In Dover, Pennsylvania, creationists were voted out – but not elsewhere (Image: Carolyn Kaster/AP/PA)

IN DOVER, Pennsylvania, five years ago, a group of parents were nearing the end of an epic legal battle: they were taking their school board to court to stop them teaching “intelligent design” to their children.

The plaintiffs eventually won their case, and on 16 October many of them came together for a private reunion. Yet intelligent design and the creationism for which it is a front are far from dead in the US, and the threat to the teaching of evolution remains.

Cyndi Sneath was one of the Dover plaintiffs who had a school-age son at the time of the trial. She has since become an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a member of the Dover Area School Board. “My interest in public education and civil liberties was certainly sparked by the trial,” she says. “And that interest permeates our family discussions.”


Chemistry teacher Robert Eschbach, who was also a plaintiff, says the trial has made teachers less afraid to step on people’s toes when it comes to evolution. It “forced me to be a better educator”, he says. “I went back and read more of the history around Darwin and how he came to his conclusions.”

None of this means that the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based think tank that promotes intelligent design, has been idle. The institute helped the conservative Louisiana Family Forum (LFF), headed by Christian minister Gene Mills, to pass a state education act in 2008 that allows local boards to teach intelligent design alongside evolution under the guise of “academic freedom”.

Philosopher Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University, another key witness for the Dover plaintiffs in 2005, testified against the Louisiana education act. “Louisiana is the only state to pass a state education bill based on the Discovery Institute’s template,” she says. Similar measures considered in 10 other states were all defeated.

Forrest heads the Louisiana Coalition for Science, and has been monitoring developments since the bill passed. In January 2009, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) approved a policy that prevents Louisiana school boards from stopping schools using supplementary creationist texts hostile to evolution, such as books published by the Discovery Institute.

Mills has now made public his desire to change the process for selecting biology textbooks statewide. In one Louisiana township, Livingston Parish, creationist board members have proclaimed their desire to have creationism taught alongside evolution in the next academic year. “This is happening with no outcry from the media or from the scientific community in Louisiana,” Forrest says.

Since Dover, states wanting to teach alternatives to established science have used deliberately vague language. In 2008, Louisiana passed a law requiring “open and objective discussion” of climate change, evolution and human cloning. Five years after the landmark case, the battle for science education continues. But for the plaintiffs and their representatives this does not detract from the achievement. Their lead attorney, Eric Rothschild, sums it up: “If we’d lost, intelligent design would be all over the place now”.