September 27, 2005
dover blog + points of note
The ACLU of Pennsylvania is tracking the Dover courtroom action pretty closely on its blog.
Day One seemed to go great from where I sit - Keith Miller, author of one of the most widely distributed high school biology textbooks, got in some really important points...
Intelligent design is not science, has no support from any major American scientific organization and does not belong in a public school science classroom[.] - NY Times
And from the York Daily Record,, Miller gets right to the religious purpose, even though he's a expert witness on the topic of :
Rather, “it’s the first movement to try to drive a wedge between students and the scientific process,” he said.Miller called intelligent design “an argument of ignorance,” in that it’s based on the premise that if we don’t understand everything, we will never understand it, so we must seek supernatural causes.
He called it “special creationism.”
Also from the YDR, here's Miller on cross, neatly and cleanly dismantling the two biggest and lamest rhetorical con jobs promulgated incessently by the ID crowd:
During cross-examination, Robert Muise, an attorney representing the district with the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan, asked Miller numerous questions about the validity of Darwin’s theory.“Is it not true evolution is a theory not fact?”
Miller agreed that was true because no scientific theories are facts. Rather, a scientific theory is well-supported, testable explanation that connects facts.
“Would you agree that Darwin’s theory is not the absolute truth?” Muise asked.
“We don’t regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth,” Miller said.
In Day Two, AP tells us that the plaintiffs called witnesses to testify that the school board first targetted evolution for elimination. This is interesting and shows that the ACLU and AU are taking pages from the Cobb County playbook, where the district court found a religious purpose merely by the focused attack on evolution to the exclusion of other scientific subjects.
posted by scott pilutik at September 27, 2005 09:15 PM