The judge's demands for (echoing the plaintiffs word for word) "peer-reviewed" articles as if labled by a BRAND NAME, and as if certain journals represented the only avenue of legitimate scientific publication, is idiotic. By the same reasoning this judge would have eliminated from the realm of science Darwin's The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Do you really want judges (lawyers) deciding, with universal jurisdiction, what is or is not science?
Cordially,
Let's not change the issue. This case arose only because a band of scientifically illiterate zealots decided -- contrary to the advice of their lawyer and the schools' science teachers -- to ram their pet religious concept into the science curriculum.
This would have been no problem had it been a private school, but the government-run schools are constrained by the state and federal constitutions regarding the establishment of religion. Many on this thread don't like that, but we're all stuck with it until such time as those constitutions are changed.
So when parents object, the matter naturally falls before a judge. If the zealots then use as their pathetic defense that their pet doctrine is "science," and that's their defense to violating the establishment clause, the judge has no choice but to deal with the merits of that defense.
In other words, the judge isn't -- as your post suggests -- on a general mission to decide what is or what isn't science. He didn't go looking for this one. It's entirely due to the zealots on the school board. They brought the whole thing on themselves.
Amiably,