True story: It's my junior year, and I'm attending a reasonably prestigious university with a reputation for being just a notch below Ivy League. I have a friend who's studying to be a doctor (as she is now). On the first day of her biology class, the professor announces that anyone asking questions implying something about 'creationism' will immediately receive an automatic "F" for the semester.

Now, at that point, I didn't know much about the debate. But I did know that's a sure sign of an unquestionable dogma in play -- as surely as the parochial school nuns other friends complained about, who handed out detentions for asking hard questions about God. How you handle dissent and honest questioning says a lot about your level of evidence and confidence for your proposition. And your level of tolerance for differing ideas.

Going back two years, my freshman year, The Panda's Thumb was required reading for all incoming Arts & Sciences students. Today, Stephen J. Gould is criticized for being too soft on 'religion' (as if atheism was an implication of biology) and his Mismeasure of Man has been somewhat discredited, some argue -- its errors arising from Gould's Marxist leanings and upbringing. But back then, The Panda's Thumb was the preferred tool for trying to instill a belief in neo-Darwinian evolution in those whose families might have taught otherwise.

And to ensure spiritual orthodoxy, freshmen were also required to take "The Bible as Literature", which was taught by an atheist who was openly and famously hostile to anything God-related. Having an intemperate atheist teach the bible is a bit like deciding one's Electrical Engineering courses should be taught by the Amish, or business administration classes taught by an ardent Marxist. Usually, you have someone who is sympathetic to a subject teach it, not someone who hates, hates, hates it.

So of course my college had a program of theological and philosophical indoctrination. And the worst was the biology professor who wasn't simply trying to expose backwoods rubes to alternative points of view, but was trying to make sure people weren't allowed to ask questions or imply something unorthodox in his classes. (And I don't imagine he adopted a different outlook regarding tenure reviews.) That was the 1980s; I don't imagine the climate has improved today. (If anything, I hear it has become worse.)

Aside from a brief foray into the probability of protein formation, Expelled spends almost no time discussing the details of the scientific debate between Intelligent Design and neo-Darwinism. The entire thesis and focus of the movie is simply: "Should people really be fired for simply making a passing reference to ID, or doing research which might lead that way? Isn't it kind of anti-American, not to mention against the spirit of academic freedom, to blackball people for espousing unpopular beliefs?"

So I wonder to what Chris Mooney is referring when he complains of scientific deception:

... this dishonest film is being placed before mass audiences, and I’m afraid that most viewers are not going to have nearly enough grounding in the unending evolution-ID battles to see why it’s so deceptive. Instead, they’re going to find Ben Stein funny (I saw the film; he is), and many of the anti-religion evolutionists featured pretty off-putting (I certainly did, and I’m not even religious). The result? A potential public relations black eye for the world of science, and the evolution community in particular.

You don't need to know the first thing about evolutionary biology to understand that the scientific "establishment" has become brittle and intolerant of dissent. As a point of reference, physics departments today are filled with crackpots who spin out non-disprovable theories of alternative universes, based in New Age metaphysics -- that's not even science, boys and girls, but nobody's demanding such people be fired. (To the contrary, Scientific American now devotes itself to such drivel; such theories, however unscientific, flatter the left's religious preferences.) Yet a student should receive an "F" for asking her professor to clarify a question "creationists" have raised? Please.

In not one critical review have a read a single description of what is "deceptive" about what little the film says about the science. The biggest complaint is that Ben Stein dared to point to the eugenics movement that Darwinists promoted in the early twentieth century.

True to form, our reviewer has exactly one antidote:

From Michael Crichton’s State of Fear to Stein’s Expelled, there is nothing to prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences. There are no standards. There is no filter. And the truth is not just automatically going to win in the competition of ideas when the playing field tilts against it.

We must have a "filter", some group of censors to "prevent the most awful, misleading drivel from reaching and influencing mass audiences"! What a wonderful antidote to a "deceptive" film which claims (outrageously!) that the scientific and media establishments want to squash dissent and control the dialogue. Boy, Chris Mooney sure proved that Ben Stein guy wrong.

(This reminds me nothing so much as the recent situation where Muslims around the world rioted and murdered people because, they felt, some had implied they were violent and intolerant.)

Of course, we could now brand Mooney a lone wacko, but he's writing on "scienceprogress.com", and his suggestion that we must stop such films from being distributed is resonating deeply with the denizens of DailyKos, who have placed it on the front page today, citing the paragraph I just quoted, quite approvingly. Yes: the answer to Ben Stein's false and deceptive claims of censorship is -- censorship!