The
following piece of news (from today’s San Francisco Chronicle), gives some hope
to the scientific community (and not only).
"Intelligent
design" cannot be
mentioned in biology classes in a
Pennsylvania
public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the
biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.
The Dover Area
School Board violated the Constitution when it ordered that its biology
curriculum must include "intelligent
design", the
notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified
intelligent cause, U.S.
District Judge John E. Jones III ruled Tuesday. The
Dover
policy
required students to hear a statement about
intelligent
design before ninth-grade
biology lessons on evolution. The statement said Charles Darwin's theory is "not
a fact", has inexplicable "gaps", and refers students to an
intelligent-design
textbook, "Of Pandas and People", for more information.
The dispute is the
latest chapter in a long-running debate over the teaching of evolution dating
back to the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which
Tennessee
biology teacher John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law that
forbade teaching evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed his conviction
on the narrow ground that only a jury trial could impose a fine exceeding $50,
and the law was repealed in 1967.
Earlier this
month, a federal appeals court in
Georgia
heard arguments over whether evolution disclaimer stickers placed in a school
system's biology textbooks were unconstitutional. A federal judge in January
ordered
Cobb
County
school officials to immediately remove the stickers, which called evolution a
theory, not a fact. In November, state education officials in
Kansas
adopted new classroom science standards that call the theory of evolution into
question. Full article:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/12/20/national/a075045S21.DTL&hw=intelligent+design&sn=001&sc=1000