Transcript of Interview with Walt Ruloff about Expelled No Intelligence Allowed. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed (DVD) is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-gifts/4003804/Expelled-No-Intelligence-Allowed-DVD/
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Chris Cash: This is the catholic spotlight the podcast where we talk about what is new, cool and exciting in the catholic marketplace. I am your host Chris Cash director of ecommerce from catholiccompany.com your source for all your catholic needs.
Today in the spotlight we have Walt Ruloff he is producer of the exciting new movie. I guess exciting could be a relative term depending on how you look at documentaries, but I certainly think the subject matter is very exciting. It’s called expelled, no intelligence allowed starring Ben Stein and it is now available on DVD. Welcome Walt.
Walt Ruloff: Thank you very much for having me, I appreciate it.
Chris Cash: So Walt tell our listeners just a little bit about what Expelled is about?
Walt Ruloff: Well Expelled the thrust of Expelled is the, the situation over Darwinian evolution, primarily in the United States but really it is a global issue. Its impact on culture, its impact on education and foremost within our piece the impact within the academy because really that is where things are set, as far as direction and what is presented to high school students and to children and to educational, different educational areas within the country. So the story is about Ben Stein on a heroic journey looking into this massive debate and discovers that there is a whole host of scientists who have dared to cross the line and actually bring up the design hypothesis or the intelligent design hypothesis and discovers that they are expelled from their given area, their given discipline, either as a professor, a teacher or a researcher, and this inspires him to move on and then really kind of uncovers what is going on.
Along the way he meets up with the great atheists who have taken it to the extreme. Kind of the neo-Darwinist position to the extreme such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and P.Z. Myers and others and ultimately gets the courage to say I really need to do something about this and finally has a face off with a group of different policy makers and then ultimately Richard Dawkins and is one of the kind of the key climax which is extraordinary to what Ben is able to get out of Richard Dawkins and then goes from there.
Ben is really making a cry to, or plea to say, you know what we need to bring freedom into the academy. We need to have freedom in our research policy, freedom in our expression in what we find. We really need allow our researchers to go where the evidence may lead them, rather than trying to reposition everything within the given dogma or the given orthodoxy which currently is Darwinian orthodoxy.
Chris Cash: Right and to be clear this movie is not a defense of intelligent design as much as it an exposition of the persecution that comes along with anyone who says they might consider intelligent design as potentially valid in coming up with some results in any kind of research.
Walt Ruloff: That is exactly right, its, we see as producers we see the intelligent design movement as being really a clear symptom of a much deeper problem within the academy. What has made this country great and what has made the advancements in science something to marvel at is the ability to question the given paradigm in whatever area. That is really important to be able to do that. No matter how uncomfortable they make some people in their entrenched positions but that needs to be part of our academic process. So really the idea.
Chris Cash: That is what the academic process was built on, I mean the whole, I am electrical engineer by training I have done research in corporate environments as well as in the academic environment in college and I, you have to understand as a researcher the whole idea is lets question the published results and make sure that they stand up. So what go you started on this project in the first place? Whose idea was this to actually make a movie of it and how did you get Ben Stein on board.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah it is a great question. We, the origination of the idea was actually between myself and the other executive producer. His name is John Sullivan he is out of Los Angeles and our background is kind of from a technology position. I spent years building up a software company that became a de facto standard in the area of optimizational logistics which is really kind of a boring area within business to business transactions.
Chris Cash: Sounds interesting to me.
Walt Ruloff: Okay, as an electrical engineer I am sure it would be yeah. So we really prided ourselves on being able to push the envelope. One of our key directives was to obsolescence our current technology every six months and always to push the paradigm forward and we ended up having about three hundred researchers and a group at MIT and so forth. It was really very exciting. After I sold that company I got involved in Biotech and microbiology and research using the mechanisms that drive adaptation and drive change within the cell, and I was astounded. I originally got very excited about it, because through computer simulation and that kind of stuff and mapping what is actually happening in these trillions of transactions that are happening on an ongoing basis in the cell. I was very excited to get involved in this because I could really see the computer application, but what I soon discovered was is that you cant stray from the current paradigm. You can question the given orthodoxy which is neo-Darwinism which is basically based on random mutation and natural selection and the key area that I was interested in was questioning the whole area of the so called random mutation.
Well that, and if you do you cant get funding you cant get acceptance within given scientific bodies and there is just a whole host of problems that arise from that, if you don’t reposition your work back into that synthesis, into that orthodoxy, so I was very inspired. John and I were very inspired, we said we’ve got to you know get the word out there that this is a major problem, and this is not just an ideological clash but this is actually hurting science, and so one thing led to the next and so we ultimately decided to make a movie from that original position which is kind of crazy but we decided to make a movie.
Chris Cash: Now, you didn’t have any experience in film?
Walt Ruloff: No, no none, we surrounded ourselves with great filmmakers, great editors, great camera people, and a lot of people who have a lot of experience and that, and traditionally that is what an executive producer needs to do is, executive producer is in charge of the funding and the initial financing by putting together the team, putting together the talent and then figuring how to execute the project and then really letting the pros in the area of making film do their work and so that is what we did, was kind of coordinate the effort of lots and lots of people to come together to make this film.
Your second question was; how did we get Ben Stein on board. Well put together a list of criteria because we knew we needed a, we wanted I should say a famous celebrity type person that could be the host of this documentary and it is very difficult to find somebody that can actually take this on, that has the credibility to be able to take this on.
So some of our list of attributes was, we wanted a movie Hollywood star, a celebrity, somebody who is very very smart. Somebody who is very respected, hopefully funny, has a good sense of humor, that we could bring into this.
Chris Cash: As well as somebody who would be willing to do it which is probably an every harder task to surmount in Hollywood?
Walt Ruloff: Exactly, you know somebody that you know will lean a bit to right or at least be willing to.
Chris Cash: Whittles your list down significantly?
Walt Ruloff: Exactly, so that you know Ben Stein rose to the top, there were a few others but Ben Stein was the key person we finally met with him just outside of Seattle on one of his trips. He gave us ten minutes so we ended up spending four hours together, and he just immediately loved the concept and really, really wanted to take it on. Now the interesting this was, Ben Stein’s perspective and his passion over this issue is sanctity of human life, and that is why you see that big area in there about social Darwinism and its impact during the Nazi era.
Chris Cash: Oh and a Jew Ben would be extremely interested in that era in particular.
Walt Ruloff: Exactly, and so that was his position. We were coming from a position of academic freedom in science, and so we talked for a long time. So I think we can put both of these areas together and meet both of our objectives and so that was the, that was a big reason why we had those two main areas in the film. Because Ben is very passionate over that issue and believed that it ultimately all leads to how do we define a person, is there sanctity, is there as he calls it a spark of the divine within each person.
If there is not, well then all bets are off. As Nietzsche if there is no God, then anything is possible. So that was definitely his passion and we came together and we started filming and starting filming all over the world, it was an incredible process and we literally met who is who and interviewed who is who in the debate and then did a great job as you will see in the film.
Chris Cash: Now, did Ben write most of the movie himself or was there a writing team beside him. I know he is capable of doing that.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah, he is an excellent writer and has written many many books. He was one of the writers. We had about fifteen researchers, we had an original writing team of about four and but the key writer was a guy name Kevin Miller and then Ben Stein so they were the two key writers on putting together the voice over and the script. Now in the interviews we always had a list of questions that Ben and we would put together before we’d meet somebody like Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins or Sternberg who is in the beginning of the movie but Ben is so smart and so crafty that if he can find an area where for example with Richard Dawkins that he maybe weak on. Ben is actually a valedictorian from Yale law school is a litigator originally, he is also an economist, but he uses that training as a litigation lawyer to kind of circle in very kind of a subtle way the wagons around these people and then eventually tightens the noose with some strong questioning and you see that also when he really kind of hones in on the origin of life and one of the researchers actually talks about that life could have emerged on the backs of crystals. So things like that we were able to bring out because of Ben’s prowess and skill and in the interviewing process.
Chris Cash: Was that there anything that you found really surprising as you made this movie in terms of just learning from the people that you interviewed or even your own research that you did in setting this up.
Walt Ruloff: I think the biggest thing that surprised us all was just the sheer hatred from that entrenched Darwinist side from anybody that may question or challenge that position. We were most, most surprised by that, by that level of anger and in some cases just sheer anger, sheer hatred. We would interview people, afterwards we would be attacked by all sides, by you know telling us that we did it under false pretence and everything else and it was ridiculous because we went through a very methodical process of giving them the questions upfront paying most of these people, they all signed a release. They, it was something we took something very, very seriously because we knew it was controversial but we didn’t understand the kind of the fact that we were touching something that goes very, very deep within these people and it would drive such anger from them. So I think that was probably the biggest thing that was of surprise to us and in fact it got so bad as you know after the film was released we released it on April 18th of 2008 of this year.
Then Monday, the following Monday we were sued in federal court and in state court by Yoko Ono and then we also had some other lawsuits that were dealing with. It was just incredible how angry people were.
Chris Cash: Right, the suit was over the use of one of John Lennon’s songs in the movie.
Walt Ruloff: Correct and there is another good case, Yoko Ono is well aware of fair use copyright law in the United States, it is very well established their lawyers knew it, but she was just very, very angry and thought she would go for it. I mean we literally destroyed her in court. She lost both in federal and in state.
Chris Cash: I imagine the lawsuit was more to intimidate movie theatres from showing the movie, than it was to actually win any damages.
Walt Ruloff: Yes, exactly it was really to try to do that and plus kind of kybosh or our efforts and you know she was successful to a certain degree, because we were unable to support the movie as we would have liked to after it was in the theater. We had another host of cash available to us to support the film and once that litigation hit we had to pull back and focus on that litigation so and you know we are not finished with her yet. We are going to continue this fight on, but so going back to your original question. That was a big surprise to us.
Chris Cash: Okay well we are going to take a minute here to hear from our sponsor and in just a minute we will back with Walt Ruloff to talk more about Expelled no intelligence allowed. This is the catholic spotlight.
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We are back on the catholic spotlight with Walt Ruloff talking about Expelled no intelligence allowed starring Ben Stein the excellent new DVD just out that will tell you all about the persecutions that go along with intelligent design theory considered in any way in any type of academia in fact we were talking just a minute ago about the absolute hatred for those who would bring up intelligent design theory among some in the academic community. I even had my own personal experience with that, back when Expelled was first coming out into the theatres. I made a blog post about the movie and about my thoughts on intelligent design theory. I included a trailer for the movie, over at inspirational archive.com, my other blog and I within a couple of days, had a couple of different hate posts responding to it, which the posts really were just flat denials of everything without any real meat to them but it certainly showed that they, those who are on the side of Darwinism certainly want to push their agenda and they look for any chance they can to do that.
Walt Ruloff: Yes, we have had many, many similar experiences and as you see in the movie too Chris. The same thing happened to those scientists but it was much more serious to those scientists because now you are talking about their career and their livelihoods and income to pay their you know their ongoing expenses, are all threatened. But we put up also on our website, expelled the movie.com Ben has a blog and Ben would write these one pagers about what he is dealing with and in this movie what are some of the key areas that he is focusing we found ourselves having to kind of go through the actual blog responses because there was a high percentage of them that were filled with profanity and just oozing hatred and we just couldn’t post those. Now 99% we just let go through but there was this large group that was, it was just unbelievable, it was off the charts and so, and then the ones that we did let through that didn’t have that profanity, about fifty percent of them in some cases were also just filled with just a high degree of anger. So yeah, I am not glad, but so he has experienced the same thing.
Yeah, now the amazing thing is I think the bottom line here is this is not over Darwinian evolution, this issue when it comes right down to it, is over something much, much deeper and right now our society and our system within the academy and within law and within politics, is that the position of faith or the position of the belief in a divine or in the case of these scientists the belief that there is a designer or some type of an external cause outside of just physical, more of a metaphysical implication, all of that has been deemed as irrational and subjective.
Now, if you have these really smart people stepping forward, these leading scientists and actually bringing up those metaphysical implications suddenly the position of a belief or a tendency towards the metaphysical becomes rational and that for those people, that is the key issue and they see that as extremely dangerous and our position on that and Ben’s position on that and I think most thinking in open people is that is ridiculous.
I mean that is the history of the human race is to be able to combine those two magisteriums and to say yes we have got implications, they are metaphysical implications that come from science. Now, let’s not try to interpret those philosophically within science, let’s interpret those within philosophy lets allow science to have these implications because they are true, they are there and they are in front of these scientists and you need to be able to express them.
Chris Cash: For another thing, from a strictly scientific standpoint if you start limiting what a scientist can even consider as possibility it creates huge problems because if you think about for instance when Einstein came up with the theory of relativity and he started with a supposition that was just so out there, so far from mainstream thought and he just threw it out there and said what if light always travels at the same speed no matter what and built this whole theory around that before even being able to test and see if it was actually true. Now you know with Einstein being who he was it turned out that it was true but you could certainly see the chance that many others who were saying, well lets say what if there was intelligent designer out there just being shot down before they even had a chance to look at what the bigger implications would be in the realm of biology and science.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah, nope you are absolutely right, you are absolutely right.
Chris Cash: Now, putting this movie together I guess we have kind of talked about some of the challenges what were some of the most fun parts of putting this together. I think obviously to me getting Ben into this little schoolboy outfit must have been a challenge but.
Walt Ruloff: That was fun, I mean we had some photo shoots and type of thing with him putting that on, but Ben is really a fun loving guy.
Chris Cash: I see him as having a great sense of humor so.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah, so he put that on and he loved the whole you know trying to create a message around that. He understood it and he loved the process and that was great. I think probably the funest part of making this film it really brought a lot of enjoyment for both Ben and myself and the crew, was really just traveling around the world and going to all these extraordinary places and seeing him in action and all of the activity before hand and finally really truly unique places. A lot of our filming was in front of the Berlin wall which acts as a centre, a central metaphor within the film. As this wall to separate freedom from tyranny within kind of a given area which then was communism and many other places like Brussels. We actually did a whole host of filming at the Vatican which didn’t make it into the film but will be in our extended version and that was absolutely fabulous.
Chris Cash: What kind of stuff did you film at the Vatican, were there actually interviews there or mostly just background.
Walt Ruloff: No, we had a series of interviews which will be in our extended version where we talk to the chief pontificate of science and many others within the Catholic Church and within the Holy See and that it has to be in a separate DVD or an extended version because that really becomes a movie unto itself. So we made a decision that it couldn’t be in the core ones but it will definitely be in the follow up DVD’s and so what is the position of the catholic church how are they going to you know walk this difficult tight rope of accepting the principles of evolution but yet understanding that there is a designer behind it.
What is that kind of core rationalization between those two positions and I think you know from, there is many people in the Catholic Church that are still struggling with that. How do you correlate those two positions, from a purely naturalistic view of science but on the other side also accepting design. So that is a whole new area that we are really interesting in, in moving forward on.
Chris Cash: So this would be kind of like expelled two the extended edition.
Walt Ruloff: Exactly.
Chris Cash: Available sometime when?
Walt Ruloff: 2009.
Chris Cash: Excellent.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah, we are also talking about putting together a four pack DVD, like an educational pack that will deal with this kind of the interpretation of the metaphysic in philosophy and in theology, the positions of the church. We also wanted to do a whole section that really expands the science area, really that was our passion and to expand these new mechanisms that are, very obviously point toward a metaphysical designer that has I should metaphysical implications. How do we deal with that? We want to expand on Ben Stein’s passion which is social Darwinism. We covered a lot of areas in the film and the film moved very quickly so what we want to be able to do is expand each of those areas for people that are interested to get into a lot more detail into the history in these areas, the ongoing debate and what we hope to you know find in the future.
Chris Cash: One thing that I would be interested in knowing more about personally would be the, you’d interviewed several scientists especially the ones who were cloaked in shadow to not reveal their identity who were using the ideas of intelligent design in their research work because they needed that basis to move it forward but they couldn’t acknowledge it. I would be very interested in knowing what kind of research is being fuelled by the ideas behind intelligent design and what problems are being solved with cursory use of the ideas of intelligent design. What kind of problems are being solved that could not have been solved just through Darwin theory alone.
Walt Ruloff: That is an excellent, excellent question and you’ve really hit one of our key passions, in making this film that we want to again follow up with more detail in an extended version. Is, we found literally thousands of scientists who are in key areas. One of your questions was what area they are working in. Well the key areas would be in biotech for example and in research in these new functions within the cell. We are, they are just now really understanding the…
Chris Cash: Which one of the important things to know as an engineer myself that when you are doing technological engineering you don’t care where the theory came from you just want to get something to work.
Walt Ruloff: Exactly, so as an engineer here is a good place to start for yourself, is the area of CAD-CAM computer aided design and computer aided manufacturing, its really dominated the landscape as far as engineering and converting engineering into a manufacturing and an automated manufacturing process such as robotics. Well the area of CAD-CAM really gave us understanding to being able to apply that as a reference position to really exactly what is happening within the cell. On one, and there is many compartments within the cell, for example there is the database of all of the information that will be translated into manufacturing process. So you have the DNA and the RNA synthesis that is being read and then transferred into another area within the cell which actually manufactures proteins and ultimately folds proteins and there is mechanisms that transfer these semi finished parts into an assembly line and then these parts are put together and the very specific parts are put together and one very, very simple, simple part within the trillions of different parts that are existing in all these many different types of cells is the probability of that coming together in the protein manufacturing process that originates from this data is one in a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion and you remember the fellow by the name of Doctor Doug Axe who is in the film who is studying that process of synthesis and how can the so called the random mutation actually build that protein, well it just cant. So if you put all of that together you can look at an engineer and somebody from computer science and say what is happening within the cell is exactly what is happening on a much, much higher level than what is happening in our modern day manufacturing arenas. I mean to really kind of put in a nutshell what is happening within the cell would be similar to if a Boeing 747 rather than being manufactured in a plant a Boeing 747 could actually replicate itself and actually could fix itself and actually could fly and work itself but the key thing is actually manufacture a new 747 and then that new 747 grows and becomes a full size 747.
I mean the complexity of self manufacturing and holding on to the data and then actually moving from a stem cell to each one of these unique cells and the coordination that happens within our own bodies, the 4.5 trillion cells working together in unison is staggering so going back to your original question. The way that these scientists look at this, is they really have to put aside again unfortunately today in confidence, they have to put aside their current you know they have to put aside Darwinian evolution and look at the cell in this framework as manufacturing as CAD-CAM and then that allows them to use that as a reference point to make sense of what they are looking at. If they look at it, as purely as kind of a random mutation and natural selection it doesn’t get them anywhere, if you understand what I am saying.
So that is why it is so key to where we need to allow these scientists to be free and to open, and to talk about what their seeing because that is, by not allowing them to talk about it you eliminate collaboration. So if somebody is going to write a paper that will ultimately be peer reviewed and be used as a benchmark research. If you are not allowed to talk about it openly you eliminate collaboration and we need to use these reference points such as design and the new processes that are being discovered as this new reference point for proper collaboration across many research entities.
Chris Cash: I feel pretty confident that with continued pushing on this issue we should be able to get to a more open environment hopefully and I guess one can never be sure of any of that but it certainly makes sense and if we can get the word out to a large enough audience then the pressures would create things that make more sense.
Walt Ruloff: Yeah, you are absolutely right and the real injustice that is happening today we haven’t really talked about is where you have this injustice happening but at the same time you have people like Richard Dawkins that are putting forward this extreme atheism by you know using neo-Darwinism as a justification to basically say if you believe in anything other than the material and if you are a believing person you are an idiot. So we’ve got a real problem on our hands. We’ve got a problem in science and now we have a problem in society by people making these ridiculous claims and so yeah.
Chris Cash: Well thank you Wolf, or excuse me thank you Walt.
Walt Ruloff: You are welcome.
Chris Cash: For coming on our show, was there anything you wanted to say to our listeners as a closing.
Walt Ruloff: Well I would really hope that if you could watch our DVD tell your friends about it and go to the website expelledthemovie.com and we are really hoping that we have, we do well with our DVD so that we can use the revenue from this to create many more and to create a lot more follow up with Ben Stein on continuing to move this issue forward so I think that just getting the word out on the DVD is really key and thank you very much for having me on your show.
Chris Cash: Well thank you very much Walt for coming. We appreciate it and we will hopefully hear from you again when some of your new material comes out.
Walt Ruloff: Great, thank you so much Chris.
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Transcript of Interview with Walt Ruloff about Expelled No Intelligence Allowed. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com
Listen Now to the audio version of the show.
Expelled – No Intelligence Allowed (DVD) is available at The Catholic Company.
http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-gifts/4003804/Expelled-No-Intelligence-Allowed-DVD/