The New York Times story on Richard Dawkins' gatecrashing a special screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in Minneapolis Thursday night contains the usual boilerplate bias of reporter Cornelia Dean. (Expelled is a "creationist" film, you see, and ID is an "ideological cousin of creationism", etc.).
(Read the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/science/21expelledw.html?em&ex=1206417600&en=46c17af663bbda1d&ei=5087%0A)
Nonetheless, Dean's report contains two nuggets. One is that Dawkins had flown to Minneapolis to accompany P. Z. Myers to a convention of atheists. That underscores the real mission of these gents, as I have said before. When they accuse ID supporters of injecting religion into science they really are just projecting.
Second, and more important, Dawkins says that the film's references to the linkage of Darwinist thought and the Nazi's race policies is a "major outrage." Great. Let him debate that with scholars who, unlike the one-time zoologist, now turned polemicist, actually have studied the matter.
No one in the film, and certainly not Richard Weikart, historian and author of From Darwin to Hitler, sees one-to-one causality. But Darwinist thought did influence the Nazis. Probably more than anywhere, the ideas of racial superiority and eugenics were fervently advocated in Germany for decades, among others, by the noted Darwin enthusiast Ernst Haeckel. As a result, race theory and eugenics were not a hard sell to the German volk, including educated people, when the Nazis took charge.
Lovely stuff. Maybe Dawkins should make a tour of it.
In Expelled, Ben Stein does.