Recently in scopes trial revisited - ID, creationism and darwin under siege Category

Via Panda's Thumb (stories here and here), and as reported by the York Daily Record, the Dover School District's attack on evolution, as funded by the Thomas More Law Center, has exposed an interesting rift between Intelligent Design 'secularists' and the dominionist Thomas More Law Center, when ID heavyweights Dembski, Campbell, and Meyer being withdrawn as expert witnesses on the defendant School District's behalf.

This is interesting for a few reasons - first, the rift already existed - the Discovery Institute has stated in the past that the time isn't ripe to bring suits forward to establish ID in the public schools, ostensibly because ID has not entirely gelled as a theory, but mostly because the Supreme Court some gelling to do of its own.

So why then were three Discovery Institute fellows thisclose to testifying in the doomed Dover effort in the first place? I'll guess that the DI is at a conflicted road - they may have realized that ID, from a public relations vantage, has a finite degree of public debatability. The Dover case has gotten a ton of press already, and how many Dovers will their possibly be after this? Sensing that Dover was going badly, they reached out to Thomas More in an effort to try and right the ship. But the Thomas More lawyers are even loonier than the DI, and the factions didn't mix well.

The presence of 'some other reason' is backed by the conflicting stories given by the DI participants and Thomas More as to the experts discontinued involvement. The fact that they couldn't get their stories straight (the stories mostly inovlving the experts wanting to utilize their own lawyers during testimony), we can better assume that the true reason for the parting was ideological - DI showed up to fix what Thomas More thought was working just fine.

Of course, it's not working fine at all. Cobb County was a far closer case than Dover is turning into - the Dover school district's proposal is far more overtly violative than was Cobb County's, and Thomas More lends a religious taint that Cobb County at least wisely sought to avoid (but was eventually burned on anyway). Not that any of this necessarily matters - the district court judge could see things entirely differently (and is not bound to any of the law made in Cobb County).

Intervener motion denied in Dover

The motion by a group of parents (Michael and Sheree Hied, Raymond and Cynthia Mummert, and James and Martha Cashman) seeking to intervene as defendants in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case has been denied. The court essentially adopted the plaintiff's reasoning as found in their opposition memorandum, which I summarize in an earlier post here.

Moreover, the Dover School District Board's motion to dismiss has also been denied (this was fairly expected).

The court's order denying both motions can be found here [pdf].

The quite-reliable York Daily Record covers the denials here.

The York Daily Record has a nice article about a 3 hour debate which took place between Thomas More (Richard Thompson) and the ACLU (Vic Walczak) at Elizabethtown College on March 1.

They were each given 45 minutes to make their arguments. Then they were given 10 minutes for rebuttal.

Thompson used nearly 15 minutes of his time to present an updated version of "The Emperor's New Clothes" and to tell a joke about the first lawyer to go to heaven.

"A town with money is alot like a mule with a spinning wheel. Danged know how he got and danged know how to use it." - Lyle Lanley

In his "emperor" metaphor, Thompson said evolution is king. And anyone who tries to make the king aware that he is naked is "stupid and unfit for public office." Then he said the Dover Area School Board is the child in the story, courageous enough to tell the king he has no clothes on.

[...]

Thompson also said legal efforts to keep God out of classrooms, and other government funded forums, were part of a greater effort to "de-Christianize America." Later though, he said intelligent design has nothing to do with Christianity or religion, saying it offered a legitimate scientific alternative to evolution.

No word on whether Walczak pounced all over this, but nice pickup by the reporter. Here we have the superfunded Thomas More Center blowing shotgun holes through its feet by making arguments that, had they any sense at all (and read the Cobb Cty. Decision), would force them to tears had their clients argued the same.

[Thompson] offered up a three-prong test the court uses to determine if something is religious. He said intelligent design does not address the ultimate question of our existence, does not have any liturgy or clergy and does not intend to identify the designer. Thus, he said, the court would see the theory is not religious.

He's offering! How nice and intellectually dishonest of him. As Walczak was forced to point out later on, Thompson's offering is wholly unrelated to the religious test that will be applied by the Middle District of Pennsylvania and any court that will hear its appeal.

When Walczak began his 45 minutes, he asked the audience if everyone could see his clothes.

Then he said intelligent design is inherently religious, and that the test Thompson referred to was used more by the courts to determine if inmates could grow their hair long or demand more recreation time because of some unfamiliar religious claim.

[...]

After the debate, several students gave their opinions.

Vanessa Ide, a freshman, said Walczak won.

Fellow freshman Laura Belkot agreed.

"(Thompson) presented an awful lot of fluffy stuff today," she said. "Walczak definitely made the better arguments."

Panda Thumber Jason Rosenhouse tackles a challenge by Southwest Daily Times writer George Deipenbrock, who was seeking a "good argument" on why "teaching only the evolution theory does not violate the [Kansas] education science mission statement to make all students lifelong learners who can use science to make reasoned decisions. Presenting only one life science theory in classes without alternatives breeds ignorance and violates the mission statement."

Rosenhouse deconstructs the 'balance' assumption/paradigm that Deipenbrock seeks well enough, but later in the response hits the nail cleaner than I've ever seen it hit when he says:

The fact is that every scientific theory presented as orthodoxy in science classes began in exactly the place ID finds itself now: A heresy believed by a handul of people dissatisfied with the orthodox view. In no case, however, did the adherents of the heresy earn their place in the curriculum by appealing directly to schools boards and state legislatures. In every case the heresy won out by producing evidence adequate to convince a large majority of scientists.

As I related in the comments on his site - Here we have a dubious majority (in some cases) who have deemed themselves privileged to contravene a process (scientific method) that has historically acted as the ruling principle for the procedure by which theories are accepted. The selection process is ingrained in the nature of scientific method itself. If we do away with that procedure, we do away with scientific method. The ID propenents invite a "scientific acceptance by majority" proposition that is truly dangerous.

Just took a peek at the latest Dover motions and I'll try to detangle for those sensible enough to not wade through all this crap. In short, on January 17th, a group of Dover parents filed a motion to intervene [pdf] as defendants (in addition to the already represented defendants, the Dover Area School District ("DASD")).

There are practical non-legal reasons for intervention here - a second set of defendants comes with a second set of lawyers that Plaintiffs must contend with. And all that entails, so I'll refrain from imaginging on your behalf.

In order to successfully intervene in federal court, an intervenor, according to Rule 24, must claim a sufficient legal interest that 1) may be impeded by an adverse outcome, and 2) is not already adequately represented by existing parties.

The intervening parents are arguing that their childrens' First Amendment rights are impacted by their being prevented from learning about Intelligent Design. They rely on two SCOTUS cases for support of this notion - Island Trees v. Pico, 457 US 853 (1982) (not to be confused with the band Pico vs. Island Trees - I'm not even kidding) and Stanley v. Georgia, 394 US 557 (1969) (I'll let Plaintiffs explain why they don't apply below).

Intervenors must also show that their interests are not adequately represented by the current party they seek to side with. Usually, intervenors are plaintiffs, for reasons that are probably plain to see - If my former partner sues a debtor who owed both of us money as a result of a single gone-bad transaction, I need to intervene to protect my interests, because former partner's account of events may not be the same as mine. And Intervenors argue that their interests are significantly different than the DASD, without ever saying why. Their entire argument on this front is one conclusory paragraph. Their only substantive argument, actually, is relegated to a footnote - that Plaintiffs have suggested on television that DASD should capitulate to avoid paying Plaintiff's legal fees, and thus the case might not be settled on its merits. That they'd put their only real argument in a footnote is testimony to their chances of success on this prong.

Before I get to Plaintiff's opposition to the newly proposed defendants, I'll mention that the Thomas More Center (lawyer's for DASD) welcomes this intervention, and filed a short response in support. Their entire argument is less than a page and merely reiterates the Intervenor's main point, that being Pico.

So what does Pico say? Pico held that public schools cannot remove school books simply because they dislike the ideas in them. But Pico only pertains to removal of material from school libraries and has nothing to do with school curricula. The other case the intervenors rely on, Stanley, recognized a right to read obscene material in the privacy of one's own home.

The Plaintiffs opposition response [pdf] (reported lightly here by the York Daily Record), demolishes the weak intervenor arguments. After pointing out the inapplicability of Pico and Stanley, and that there is no recognized First Amendment right to require that their children be taught X instead of Y, it lands the hardest blows on the inadequacy of of representation prong. Key paragraph comes at the end:

Adequacy of representation depends on whether the named party represents the interests of the would-be intervenor, not on whether Mondaymorning quarter-backing might suggest a different litigation strategy. [...] Applicants have not even made a minimal showing of inadequate representation here.

And then the memo gets the real reason this crap is being foisted on the court:

Applicants’ participation as parties would add nothing to this litigation but more lawyers, more schedules to consider, more discovery requests, depositions, and briefs on the same subjects, more time at trial and, as a result, more costs for both the plaintiffs and defendants.

Yep.

After a neat and tidy shredding of the Intelligent Designers, the Washington Post takes a thoughtful look forward, and mentions a rarely commented on (but ultimately quite important) factor that burbles beneath the surface of each of these controversies - the brain drain that is already ongoing in the American scientific community.

[T]he breadth and extent of the anti-evolutionary movement that has spread almost unnoticed across the country should force American politicians to think twice about how their public expressions of religious belief are beginning to affect education and science. The deeply religious nature of the United States should not be allowed to stand in the way of the thirst for knowledge or the pursuit of science. Once it does, it won't be long before the American scientific community -- which already has trouble finding enough young Americans to fill its graduate schools -- ceases to lead the world.

The New York Times makes many good points today in an editorial titled "The Crafty Attacks on Evolution". Their layman interpretation of the Cobb County sticker is especially astute (and not all that different a conclusion than Judge Cooper's):

Although the board clearly thought this was a reasonable compromise, and many readers might think it unexceptional, it is actually an insidious effort to undermine the science curriculum. The first sentence sounds like a warning to parents that the film they are about to watch with their children contains pornography. Evolution is so awful that the reader must be warned that it is discussed inside the textbook. The second sentence makes it sound as though evolution is little more than a hunch, the popular understanding of the word "theory," whereas theories in science are carefully constructed frameworks for understanding a vast array of facts. The National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific organization, has declared evolution "one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have" and says it is supported by an overwhelming scientific consensus.

The third sentence, urging that evolution be studied carefully and critically, seems like a fine idea. The only problem is, it singles out evolution as the only subject so shaky it needs critical judgment. Every subject in the curriculum should be studied carefully and critically. Indeed, the interpretations taught in history, economics, sociology, political science, literature and other fields of study are far less grounded in fact and professional consensus than is evolutionary biology.

Story courtesy Tearsa Smith, WATE-TV News 6 News Anchor/Reporter, we learn that Intelligent Design has burrowed into another school board, this time in Blount County, Tennessee. I'm just going to paste the entire story here, in case the details magically morph between now and later:

BLOUNT COUNTY (WATE) -- If you have high schoolers in Blount County and you haven't heard of intelligent design, you'll hear plenty about it in the future. It's an alternative to teaching evolution.

Currently, biology text books in Blount County high schools include several theories on evolution, but not the theory of intelligent design.

However, the school board recently approved the theory for teachers to introduce.

"Biology teachers in particular would be able to teach the controversies perhaps within the evolutionary theory. That would be the major thing," says board member Dr. Don McNelly.

The intelligent design theory says that human biology and evolution are so complex it has to require the creative hand of an intelligent force.

"Encouraging our teachers to teach the controversies with respect to biological origin, within a secular content, not relying on anything other than the research," McNelly says.

The move comes on the heals of a national debate and controversy. Some parents in Dover, Pennsylvania are outraged with their school system's adoption of intelligent design. They're even suing the town, calling the move unconstitutional because it favors creationism.

Blount County officials hope to avoid that. "We haven't relied on any religious background, any religious theory. It's secular and it says in essence it's life that has been designed, has to have been designed," McNelly explains.

To the best of the school boards' knowledge, there isn't a current text book that teaches intelligent design. For now, teachers will have to design their own curriculums.

So they don't have a text book. They just know that they want ID in their curiculum. I'm curious as to what literature, then, triggered such a decision. Anyway,

It's notable that these quotes from board member McNelly deliberately avoid religion as a motive, using terms like 'secular content' (even though he most likely meant 'secular context'). No word on whether News 6 Anchor/Reporter Tearsa Smith is a product of the Blount County school district, but it might help explain the passage:

The move comes on the heals of...

It'll be interesting to see what happens next on this new front.

This is probably from the New Yorker, but I saw it first on The Poor Man

Yet more hilarity [from Fanatical Apathy]:

Q: So these ID guys don't believe in God. A: Oh no, they do.

Q: All of them?
A: Pretty much. So what? Doesn't mean they can't be scientists.

Q: Oh. So there's all these scientific papers they write, right?
A: Yes.

Q: What do they say?
A: Well, they're diverse and technical, but they all come to the conclusion that life was created by an intelligence.

Q: Why?
A: Because it looks like it.

Q: That's it?
A: Pretty much. It's all about how the design of life resembles the designs of people. And a lot of stuff about how it's a better explanation than evolution.

Entire FAQ at Fanatical Apathy