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Intelligent design, the argument that life is so complex that it must have needed a sophisticated designer, was formulated to get around court rulings that banned creationism from being taught in science classes. For a while, there was an effort to get intelligent design into schools, but that came crashing down after a court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, recognized it as inherently religious. That court case is now more than a decade old, and it looks like some school districts have a short memory.

Zack Kopplin, an activist who has tracked attempts to sneak religious teachings into science classrooms, found a bit of sneaking going on in Youngstown, Ohio. There, a document hosted by the city schools includes a lesson plan that openly endorses intelligent design and suggests the students should be taught that there's a scientific controversy between it and evolution.

The document focuses on the "Diversity of Life" and is a bizarre mix of normal science and promotion of intelligent design. Most of the first page, for example, is taken up by evolution standards that have language that echoes that of the Next Generation Science Standards. But the discussion is preceded by a statement that's straight out of the "teach the controversy" approach: "The students examine the content of evolution and intelligent design and consider the merits and flaws of both sides of the argument." In fact, elsewhere in the document, teachers are told to host a debate where students take turns arguing for evolution and intelligent design.

The document then goes into specific exercises that should happen in school classrooms. These exercises provide the impression that the school system has taken a standard lesson plan and tacked on some creationist material. One creationist handout from one of the exercises highlights the arguments of Lehigh University professor Michael Behe. Behe claims to have identified structures in cells that are too complex to have come about through evolution. The biological community, however, has comprehensively addressed this claim. When he repeated it in court at Dover, the judge rejected Behe's arguments entirely.

Yet the same handout claims that "Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a theory in crisis in light of the tremendous advances we've made in molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics over the past fifty years." The same argument is also repeated in detail in one of the videos that the document suggests that students should view. The video appears to have originated with the media arm of the Discovery Institute. Discovery is a major proponent of intelligent design, which it views as a tool to replace the current scientific process with one more consonant with its theological views.

Another video promoted by the document is more overtly religious—and even worse scientifically. It claims that there are no fossils of animal life prior to the Cambrian (apparently, someone is unaware of the Ediacaran). It also claims that scientists have never uncovered a single fossil of a transitional species, which it says "definitely refutes the Darwinist's claim." It later makes the biologically nonsensical argument that the different number of chromosomes in various species is also evidence against evolution.

Just as the video is cutting out, it ends with the statement that "each species was created by God," making its religious nature (and unconstitutionality in the school system) clear. Kopplin highlights how this video is actually the product of an Islamic creationist (and possible cult leader), a fact that the presumably Christian backers of this lesson plan would probably not appreciate.

Mixed in with these videos and handouts, however, are various links to exercises, documents, and videos from highly reputable sources like universities and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It's pretty likely that whoever put together this document started with a standard, scientifically valid lesson plan and tacked on a series of random bits of creationist information obtained by a bit of Web searching.

Clearly, however, the authors' search did not extend to legal precedents and any of the information out there that describes intelligent design's overtly religious roots. And, in doing so, they have left their school system vulnerable to an expensive lawsuit that the schools will clearly lose.