The lawyer, actor, writer, economist, professor, former Nixon speechwriter, and game-show host Ben Stein is starring in a new movie, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, that challenges the Darwinian account of life’s history. It was given a screening in Minneapolis on March 20th, and among those attending were Richard Dawkins, who had actually consented to be interviewed for the film before he knew what its angle was going to be, and the biologist PZ Meyers, author of one of the world’s premier science blogs, Pharyngula.
Once Myers, an acerbic critic of “Intelligent Design”, creationism, and religion in general, was spotted in the audience, he was ejected — although surprisingly his guest, Dawkins, was not. The irony of Myers’s being expelled from Expelled was not lost on anyone, and the story has been reverberating ever since. Somehow, I was so out of the loop on this one that I didn’t hear about it for a week, but if you haven’t either, you can read an account in the New York Times from last weekend (I missed that one while I was up in Wellfleet), or get the story straight from Myers himself.