Microcosm_ E. Coli and the New Science of Life - Carl Zimmer [78]
“Darwinists dismiss the reasoning behind the intelligent-design movement, contending that living organisms were produced by the mindless processes of random mutation and natural selection,” Hartwig wrote. “But advances in molecular biology are shredding that claim. For example, consider the little outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and long whip-like propeller. It hums along at 17,000 rpm.” Hartwig pointed out that it took fifty genes to create a working flagellum. If a single gene were disabled by a mutation, the flagellum would be crippled. There were therefore no intermediate steps by which a flagellum could have evolved. “Such systems simply defy Darwinist explanations,” Hartwig declared.
Focus on the Family was not the only organization trying to get Of Pandas and People into public schools. In 2000, a Christian legal organization called the Thomas More Law Center began sending lawyers to school boards around the country. They urged the boards to adopt the book and promised to defend them if they were sued. “We’ll be your shields against such attacks,” Robert Muise, one of the lawyers, told the Charleston, West Virginia, Board of Education. (The Thomas More Law Center calls itself “the sword and shield for people of faith.”) School boards in Michigan, Minnesota, West Virginia, and other states turned them down.
But in 2004 the Thomas More lawyers got a break when they visited the rural community of Dover, Pennsylvania. The Dover Board of Education decided to promote the teaching of intelligent design. One board member arranged for sixty copies of Of Pandas and People to be donated to the school library. The local school board added a new statement to the science curriculum. “Students,” it read in part, “will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s Theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design.”
The board of education also demanded that teachers read a second statement aloud to all Dover biology classes. They were required to say that evolution was a theory, not a fact (confusing the nature of both facts and theories). “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view,” the statement continued. “The reference book Of Pandas and People is available for students to see if they would like to explore this view in an effort to gain an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. As is true with any theory, students are encouraged to keep an open mind.”
Dover’s science teachers refused to read the statement. They declared that to do so would violate the oath they took not to give their students false information. The superintendent came to the classrooms to read the statement instead. When curious students asked what sort of designer was behind intelligent design, he told them to ask their parents and walked out.
Two months later, eleven parents filed a lawsuit. Their lawyers argued that the statement violated the First Amendment because it represented the impermissible establishment of religion. And on an autumn day the trial began.
The plaintiffs called parents and teachers to testify how the board of education had pressured teachers not to teach “monkey to man evolution” and promised to bring God back into the classroom. The defense responded by bringing in two biologists as expert witnesses, Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho and Michael Behe of Lehigh University. Like Dembski, Minnich and Behe are fellows at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the leading organization for the promotion of intelligent design.
Behe has never managed to publish a paper in a peer-reviewed biology journal arguing for intelligent design based on original research. Instead, he has presented his case mainly in op-ed columns, speeches, and books. Behe claims that some biological systems could not have evolved by natural selection because they