Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [49]
Copies of the book Of Pandas and People were made available to the school by William Buckingham, the chair of the curriculum committee, who raised $850 from his church to purchase copies of the book for the school. As he told a Fox-TV affiliate in an interview the week after the school board meeting, “My opinion, it’s okay to teach Darwin, but you have to balance it with something else such as creationism.” But eleven parents of students enrolled in Dover High would have none of this, and on December 14, 2004, they filed suit against the district with the legal backing of the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The TMLC had the fight they were aching for. The suit was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, and a bench trial was held from September 26 to November 4, 2005, presided over by Judge John E. Jones III, a conservative Christian appointed to the bench in 2002 by President Bush.
The primary task of the prosecution was to show not only that Intelligent Design is not science but that it is just another name for creationism, which the U.S. Supreme Court had already decided in Edwards v. Aguillard—the Louisiana case—could not be taught in public schools. Expert scientific witnesses testified on behalf of the prosecution, including Brown University molecular biologist Kenneth Miller and University of California, Berkeley, paleontologist Kevin Padian, both of whom rebutted specific Intelligent Design claims. More important were the expert testimonies of the philosophers Robert Pennock, from Michigan State University, and Barbara Forrest, from Southeastern Louisiana University, both of whom had authored definitive histories of the Intelligent Design movement. Pennock and Forrest presented overwhelming evidence that Intelligent Design is, in the memorable phrase of one observer, nothing more than “creationism in a cheap tuxedo.”
It was revealed, for example, that the lead author of the book Of Pandas and People, Dean Kenyon, had also written the foreword to the classic creationism textbook What Is Creation Science? by Henry Morris and Gary Parker. The second author of Pandas, Percival Davis, was the co-author of a Young Earth creationism book called A Case for Creation. But the most damning evidence was in the book itself. Documents provided to the prosecution by the National Center for Science Education revealed that Of Pandas and People was originally titled Creation Biology when it was conceived in 1983, then Biology and Creation in a 1986 version, which was retitled yet again a year later to Biology and Origins. Since this was before the rise of the Intelligent Design movement in the early 1990s, the manuscripts referred to “creation,” and fund-raising letters associated with the publishing project noted that it supported “creationism.” The final version, by now titled Of Pandas and People, was released in 1989, with a revised edition published in 1993. Interestingly, in the 1986 draft, Biology and Creation, the authors presented this definition of the central theme of the book, creation, as follows:
Creation means that the various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.
Yet, in Of Pandas and People, published after Edwards v. Aguillard, the definition of creation mutated to this:
Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc.
So there it was, the smoking gun. The textbook recommended to students as the definitive statement of Intelligent Design began its evolving life as a creationist tract. Like the old Monty Python routine where the guy changes a dog license to a cat license by simply crossing out “dog” and writing in “cat,” the creationists simply deleted “creation” and pasted in “intelligent design.”
If all this were