Ben Stein is an Idiot

Seriously. I got the most recent issue of Focus on the Family's magazine (I subscribe only to see what the anti-gay/anti-family/anti-tolerance organization is up to) where it covered monotone Ben Stein's new documentary "Expelled." The movie is anti-evolution "exposes the persecution" of those that question it in academia.

That's all well and good, but then Stein says:

"I was horrified on the effects of social Darwinism. It teaches that superior species would do everyone a favor if they just killed off all the inferior species. You can draw a straight line from this grandfatherly old man [Darwin] to Hitler and the Holocaust."

Yeah, he said that. Out loud. When you remember this guy used to work for Nixon, this logic kind of makes sense.

Rather than regurgitate the whole thing, Skeptico already debunks this kind of backwards reasoning here. In part:

Evolution is a process where favorable mutations are selected by nature – that is, mutations that make it more likely the organism will reproduce, will be passed to offspring. Although the phrase “survival of the fittest” has become popular, the idea that this means “only the strongest survive” or that living beings fight each other for survival (and so only the strongest survive), is false. “Fittest” actually means “most able to reproduce”. That sometimes means “the strongest”, but in social groups (such as primates), “fittest” can also mean “well regarded by the group”. For example, a rogue early hominid, who murdered his peers, might well have been excluded by the group and (therefore) would not have been able to reproduce.

Hitler’s solution was the opposite of allowing nature to select. Hitler’s approach was to artificially remove groups of people he didn’t like, from the gene pool, in what was undeniably a sickening version of selective breeding, as practiced by farmers for around 10,000 years before Darwin. If Hitler learned of the opportunities of such selective breeding from anywhere, it was from farmers’ knowledge and experience that predated Darwin. Which means that Hitler’s final solution was, if anything, an example of intelligent design.

So Hitler wasn’t inspired by Darwin. If Hitler was inspired by anything, it was religion.

The other thing that bites me is what Stein calls "implications for moral reasoning." Stein stresses...

"Is all life random and are we all meaningless blobs, or is there moral meaning in the world? One of the people we interviewed postulated that there is no God. People like that idea, since if there's no God, there's no morality. Maybe they're scared that if there's some God, they'll be held accountable. If there is a God, some of these guys had better watch out."

Or what? I think it's making an enormous and simplified generalization that anyone that subscribes to evolution has no morality. And thus, if everyone goes along with it, therefore....no morality. Another statement on the site puts it - "How will ideas of morality change, if life is thought to be purposeless and undirected?" That's insulting.

And my favorite - "What are the consequences over time of teaching this one-sided worldview as if it were fact rather than theory?"

Is Stein supposing intelligent design is then fact? Without using the bible as evidence, how do you support that?