The documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” represents the latest effort by intelligent design (ID) advocates to refute evolutionary theory.

Hosted by Ben Stein, the film claims that educators and scientists are being persecuted for their belief that ID is evident in nature.

But instead of being an investigative inquiry that highlights the arguments, this film presents a ridiculous caricature of the scientific community bent on quashing free speech for the sake of protecting a failing ideology.

The audience is bombarded with images of the Berlin Wall, Holocaust mass graves and the downtrodden citizenry of totalitarian regimes. The result of the edited slices is a politicized rant that fails to note the vital distinction between Herbert Spencer’s long-discredited social darwinism and modern evolutionary theory as applied to the natural sciences and not human morality.

Stein, in his signature deadpan style, attempts to portray a group of disgruntled researchers as the victims of a Darwinian conspiracy for their roles in promoting ID instead of dealing with the real issue responsible for their professional failures — shoddy science. Curiously, “Expelled” does not even provide an adequate description of modern evolutionary theory, the very paradigm that is being contested in this film.

Perhaps the most important question that is never addressed in “Expelled” is whether or not ID is actually science. Stein argues that ID is being kept out of science curriculum in an attempt to stifle independent thought.

However, the ID program appeals to an unknown cosmic designer or supernatural power to explain biological variation, neither of which can be directly observed nor tested in an empirical fashion. Thus, ID is not science.

As much as Stein would like to tear down that ideological Berlin Wall he sees existing in academia, the wall needs to remain in order to keep ID and religious philosophies out of our science classrooms and laboratories.

—Mark Zlojutro, graduate student in the Laboratory of Biological Anthropology