Ruling may not stop Americans teaching 'intelligent design'

Published on Saturday 24 December 2005 00:05

WHEN the school board in Muscatine, Iowa, sits down next year for its twice-a-decade evaluation of the district's science curriculum, the matter of whether to teach intelligent design as a challenge to evolution is expected to come up for discussion.

Board members disagree about whether they will be swayed by a sweeping court decision on intelligent design released on Tuesday in Pennsylvania. A federal judge there ruled intelligent design "a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory" that must not be taught in a public school science class.

"I don't think that a judge in one state is going to be able to tell everybody in all other states what to do," says Paul Brooks, a school board member and retired principal in Muscatine who favours teaching intelligent design.

"So I don't get too excited about what he said."

The board's vice-president, Ann Hart, demurs. "This determination in Pennsylvania will help the cause," Ms Hart says, "for those of us who think intelligent design should not be taught in public school science classes because of separation of church and state."

Educators and legislators in Muscatine and other communities that are considering intelligent design said they were learning about the results of the trial involving the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, and had not read the decision.

The Dover board voted in October last year to have students listen to a statement at the start of their biology class that said that evolution was a flawed theory and that intelligent design was an alternative they could study further. It was a limited step, but it opened the door to a lawsuit from local parents that became the nation's test case of the legal merits of teaching intelligent design.

The federal district judge in the Pennsylvania case, John E Jones III, ruled after a six-week trial that intelligent design (ID) was "an interesting theological argument, but it is not science". He concluded that it was "unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom".

Intelligent design is the proposition that biological life is so complex that it could not have randomly evolved, but must have been designed by an intelligent force.

Lawyers for the parents who sued the Dover board hailed the decision as a cautionary one for any state or school board flirting with intelligent design because Judge Jones ruled broadly on the very legitimacy of intelligent design as science.

The judge's 139-page decision dealt not only with the specific missteps of the Dover school board, but also traced the growth of the intelligent design movement from the remnants of creationism and creation science - which the Supreme Court declared in 1987 to be unconstitutional to teach in public school science class.

Intelligent design proponents gained support in Dover and across the country with the rallying cry to "teach the controversy" over evolution and open students' minds to competing theories.

The National Centre for Science Education in Oakland, California, has tracked efforts in at least two dozen states to introduce challenges to evolution in the curriculum. Some efforts hew more closely to the approach in Kansas, where the State Board of Education changed its standards to teach about the flaws in evolutionary theory.

In South Carolina, State Senator Mike Fair has introduced a bill to encourage teaching criticism of evolution. Mr Fair is also on a state education committee that is evaluating biology standards. He says although he had not read the Pennsylvania ruling, it offended him because it impugned board members' motives because they were Christians.

"This case hasn't settled anything," Mr Fair says.

Kristi Bowman, a law professor at Drake University in Des Moines, said that technically the judge's ruling was legally binding only in part of Pennsylvania and that no other courts in the country must follow it.

"That aside," Professor Bowman said, "this is such a thorough, well-researched opinion that covers all possible bases in terms of the legal arguments that intelligent design advocates present, that I think any school board or state board of education thinking about adopting an intelligent design policy should think twice."

Prof Bowman attended part of the Dover trial and expects her article on intelligent design to be in The Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

The legal fees incurred may be "an even stronger cautionary signal to school districts around the country than the actual decision," Prof Bowman says.

The Dover school district is now liable for the legal fees incurred by the plaintiffs - which plaintiffs lawyers say could exceed $1 million.

The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, as well as lawyers with Pepper Hamilton, a private firm.

Eric Rothschild, a Pepper Hamilton lawyer, said in a news conference after the ruling that holding the Dover board to a financial penalty would convey to other school districts that "board members can't act like they did with impunity."

But Mr Rothschild said the fees were still being totalled, and he left open the possibility that the lawyers might go after individual board members who voted for the intelligent design policy to pay the legal costs.

In Muscatine, the superintendent, Tom Williams, said he expected that the possibility of a legal battle would deter his board from adopting intelligent design.

"We do expose ourselves to some kind of risk if we go out on a limb," Mr Williams says.

He adds that he was not in favour of it because he saw intelligent design as creationism with "just a little different twist of terminology".

"We need to stick with what our teachers are trained to do, and they're not trained to teach religious philosophies," says Mr Williams.

Evolution research hailed as the biggest milestone of year

STUDIES that widened understanding of evolution were collectively awarded the title "Breakthrough of the Year" yesterday by the leading US journal Science.

A number of scientific papers published this year focused on the "nuts and bolts" of Charles Darwin's theory, ranging from studies of the influenza virus to chimpanzee genetics and stickleback fish armour. The all- encompassing role of evolution is highlighted in a Science editorial, which says: "Today evolution is the foundation of all biology, so basic and all-pervasive that scientists sometimes take its importance for granted."

The decision to name evolution research as the most significant scientific milestone of 2005 makes a thinly disguised political point.

It comes at a time when Darwin's ideas are increasingly under attack by Christian fundamentalists and supporters of "intelligent design", especially in the US.

Some experts are seriously worried about children being taught theories based on the influence of divine intervention that have nothing to do with science.

Placing itself squarely in opposition to the creationists and intelligent design advocates, Science says: "2005 stands out as a banner year for uncovering the intricacies of how evolution actually proceeds."

A number of studies showed how small changes in DNA can trigger dramatic evolutionary events.

Researchers found that a single genetic change can be all that is needed to turn one species into many - as in the case of the Alaskan stickleback that lost its armour and evolved from an ocean-loving species into a variety of lake dwellers.

Teams following evolution at the genetic level looked at the chimpanzee genome and reconstructed the 1918 pandemic flu virus, discovering that it appeared to have started out in birds.

Scientists also watched evolution in action among a number of animals, from caterpillars to crickets, and found that basic behavioural differences can turn a single population into two species.

Science awarded the title of "Breakdown of the Year" to US particle physics.

Two major experiments were cancelled in 2005 and there is talk of forcing one of the three US particle colliders to close early.

JOHN VON RADOWITZ