The Dover Area School District of Pennsylvania is currently involved in a historic courtroom battle in federal court. The plaintiffs, eleven parents of Dover area children, are suing the School Board for modifying the curriculum last year to de-emphasize evolution and add something called "intelligent design". The ACLU is providing free representation for the plaintiffs while the Dover School Board is being defended free of charge by a Christian right-wing think tank. The plaintiffs argue that their First Amendment rights are being violated by the inclusion of what they consider religion into the biology curriculum. More below the fold.
First off, some background is needed. In the 1980's the religious right tried repeatedly to get "scientific creationism" put on the curricula of many states' educational systems. It was a vicious battle and many lawsuits were filed, but in the end, the dust settled and scientific creationism was soundly defeated. The religious right wasn't just going to give up getting their doctrine into schools however. In the late 1980's the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture published what is now known as "The Wedge Document". Here are some choice quotes:
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. The Center awards fellowships for original research, holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the opportunities for life after materialism.
At around the same time the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, a religious right-wing non-profit, published the "textbook" Of Pandas and People. This book was added alongside the mainstream scientifically-accurate Biology textbook in biology classes in the Dover Area School District last year. It was in Of Pandas and People that the term "intelligent design" was first used. The book cleverly avoided mentioning God at all, rather, referring repeatedly to an "intelligent designer" which could presumably be taken to mean God or aliens. It was through this vector that the right-wingers once again tried to put Christian creationism into science classrooms. To them, it doesn't matter so much that Of Pandas and People is hopelessly flawed and completely unscientific. In short, it's unsuitable as a textbook for use in schools simply because it's wrong - but yet it is currently being used in biology classrooms in Dover, Pennsylvania. This was the major factor in the filing of the current lawsuit against the Dover Area School Board.
The trial is now underway and things aren't looking too good for the Dover Area School Board. Their lawyers are being donated free of charge, but if they lose, they're still going to have to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to the ACLU's attorneys. If that happens it's not going to help the Dover Area School District which, like all school districts, is underfunded, and the fault would lie solely with the members of the School Board for their inclusion of non-scientific principles into their classes.
In recent days Michael Behe, famous for his concept of "irreducible complexity", has testified for the defense. He is known as one of the lead proponents of Intelligent Design, and so you'd think he'd do a good job defending his own ideas, right? This isn't exactly so:
HARRISBURG -- One of intelligent design's leading experts could not identify the driving force behind the concept.
In his writings supporting intelligent design, Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and author of "Darwin's Black Box," said that "intelligent design theory focuses exclusively on proposed mechanisms of how complex biological structures arose."
But during cross examination Tuesday, when plaintiffs' attorney Eric Rothschild asked Behe to identify those mechanisms, he couldn't.
When pressed, Behe said intelligent design does not propose a step-by-step mechanism, but one can still infer intelligent cause was involved by the "purposeful arrangement of parts."
Michael Behe also got himself into hot water when he tried to use the fifteenth-century definition of "scientific theory" rather than the modern one:
HARRISBURG -- Dr. Michael Behe, leading intellectual light of the intelligent design movement, faced a dilemma.
In order to call intelligent design a "scientific theory," he had to change the definition of the term. It seemed the definition offered by the National Academy of Science, the largest and most prestigious organization of scientists in the Western world, was inadequate to contain the scope and splendor and just plain gee-willigerness of intelligent design.
So he devised his own definition of theory, expanding upon the definition of those stuck-in-the-21st-century scientists, those scientists who ridicule him and call his "theory" creationism in a cheap suit.
He'd show them. He'd come up with his own definition.
Details aside, his definition was broader and more inclusive of ideas that are "outside the box."
So, as we learned Tuesday, during Day 11 of the Dover Panda Trial, under his definition of a scientific theory, astrology would be a scientific theory.
Astrology?
Who knew that Jacqueline Bigar, syndicated astrology columnist, was on par with Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe?
Eric Rothschild, attorney for the plaintiffs, asked Behe about whether astrology was science. And Behe, after hemming and hawing and launching into an abbreviated history of astrology and science, said, under his definition, it is. He said he wasn't a science historian, but the definition of astrology in the dictionary referred to its 15th-century roots, when it was equated with astronomy, which, according to the National Academy of Science, is a science.
So, taking a short logical leap, something Behe would certainly endorse since he does it a lot himself, you could say that intelligent design is on par with 15th-century science.
Sounds about right.
I'll be posting more diaries on the ongoing courtroom battle in Dover, Pennsylvania as events progress, but in the mean time here is a collection of links for further education on the subjects of evolution, creationism, Intelligent Design, and science education:
- The Talk.Origins Archive is THE site to go to for information on evolution.
- TalkDesign.Org contains a great list of articles on Intelligent Design and why it is not a valid scientific theory.
- The York Daily Record's Dover Biology Page is an excellent source of information on the current court battle. It is updated daily with breaking news from the courtoom.
- The National Center for Science Education has lots of information with frequent updates on the attacks against our science education in our public school systems.
- UC Berkeley's Understanding Evolution has lots of information and learning materials on evolution aimed for a layperson's understanding.
- The talk.origins Usenet group, available through Google Groups is the place to go for all of your evolution vs. creationism discussion needs.
And of course no diary on evolution would be complete without a little self-deprecating humor: