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FROM THE OPINIONJOURNAL ARCHIVES
BOOKSHELF

Dover Meets Darwin
The battle over biology class.

by PAMELA R. WINNICK
Thursday, February 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

"Breathtaking inanity." That's how U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III described the actions of the school board in Dover, a central Pennsylvania town (population 1,900), when it required students in the local high school to be made aware "of gaps in Darwin's theory of evolution."

The judge's ruling, handed down in December 2005, was the end-point of a long ordeal for Dover and its residents. A year before, several parents had sued the school board, claiming that such a requirement breached the wall between church and state. A long trial during the summer of 2005 brought a lot of attention to Dover and, more tellingly, to the theorists who oppose Darwinian teaching. In "Monkey Girl," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes tells the story.

How did it all begin? Not with unanimity. Darwin supporters and evangelical Christians wrangled over whether to revise the content of Dover high school's ninth-grade biology classes, until then devoted to a classic Darwinian approach. Eventually, in October 2004, the school board ignored the advice of counsel and voted, 6-3, to require that a school official read out a statement to ninth-grade biology students expressing skepticism toward Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

"Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered," the statement said. "The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. . . . Students are encouraged to keep an open mind." The board also encouraged students to consult "Of Pandas and People," a textbook that promotes intelligent design.

Part of what made the lawsuit so interesting was this intelligent-design component. According to ID, as it is nicknamed, a "designer" is responsible for the life forms we see around us, including our own species. In 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court had held that "scientific" creationism can't be taught alongside evolution in public schools, but no court had ever ruled on the permissibility of introducing ID into biology classes. The "designer" referred to by ID theorists is theoretically non-denominational, although--with some notable exceptions--most proponents are evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics.

During the trial, the plaintiffs' lawyers--supplied by a prestigious Philadelphia law firm and the ACLU--made monkeys of the school board's witnesses. Even Michael Behe of Lehigh University, a professor of biochemistry and one of ID's leading advocates, came off badly. He handled himself well enough on direct examination but crumbled on cross when he finally admitted that his book "Darwin's Black Box"--in which he argued that cellular structures are irreducibly complex in ways that natural selection cannot explain--did not undergo peer review. Other ID luminaries, like William Dembski, refused to testify, feeling at odds with the school board's actions.

Judge Jones decided--appropriately, in light of the facts--that the school board's statement about what should be taught in biology classes was motivated by religion and did not belong in the public schools. By then the people of Dover had tossed out the pro-ID members of the school board, making a judicial decision unnecessary.

Mr. Humes's account is thorough but disappointingly self-righteous. "The evolution war," he writes, "had become part of a larger political campaign; the Republican leadership's controversial 'Culture of Life' . . . in which religion, politics and government at times seemed all but indistinguishable." There are certainly those who think so, but Mr. Humes might have been more persuasive had he shown some minimal respect for the religious side of this debate instead of treating all ID-proponents as benighted fanatics with a crude political agenda. (He even spends four pages bashing Ann Coulter, as if she is an important thinker in need of refutation.)

Mr. Humes's account also feels hastily put together. All the ingredients for good narrative nonfiction are there: courtroom drama, legal quarrels and colorful characters, including William Buckingham, the OxyContin-addicted school-board member who insists that "the United States is a Christian nation," and Tammy Kitzmiller, the timid single mom who became the named plaintiff in the lawsuit. But "Monkey Girl" (the title comes from a schoolyard taunt aimed at the daughter of another plaintiff) often reads like a college term paper written the night before it was due.

Mr. Humes quotes a lot of people; at times, he even tells us what they were thinking. But these conversations and thoughts aren't footnoted, and there is no bibliography. We don't know whether he talked to the people he quotes or to people who talked to them, or drew from court records or newspaper accounts. Mr. Humes did score one big interview, with Judge Jones himself. The judge is thoughtful, but the interview is inappropriate. Most judges feel ethically compelled to refrain from public comment on cases that have come before them.

Mr. Humes claims that the Vatican has unequivocally embraced Darwin. True, in a 1996 address, Pope John Paul II did acknowledge the scientific proof for evolution. But nowhere did he endorse the mechanism of evolution posited by Darwin: the godless and random forces of natural selection that render the human species a mere accident of nature. Mr. Humes omits entirely the statewide battle in 2000-01 over the teaching of evolution in Pennsylvania: The state Department of Education ended up passing a science curriculum requiring that evolution be taught without reference to ID or "gaps" in Darwin's theory. Surely this state decision was worth mentioning.

Mr. Humes dismisses as "baloney" criticism of the famous British experiment, conducted in the 1950s, purporting to show that in response to industrial pollution peppered moths evolved from light to dark to camouflage themselves from predators. But a 1998 article in the journal Evolutionary Biology and a 1998 book review in Nature--hardly venues for tendentious religious thinkers--proved that the experiment was close to a hoax, its "findings" without value.

And then there is the book's view of the Constitution. Mr. Humes says that the Founding Fathers "adamantly fashioned a nation in which government and religion were never to interfere with each other" in part because of "learned deists" like "Jefferson and Franklin and Washington." As it happens, none of these men had a hand in writing the First Amendment, but even granting Mr. Humes's point about deist skepticism, the claim is overstated. The history of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause--along with its inconsistent interpretation by the Supreme Court--shows it to be far more complex than Mr. Humes allows. Indeed, much of the material in "Monkey Girl" is more complex than the author allows.

Ms. Winnick is an attorney and former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.


 
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