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John M. Lynch is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett the Honors College at Arizona State University. He's also affiliated with ASU's Center for Biology & Society. When he's not an historian of anti-evolutionism, he's an evolutionary morphologist. Much to his surprise, in 2007 he was named the Arizona Professor of the Year. No doubt his students were surprised as well.

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« Bruce Chapman is a liar | Main | Sea Cucumber Sex Scandal »

Expelled and Reduction ad Hitlerum

Posted on: March 21, 2008 10:12 PM, by John Lynch

Phil Plait on the reductio ad Hitlerum that is central to Expelled!:

For the producers of this movie to continue this Big Lie tying evolution and Nazis together is an irony almost too big to comprehend, given that this is precisely how Nazi propaganda worked. In a rich field of creationist ironies, this may be the elephant in the room. They are projecting onto their enemies the very thing they are guilty of.

For Ben Stein to go to concentration camps and promote creationism is beyond the pale. It’s a lie, it’s ugly, and it should spark universal condemnation from every thinking human on the planet. This movie is founded on falsehoods, the producers lied to get interviews, they’ve used decidedly shady tactics to promote it, and the movie evidently has a huge lie as its very premise -a lie to which the producers themselves have admitted.

All of this, by the way, follows from a sympathetic viewer (Stuart Blessman) noting that

Nazi Germany is the thread that ties everything in the movie together. Evolution leads to atheism leads to eugenics leads to Holocaust and Nazi Germany

Blessman, it appears, also makes up a bunch of lies about Myers at the screening and accuses Dawkins of being a "gatecrasher".

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All of this, by the way, follows from a sympathetic viewer (Stuart Blessman) noting that
You have run across a reproduction at the Expelled! site. It does not include full attribution or a link to the original post at Jeffrey Overstreet's blog. (Isn't this an intellectual property violation?) Without a link to follow, you will not see the many comments in which Blessman is shown to contradict himself as well as many easily verifiable facts. This despite the blog host being generally favorable to his position. Overstreet seems more concerned about foul language than about the bearing of false witness.

Posted by: Friend Fruit | March 23, 2008 2:40 PM

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