts to explain complex issues, as Stein makes snide remarks in voice-over.

From the Colorado Springs Independent:

Nazis? It’s all about Nazis?

In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein, former Nixon speechwriter turned ironic symbol of the anti-hip, may be making a documentary about how the Nazis used the “controversial” theory of gravity to make bombs fall to earth — so, of course, the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and in this universe Ben Stein is actually telling us that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong.

It’s nuttiness right from the opening moments of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Images of Nazi atrocities and the terrors of life behind the Berlin Wall are smugly deployed in an attempt to editorialize away basic scientific fact.

Expelled isn’t about “intelligent design,” about an alternative scientific theory, or even about academic freedom. It’s about Stein believing he has proven that acceptance of evolution leads to atheism (and also, we’re told, to such horrors as birth control). Hence, evolution cannot be allowed to be true. Even if it is.

From Newsday:

Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He’s definitely smarter than I am. What’s galling about his new documentary, “Expelled,” is that he seems to think we’re both slobbering idiots.

In an increasingly hysterical tone, Stein lambastes Darwinians as misguided, ignorant fascists, cutting repeatedly to old footage of the Berlin Wall - a metaphor for squelched thought.

Finally, he unleashes his biggest attention-getter, holding Darwinism responsible for Nazi atrocities and genocide. I’m no lawyer, but that’s a pretty lousy argument.

Did Stein really think audiences wouldn’t balk at being suckered into a propaganda rally? Or was he preaching to the converted from the start? Stein claims to denounce the tyranny of dogma, then browbeats us with his own.

From Variety, whose reviewer is predisposed to like the movie:

Even more offensive is the film’s attempt to link Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ideas and Hitler’s master-race ambitions (when in doubt, invoke the Holocaust), complete with solemnly scored footage of the experimentation labs at Dachau. Evocations of the Berlin Wall, treated as a symbol of a bullheaded scientific establishment on the verge of collapse, are equally fatuous.

The Village Voice:

[Stein's] thesis: Teaching Darwinian evolution but ignoring intelligent design in America’s public schools and universities is the biggest threat to American freedom today—bigger, presumably, than Al Qaeda, Iraq, and the recession combined. A series of interviews with ID true believers has him playing Michael Moore–dumb—no hard questions for the folks at the Discovery Center

ID’ers protest that they’re simply interested in secular alternatives to Darwinian evolution; their scientific opponents, meanwhile, are potential Communists and Nazis. Bizarre and hysterical.

The Orlando Sentinel, whose review was also run by the Chicago Tribune:

….Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, [is] a cynical attempt to sucker Christian conservatives into thinking they’re losing the “intelligent design” debate because of academic “prejudice.”

It’s a rabble-rouser of a doc that uses all manner of loaded images, loaded rhetoric, few if any facts, dubious ID “experts” and mockery of hand-picked “weirdo” legit scientists to attack those who, Stein claims, are stifling the Religious Right’s efforts to inject intelligent design into science courses, science curricula and the national debate.

It just isn’t particularly funny. Or the least bit convincing.

I lost track of the number of times Stalin’s image hit the screen, and in the ways the movie equated science with Darwinism with atheism with Hitler or Stalin. Subtle, it’s not.

Stein (he co-wrote it) builds his movie on classic Big Tobacco Tactics.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently has a rating of less than one out of ten.

Update: As of Saturday, April 19, this post is number four in a google search of “expelled reviews,” and it is getting a lot of traffic. This post keeps switching places on the google front page with “Expelled Exposed,” so I figured that I’d better do an update to reflect more reviews that I’ve found over the last day. Here you are:

The Waco Tribune:

[The] film’s arguments are a rhetorical mishmash of straw men, red herrings, guilt by association, quote harvesting, gotcha interviews and post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this) associations that may cause your head to pop. It’s a propaganda form highly polished by director/activist Michael Moore on the other end of the political spectrum.

Those coming to Expelled hoping to learn something about any research behind ID, a fair appraisal of weaknesses in evolutionary theories or — perhaps the film’s most glaring and telling omission — how Christian evolutionists reconcile faith and science will leave sorely disappointed. The latter is quickly dismissed by a chain of quotes that brand them as liberal Christians and duped by militant atheists in their efforts to get religion out of the classroom.

From TV Guide:

It’s hard to pinpoint the most insulting aspects of t