Proponents of ”intelligent design” vowed on Wednesday to continue their battle against the teaching of evolution in United States schools despite a stinging defeat in a Pennsylvania court.
They said that Tuesday’s ruling is only legally binding in part of Pennsylvania, around the town of Dover, where the education authority had been sued for advocating intelligent design in its schools.
Supporters also claimed the case will increase curiosity in intelligent design, which teaches that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved by random mutation and natural selection, as explained in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
”The Dover decision is an attempt by an activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific idea and even to prevent criticism of Darwinian evolution through government-imposed censorship rather than open debate, and it won’t work,” said John West, an associate director of the Centre for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a conservative organisation that has taken the lead in promoting intelligent design.
Opponents pointed to the comprehensive nature of the 139-page verdict by the Pennsylvania Judge, John Jones, which denied intelligent design’s claims to be a science and identified it as a religion. The verdict is unlikely to be the subject of an appeal as a new Dover school board was elected in November that opposes the advocacy of intelligent design.
”I would like to think that folks will read the decision and realise that if they start teaching ID [intelligent design] they are sticking up a big ‘sue me’ sign,” argued Barry Lynn, the director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
Both sides are looking to Kansas as the most likely new battlefield in the culture war over education. Last month, the state’s education board voted for new teaching standards, redefining science to include the supernatural and encouraging Kansas science teachers to question the validity of evolution in their classrooms. If a local authority within the state accepts the board’s recommendation and changes its school curriculum to play down evolution, it could trigger another legal battle.
Steve Abrams, the Kansas board chairperson, told The Associated Press that the Pennsylvania and Kansas cases were very different. In Dover, science teachers had been made to read out a statement in biology class pointing to holes in evolution theory and recommending pupils look into an intelligent-design library textbook called Of Pandas and People.
Abrams said the Kansas board was not specifically advocating intelligent design, only questioning evolution.
”We haven’t put in intelligent design. What we have focused on is good science.”
Ohio has adopted a similar curriculum intended to expose students to criticism of evolution, but, as in Kansas, it has yet to be put into effect.
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Georgia is considering the case of an Atlanta suburb that had stickers put into biology textbooks, describing evolution as ”a theory, not a fact”.
Opponents of intelligent design believe the law is on their side. A Supreme Court decision in 1987 banned the teaching of creationism as an explanation of human origins, and in his verdict on Tuesday Jones said intelligent design is ”a mere relabelling of creationism”.
But President George Bush has openly espoused teaching intelligent design alongside evolution, and he is trying to appoint two conservatives to the Supreme Court.
US public opinion is also extremely hostile to Darwinian theory. In a national poll two months ago, 51% of Americans said they believed that human beings were created by God. Another 30% said God guided human evolution, and only 15% thought that humans had evolved without divine intervention.
”Anyone who thinks a court ruling is going to kill off interest in intelligent design is living in another world,” said West. ”Americans don’t like to be told there is some idea that they aren’t permitted to learn about. Banning intelligent design in Dover will likely only fan interest in the theory.” — Guardian Unlimited Â