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A rural school district agreed to stop teaching a religion-based alternative to evolution as part of a court settlement filed Tuesday, a legal group said. Frazier Mountain High School will stop teaching a philosophy class discussing the theory of "intelligent design" this week and won't teach it in the future, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Officials at the El Tejon Unified School District were not immediately available for comment. A federal judge in Fresno had been scheduled to hold a hearing Tuesday afternoon on whether to halt the class midway...

Cosmic Fingerprints: Evidence of Design RTB Regional Conference February 10-11, 2006 Charleston, SC Has a testable Creation Model solved the mystery of cosmic beginnings? Does the theory of evolution conflict with the most recent scientific data? World renowned astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross and Internationally respected biochemist Dr. Fazale "Fuz" Rana think so. These two scientists have developed a model for creation that is testable, falsifiable and predictive. For the first time in more than 80 years, this innovative approach catapults the evolution/creation debate from science vs. religion to science vs. science. As currently formulated, popular theories of origins are not...

Darwinists must be an endangered species. How else to explain their 80-year need for court protection to ensure their survival? In 1925, an ACLU-driven defense team in the Scopes-Monkey Trial wanted a court to declare that laws forbidding the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional. In recent weeks, in a courtroom in Dover, Pa., the same organization applauded a judge’s ruling that the teaching of ideas contrary to evolution, in this case Intelligent Design, were unconstitutional. The same ACLU that once advocated for free and open discussion in schools is working to see it stifled today. Its website boasts, “Intelligent Design...

The Discovery Institute, an organization which bills itself as “the leading organization supporting scientific research into intelligent design” is seeking to distance itself from creationists. Casey Luskin, an attorney with the Discovery Institute wrote a letter to John W. Wight, Superintendent of the El Tejon school district in California seeking to change the title or content of a class. The district is facing a lawsuit filed by parents over a course titled “Philosophy of Design” taught by Sharon Lemburg, the wife of a local minister. According to Luskin’s letter “the course inaccurately mixes intelligent design with young earth creationism or...

Just as a pocket watch requires a complex system of gears and springs to keep it ticking precisely, individual cells have a network of proteins and genes that maintain their own internal clock -- a 24-hour rhythm that, in humans, regulates metabolism, cell division, and hormone production, as well as the wake-sleep cycle. Studying this "circadian" rhythm in fruit flies, which have genes that are similar to our own, scientists have constructed a basic model of how the cellular timekeeper works. But now, a new report in this week's issue of the journal Science turns the old model on its...

Welcome to Science Court The ruling in the Dover evolution trial shows what the legal and scientific processes have in common--intellectual rigor Chris Mooney; January 9, 2006 Legally speaking, Judge John E. Jones III's ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District--Pennsylvania's much-discussed lawsuit over the teaching of "intelligent design"--can only be called conservative. The decision draws upon and reinforces a series of prior court precedents, all of which barred creationist encroachment upon the teaching of science in public schools. In another sense, though, Jones' ruling is revolutionary. We live in a time when the findings of science themselves increasingly...

Many high-profile critics in the raging debate over "intelligent design" have, understandably, been evolutionary biologists. Legendary Oxford professor Richard Dawkins regularly appears on British TV to talk up Darwin and lash out against ID between books. Harvard emeritus prof E.O. Wilson has edited a hefty new 1,700-page anthology of Darwin's collected works, with the fighting title From So Simple a Beginning. They're generally not people like Leonard Susskind, a renowned physics professor at Stanford and a prime architect of string theory. His new book, his first for a general audience, has the provocative title The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and...

If there’s anything to be learned from the intelligent design debate, it’s that branding “activist judges” is the hobby of bitter losers. For those who care about the fight over evolution in biology classrooms, Christmas came five days early when the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District ruling was handed down. In his decision, Judge John E. Jones III ruled that not only is the theory of intelligent design religion poorly dressed in science language, teaching it in class is an outright violation of the First Amendment. The ruling was a concise and devastating demonstration of how law, precedent and...

WHAT IS IT ABOUT EVEN the slightest dissent from Darwin's theory of natural selection that drives liberal elites (and even some conservative elites) bonkers? In the 1920s, in the days of the Scopes trial, it was the fact that anyone could believe the story of Genesis in a literal way that offended the delicate sensibilities of our cultural mavens. Then in the 1970s it was something called "creation science" that drove them apoplectic. Today it is the heresy of "intelligent design" that they seek to extirpate root and branch. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, liberals are haunted by the specter that...

(AgapePress) - A pro-family attorney is expressing dismay over a Pennsylvania school board's decision to drop a science policy that generated widespread controversy and national media attention. The newly elected Dover Area School Board has voted unanimously to rescind a policy designed to inform students that the theory of intelligent design, or ID, is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.Last month a federal judge declared the Dover Area School District's policy unconstitutional, saying it violated the Establishment Clause, or separation of church and state. Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, says the...

Among the many, many errors in Judge John Jones’ Dover vs. Kitzmiller opinion is the charge that intelligent design (ID) makes no empirically testable claims (see pp. 66 ff.). Similarly, other ID critics assert that intelligent design makes no testable predictions. In fact, intelligent design fulfills both criteria since it makes numerous empirically testable predictions. It’s true that there’s no way to falsify the bare assertion that a cosmic designer exists. Nevertheless, the specific design arguments currently in play are empirically testable, even falsifiable, and involve testable predictions. Consider the argument that Michael Behe makes in his book Darwin’s Black...

Also today, Dover's board might revoke the controversial intelligent design decision. Now that the issue of teaching "intelligent design" in Dover schools appears to be played out, the doings of the Dover Area School Board might hold little interest for the rest of the world. But the people who happen to live in that district find them to be of great consequence. Or so board member James Cashman is finding in his final days of campaigning before Tuesday's special election, during which he will try to retain his seat on the board. Even though the issue that put the Dover...

Pa. School Board to Vote on Evolution 21 minutes ago Dover's foundering school policy of presenting "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution was headed for the history books Tuesday night. Two weeks after a federal judge ruled the concept was religious and not scientific, the Dover Area School Board's newly elected members planned to formally rescind the policy. The policy, approved in October 2004, required students be read a statement about "intelligent design" before ninth-grade lessons on evolution. The statement said Darwin's theory is "not a fact" and has inexplicable "gaps," and referred students to an intelligent-design book. On...

By MARTHA RAFFAELE Associated Press Writer DOVER, Pa. (AP) -- The Dover school board on Tuesday rescinded its policy of presenting "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution in high school biology classes, two weeks after a federal judge found the concept was religious and not scientific. There was no discussion by members of the Dover Area School Board before the voice vote Tuesday night. The policy, approved in October 2004, required that a statement be read to students about "intelligent design" before ninth-grade lessons on evolution. The statement said Darwin's theory is "not a fact" and has inexplicable "gaps."...

A former high school science teacher turned creation science evangelist told an audience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee last Tuesday that evolution is the “dumbest and most dangerous theory on planet Earth.” Kent Hovind, founder of Creation Science Evangelism, presented “Creation or Evolution … Which Has More Merit?” to a standing-room only audience in the Union Ballroom on Dec. 6. The event was sponsored by the Apologetics Association, the organization that brought Baptist minister Tim Wilkins to UWM to speak about homosexuality in October. No debate challengers Members of the Apologetics Association (AA) contacted biology, chemistry and geology professors at...

This is an excerpt (a long excerpt) from the "PLAINTIFFS’ FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW" which were submitted to the court in the Dover trial on Intelligent Design. Here is a link to the documents filed with the court. The document excerpted here is #334. The defendant School Board's proposed findings are in item 335. All references within the numbered paragraphs are to the transcripts of witness testimony, or to documents and other evidence. We begin with the first part of the table of contents, and it's probably formatted badly. The entire document is 161 pages long, and...

The presidents of Cornell and Princeton have publicly blasted intelligent design in recent months, while faculty at these universities, as well as at Brown, have been similarly outspoken in their support of evolution. Intelligent design - which holds that patterns and designs in life on Earth reveal the role of an "intelligent designer" - is "an idea that's gained some traction in the American imagination," said Professor of Biology Kenneth Miller. The movement has garnered support from coast to coast and has permeated the science curricula of several U.S. school districts. At the same time, it has alarmed educators and...

For the past six weeks, the debate over evolution and intelligent design has played out in a Pennsylvania courtroom. Today, Kansas gets the national spotlight back — and with it, the possibility of a federal lawsuit here. “What’s going on in Kansas,” said Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist, “is much more radical and much more dangerous to science education” than the contested decision in Dover, Pa., to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” in public school science classes. Intelligent design speculates that the world is too complex to have evolved without the help of an unknown designer — an...

Attorneys arguing in a landmark federal trial over whether a school board intended to promote religion when it included "intelligent design" in a high-school biology curriculum were expected to give closing arguments Friday afternoon. Lawyers representing the Dover Area School Board finished presenting their case Friday morning with testimony from University of Idaho microbiology professor Scott Minnich, who supports discussing the concept in high school science classes. Minnich said under cross-examination that "intelligent design" articles are not found in the major peer-reviewed scientific journals because it is a minority view. "To endorse intelligent design comes with risk because it's a...

A school board member who was questioned by a federal judge about discrepancies in his testimony on the purchase of "intelligent design" textbooks was expected to return to the witness stand Wednesday. Dover Area School Board member Alan Bonsell was to undergo redirect questioning by an attorney representing the board in a landmark trial over whether intelligent design can be introduced in high school science classes. Bonsell testified Monday that he had received an $850 check from fellow board member William Buckingham. The check was made out to Bonsell's father, who volunteered to donate copies of "Of Pandas and People"...