The road to Dover. In 1968, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. The Court ruled that the Arkansas law had a religious purpose — namely, to oppose teachings perceived to conflict with the biblical story of creation. Following this defeat, opponents of evolution adopted two strategies. First, they advocated the teaching of creationism as an alternative scientific explanation, along with evolution. Second, they began to adopt scientific jargon to give creationism a veneer of science. Two states, Arkansas and Louisiana, passed laws mandating this “balanced” treatment of evolution and creationism.

This set the stage for the Arkansas trial of 1982 (McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education), which was almost entirely focused on the question “Is creationism science?” Judge William R. Overton stated in his opinion (6) that creationism fails to be a science because it fails to satisfy the following requirements: “(a) it is guided by natural law; (b) it has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; (c) it is testable against the empirical world; (d) its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and (e) it is falsifiable.”

The issue returned to the Supreme Court in 1986–1987. The Court ruled 7–2 in Edwards v. Aguillard that Louisiana’s law calling for the balanced treatment of evolution (“evolution-science” and “creation-science”) violated the First Amendment “because it lacks a clear secular purpose” and it “impermissibly endorses religion by advancing the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind” (7).

The creationists once again mutated and adapted. After the Edwards ruling, they set about removing references to God and creationism from their tracts. For example, as revealed at the Dover trial (8), the authors of the intelligent design (ID) text Of pandas and people: the central question of biological origins stripped the direct mentions of creationism present in early drafts of the text and systematically substituted the novel term “intelligent design” (9).

The evolution of creationism. ID is the contemporary version of an argument that has a long history. It was given a succinct formulation by William Paley in the early 19th century. Modern defenders of the design argument contend that living things are too complex to have evolved by the process of natural selection; rather, their “irreducible complexity” is convincing evidence of the hand of an intelligent designer. ID theory’s contemporary advocates, who include Lehigh University biochemistry professor Michael Behe, cite complex systems such as the blood-clotting cascade, the flagellar motor, and the human eye to argue that because these systems would be nonfunctional if even a single component part were excised, they could not have evolved by mutation/natural selection and therefore must have been “intelligently designed.” The argument can be boiled down to this: complexity is itself evidence of a designer. In its current version, ID conveniently omits mention of God.

However, ID is not a scientific theory. The premise for the arguments of Behe and other ID proponents is deeply flawed, scientifically and philosophically. Behe assumes that the component parts of irreducibly complex systems never had other functions in older organisms. This is contradicted by scientific evidence. The Dover trial transcripts are illuminating (see “The Dover trial”) (8). Under oath, Behe was forced to concede that there are organisms that lack some of the mammalian clotting proteins. Proteins that are present in the flagellar motor have orthologs that are involved in unrelated functions. A recent elegant example of proteins acquiring a new function within a complex system can be seen in a structure that functioned in respiration in fish and later evolved to be part of the mammalian inner ear (10).

ID makes no testable predictions. There is nothing in this concept that allows for scientific investigation of the “designer.” It is simply an argument by default; the failure to explain something is said to lend credence to a supernatural explanation. The attempt to promote this as science is deeply misguided. In spite of uncounted hundreds of thousands of scientific studies published in the last 50 years, there are still demonstrable gaps in what we know about the evolution of life on this planet. However, those studies tell us a great deal about how life came to be as it is and now form the foundation of modern biology. ID, by contrast, has produced nothing.

The Discovery Institute. The engine behind the ID movement is the Discovery Institute, founded in 1990 by Bruce K. Chapman. Today, the institute receives more than $4 million per year from numerous foundations, most with religious missions. The center’s objectives are outlined in its “Wedge Strategy,” which was leaked and posted on the Internet (11). The document states that the Discovery Institute “seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies” and “to replace materialistic explanations with theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.” Its goals are to see ID theory as the dominant perspective in science; to see design theory applied in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics, and cosmology in the natural sciences and ethics, politics, theology, and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts; and to see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral, and political life.

The Dover decision. In Dover, Pennsylvania, 2005, 11 parents sued to reverse a school board requirement that the following statement be read to students: “because Darwin’s Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations” (Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District) (12). The required statement referred only to evolution. The third paragraph in the statement read: “Intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view. The reference book, Of pandas and people (9), is available for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what intelligent design actually involves.”

In his decision, Judge John E. Jones stated that ID is essentially Paley’s argument for the existence of God, with God left unmentioned. In short, ID is a religious doctrine. He noted that Behe “claims that the plausibility argument for ID depends upon the extent to which one believes in the existence of God”; thus, “ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition.” He characterized ID as “nothing less than the progeny of creationism.” Jones stated that the Dover school statement forces a “false duality” on students by making them choose between God/ID and atheism/science and “singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.”

The Dover case was an important victory for science education. Judge Jones wrote a strongly worded, carefully crafted opinion that should guide future litigation (12). The transcripts of the Dover trial constitute an excellent educational resource, rich in testimony about the nature of science, the evidence for evolution, and the history of deceit in the creationism/ID movement.