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The Case of Creation Last Year’S Dover Trial Resulted in Intelligent Design Being Removed from the Science Curriculum

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The Case of Creation Last Year’S Dover Trial Resulted in Intelligent Design Being Removed from the Science Curriculum Vol 448|19 July 2007 BOOKS & ARTS The case of creation Last year’s Dover trial resulted in intelligent design being removed from the science curriculum. The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA by Gordy Slack Jossey-Bass: 2007. 240 pp. $24.95 PHOTO C. KASTER/AP 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin® and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania by Matthew Chapman HarperCollins: 2007. 288 pp. $25.95 Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul by Edward Humes Ecco: 2007. 400 pp. $25.95 Kevin Padian Three new books use as a centrepiece the court case of Kitzmiller et al. versus Dover Area School District, which played out for six weeks in late 2005 at the state capital of Penn- sylvania. This trial was the latest in a series of American ‘Scopes trials’, named after the 1925 prosecution of Tennessee teacher John Pennsylvania parents, and their children, fought against the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Scopes, who was fined $100 for flouting a state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution in board in the middle of Pennsylvania’s rolling deeper. Edward Humes in Monkey Girl is even state-run schools. Scopes volunteered to be the hills was just crazy enough to buy it — and that more scholarly and thorough in his approach, test case, knowingly breaking the law. Famed was the start of the now-famous Dover case. and contextualizes the trial historically. Unlike attorneys Clarence Darrow and William Jen- The characters on all sides of the Dover trial Chapman and Slack, he does not insert himself nings Bryan argued the case. Scopes lost, — judge, plaintiffs, witnesses, school-board into his narrative, but his views of the proceed- Tennessee was ridiculed, a few other states members and attorneys — are colourful and ings are no less clear. passed similar legislation, and the divide complex, and the trial strikes at the heart of The particulars of the trial are by now famil- between fundamentalists and secularists in what still divides the US population, 400 years iar (see Nature 437, 607; 2005 and Nature 439, the United States was irrevocably cleft. after European settlers arrived. Is the Ameri- 6–7; 2006). Dover’s school board, against the Since the Scopes case, American jurispru- can tradition one of philosophical and political advice of its teachers and attorney, required dence has increasingly sided with the Enlight- idealists, or of persecuted pilgrims who then that high-school biology students be read a enment in a sequence of landmark decisions: turn around and ostracize anyone who doesn’t statement that among other things alleged yes, you can teach evolution; no, you cannot agree with them? that “gaps in the [evolutionary] theory exist balance it with creationism; no, ‘creation sci- The three books take different tacks and for which there is no evidence” and that intel- ence’ is not science; and so on. Then, in the each has different strengths. The author of ligent design is “an explanation of the origin late 1990s, a new kid on the block, intelligent 40 Days and 40 Nights, Matthew Chapman, of life that differs from Darwin’s view”. Stu- design, began to flex its muscles and demand is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin; dents were referred to a supplementary text consideration as a viable scientific theory — his presumed vested interest in the proceed- published by the Foundation for Thought and but in the public arena, not the scientific one. ings is tempered by his own history as a school Ethics, Of Pandas and People, for more infor- Intelligent-design proponents, mostly right- dropout, a movie screenwriter and a Brit with mation on intelligent design. Eleven parents wing Christians with more chutzpah than a perpetually bemused view of colonial antics. sued, engaging the American Civil Liberties scientific acumen, gathered steam, money and Still, his odyssey is a fulfilling one, and he Union and other top representation and sci- eventually a grand strategy to “reverse the sti- seems genuine enough to get himself invited entific advice. The decision of Judge John E. fling dominance of the materialist world view, into many homes where insights and passions Jones III slammed the “breathtaking inanity” and to replace it with a science consonant with run deep. Gordy Slack, author of The Battle of the school board, established its religious Christian and theistic convictions”. They set Over the Meaning of Everything and an experi- motive and actions, accepted the view of the up a think-tank, the Discovery Institute, and enced science writer and editor, likewise brings scientific community that intelligent design started to write op-ed pieces and lobby school his own family baggage (his father is a staunch does not qualify as science, and proscribed districts to introduce their exciting new con- fundamentalist) to his account, but his report- bogus criticisms of evolution in science classes. cept to children. A gullible and obstinate school ing is more linear and his background research Intelligent-design proponents sputtered and 253 BOOKS & ARTS NATURE|Vol 448|19 July 2007 fumed; the usual right-wing commentators Where does the ‘science’ of intelligent explanation, has never demonstrably received fulminated; no one has since taken the Dis- design come from? Biochemist Michael Behe peer review, although its description in his pop- covery Institute seriously. of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsyl- ular books (such as No Free Lunch, Rowman All three books, despite their regrettable vania, is virtually the only scientist prominent & Littlefield, 2001) has come in for withering titles, handle the basic story very well and in the movement; he has published popular criticism from actual mathematicians. Plain- recount some extraordinary moments. An books (for a review of the latest see Nature tiffs’ attorneys were eager to take him apart, but OxyContin-addicted school-board member 445, 1055–1056; 2007) but no demonstrable Dembski exited the proceedings in a suspicious ranted on record: “Two thousand years ago peer-reviewed research on intelligent design. eleventh-hour dispute about having his own someone died on a cross. Won’t anyone take a Behe’s notions of ‘irreducible complexity’ and lawyer represent him in deposition. stand for him?” and then denied that creation- the status of intelligent design as science were All three books are entertaining and inform- ism had ever been discussed at board meet- shredded by attorney Eric Rothschild, who got ative reads; on balance the nod goes to Humes ings. The school-board president claimed in him to admit that under his own definition, for his comprehensive account, although Slack his deposition that he did not know where astrology would qualify as science. is concise and readable. Another book on the the money came from to purchase the Pandas Conspicuously absent from the trial was trial, by local reporter Lauri Lebo, is due out books, and then was shown the cheque from William Dembski, the other pillar of intel- next year. It promises even more lively details the other board member to his own father. ligent-design ‘research’, who holds advanced of this perfect storm of religious intolerance, Expert witness Barbara Forrest graphically degrees in maths and theology but none in First Amendment violation and the never-end- showed that the authors of early drafts of Pan- science, and believes that intelligent design is ing assault on American science education. ■ das had changed some 150 uses of terms such the Logos of the Gospel of John restated in the Kevin Padian is professor of integrative biology and as ‘creation’ and ‘creationist’ to ‘intelligent language of information theory. His notion of curator at the Museum of Paleontology, University design’ and ‘design proponents’, despite a 1987 ‘specified complexity’, a probabilistic filter that of California, Berkeley. He is also president of the Supreme Court decision ruling that ‘creation allegedly allows one to tell whether an event National Center for Science Education and was a science’ was not science. is so impossible that it requires supernatural pro bono expert witness in the Dover trial. that he thought would be there in 1936 (290 A lone voice in the greenhouse p.p.m.), 2000 (314–317), 2100 (346–358) and 2200 (373–396). The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius. With a simple model of the absorption of of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898–1964), Callendar’s seminal paper, ‘The Artificial infrared radiation, he worked out the amount the Scientist who Established the Carbon Production of Carbon Dioxide and its Influence of global warming to be expected from his pre- Dioxide Theory of Climate Change on Temperature’, was published in 1938, nearly dicted CO2 levels, concluding that temperature by James Rodger Fleming half a century after these nineteenth-century would then have been increasing at a rate of American Meteorological Society: 2007. works. During the intervening period, serious about 0.03 °C per decade. Callendar’s 1938 176 pp. $34.95 doubts had developed about the importance of attribution of early twentieth-century warm- changing atmospheric CO2 as a factor in Earth’s ing to CO2 increase might have been believable Robert J. Charlson climate and a cause of ice ages. Competing if global cooling had not ensued in the 1960s With so much written on the subject of car- theories — changes in Earth’s orbital geometry and 1970s. bon dioxide as a cause of climate change, it or in solar output, the role of the oceans, the His result was based on many assumptions seems to have a settled history. But the word attenuation of sunlight by vol- and he used no contemporary ‘established’ in this book’s subtitle moved me canic dust, and spectroscopic CO2 data on which to base his to ask who actually came up with this now considerations such as water estimates.
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