Darwin, Dover, 'Intelligent Design' and textbooks.

Designs on intelligence

An expected six-week court case, due to conclude next month, pits US biologists' commitment to the evolutionary theories of Darwin once again against religious opponents with more biblical views. In a Pennsylvania courtroom a test case could decide how evolution is taught in state schools. The civil trial, triggered last year by a classroom battle, marks the beginning of the first major legal a...

Human Evolution from Darwin to Dover: What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been

These lyrics, sung by Crystal and Robyn Bernard for Dr. Jerry Falwell: Feudin’ Fussin’ & Frettin’, capture one of the more significant challenges to teaching human evolution: the belief that “I didn’t come from a monkey.” A documentary on the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, over the teaching of intelligent design, also features this song, and not surprisingly, it was also in Dov...

Swift-boating Darwin: alternative or complementary science.

American scientists breathed a collective sigh of relief last December after Judge John Jones ruled against teaching intelligent design (ID) in the classrooms of science. “The overwhelming evidence is that Intelligent Design is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism and not a scientific theory,” Jones declared in his 139-page decision, issued in Dover, PA. “It is an extension of th...

Growing challenge of Darwin's detractors

Evolutionary biologists in the US got a little early seasonal cheer in December with a detailed and comprehensive attack on the increasingly widespread notion of intelligent design. A Pennsylvania judge ruled that it could not be taught alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection in biology classes. Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology ...

Intelligent design: going back to Darwin for a better computational model of creation