How would you feel if creatures no more than 2% away from chimpanzee DNA were in charge of your children's education?
So, a group of primates decide to play havoc with the biology curriculum. They decide to promote an unprovable and more importantly, untestable, idea and equate it with a perfectly working existing model.
If you have not been crawling under a rock for the last few years, this story may already be familiar to you. We have to move our attention to small town America, particularly, Dover Pennsylvania. As Stephen King rightly points out, if you want a horror show, skip the urban areas and go to a cornfield. No wonder certain ursine femme politicos are so fond of these nooks and crannies of “real America”. As The Hitch once said, all politics is yokel.
Some trolls decided that they had had enough of living under the bridge (or in some cases, golf courses) and decided to join the local school board. Once in it, they were astonished to find that the public school curriculum was based on teachings of modern science. (Shocked! Shocked I say! ). Being faithful (pun intended!) thumpers of a particular book they decided to bring their bearded-old-man-in- the-sky back to the classroom.
They began by putting pressure on the biology teachers not to teach the Theory of Evolution. They even went to the extent of not approving the funding for high school text books because the books were modeled on teaching the theory. Failing that they decided to look around for other avenues of disruptions.
Soon opportunity came knocking in the guise of the Discovery Institute. This collection of odious nincompoops, erroneously called a think tank, promotes the idea of intelligent design(ID). ID states that life, the Universe and Everything could not have formed ex nihilo. To them, life on Earth shows distinct sings of being designed and therefore there must be some intelligent designer who had created all this we see around us. (some one needs to learn how to multiply seven by six!).
What the Discovery Institute does is not waste their time on such tedious and boring tasks like doing research and testing their theory. They do not need evidence! Evidence is for suckers! They would rather spend their valuable time promoting the idea of teaching ID in schools. So this is quite a novel idea: by-pass the entire scientific process and go straight to the curriculum. Brilliant!
So one of the books published by this think tank is called Pandas and People which was promoted by the aforementioned trolls of the board. Failing to secure funding for the books, they raised money in their churches to pay for them and send them to the public schools.
The science teachers were livid! They refused point blank to teach nonsense in their classroom. So a member of the board went to each classroom to read out a notice about ID as an alternative to Evolution.
Some of the parents sued the school for violating the separation of Church and State. The case went to Federal Court and landed on the courtroom of Judge John Jones. (Can we call him 3J?). The parents were represented by the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Pepper Hamilton LLP. The School Board was represented by the Thomas More Law Center, a hub of politically motivated religious lawyers who want to promote religion in the public square. The horns were locked.
The witnesses for the plaintiffs included many top academic biologists including the sublime Dr. Kenneth Miller of Brown University. They spoke about the nature of Science and what science is and what it isn't. Evolution falls on the former category and Id on the latter.
The witnesses on the side of the defense were proponents of irreducible complexity- a major argument in favor of ID. That was the only argument that they offered in favor of their position. When their star witness, Michael Behe took the stand, he was humiliated by Eric Rothschild, counsel for the plaintiffs.
Every time Behe made an assertion, Rothschild would put piles of books refuting his position in front of him. The iple of books and journals grew so tall that t they hid his features from the court!
Apart from ruling on the violation of Church and State argument, Judge Jones was in a unique position to rule on whether ID was science or not. His response? ID was, according to his verdict, “Breathtaking inanity”! Way to go, Your Honor!
Judgment Day is available on the PBS NOVA website.
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