Over 20 years since Kitzmiller v. Dover, the war against Intelligent Design goes on

Last November, as the twentieth anniversary of the infamous Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial approached, I interviewed one of its star witnesses, Kenneth R. Miller, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brown University, about his illustrious career and achievements. It was a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with someone whose contributions to the life sciences are immense.

For those who know some history, the Kitzmiller trial pitted so-called Intelligent Design (ID) theory against evolutionary science. The question at its heart was whether ID should be taught in the Dover, Pennsylvania, district’s public schools as science. President George W. Bush had stated that he thought equal time should be given to the teaching of both evolution and ID, and the movement spearheaded by the Discovery Institute propagandised aggressively across multiple channels, but especially in churches and among homeschoolers and education bodies. Their narrative focused on fairness, and their catchphrase was ‘Teach the controversy’. They claimed that evolution was a highly disputed scientific theory and that students should know this. (For the full story of the trial, see the excellent 2006 BBC Horizon documentary, A War on Science, here.)

To those in the life sciences, this was bizarre. In the scientific community, there has been no real controversy about the truth of evolution for many decades. The entire conflict was manufactured by a well-funded religious movement eager to impose their particular theological agenda through science education. Many scientists with religious faith wondered why a conflict between evolution and Christianity was being posited when one need not be there. What’s more, with the Human Genome Project recently coming to completion and the costs of genomics beginning to fall, evolutionary science was set for its biggest revolution in half a century. In other words, it was a thriving field.

For Professor Miller, the matter began innocently enough. Together with Professor Joe Levine, he was the author of some of America’s most widely used biology textbooks. Not long before Kitzmiller, they produced a new edition of their famous Dragonfly Book. Levine is Jewish and Miller is Catholic, which came in handy when they occasionally needed to reassure more religious schools that they were not presenting evolution in a manner that attacked faith.

In 2004, the Dover Area School District mandated that ID ideas be presented alongside evolution in public school biology classes (teachers were to read out a statement criticising evolutionary theory and directing students to an ID textbook), and Miller and Levine’s textbook, Biology, which was used in these classes, was targeted for attack. Several parents viewed ID as thinly-disguised creationism and the board’s mandate as an attempt to sneak religion into public schools. Backed by the ACLU and others, they decided to sue.

Miller kept up with the unfolding controversy before being asked by the plaintiffs to be their lead witness. As the author of the textbook and a Catholic, he was well-placed to combat the defence, who were clearly going to present the trial as a matter of science v. religion. Miller, having read ID ‘theorist’ Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, and who was familiar with the sort of ‘irreducible complexity’ arguments—whereby a particular biological phenomenon is said to be too complex to have come about by conventional, step-by-step Darwinian means—put forward by Behe and others, agreed.

During the trial, Miller masterfully dismantled the argument from irreducible complexity, whether for the bacterial flagellum, the immune antibody-producing system, the blood clotting mechanism, and various other protein targeting systems. Miller demonstrated that evolution by natural selection was well capable of, and had indeed, brought about supposedly irreducible biological phenomena. His own work crossed over perfectly with several of the ID arguments, and he could give evolutionary explanations for all of the examples put forward by his opponents. He also demonstrated how ID utterly failed as a scientific theory capable of explaining anything and argued that it was not a scientific theory at all; rather, it was thinly veiled religious dogma which its defenders wanted to impose on students as if it were legitimate science.

Miller was not alone. His fellow witness, philosophy professor Barbara Forrest, used the Discovery Institute’s leaked ‘Wedge Document’ to undermine the defence; the document showed the explicitly religious motivation of the Discovery Institute. Though the Discovery Institute’s involvement with this particular controversy was complex¹, this demonstrated that the ID movement as a whole was fundamentally religious in nature and that its real aim was to get religion into public schools. Miller, Forrest, and the entire legal team went on to receive several awards for their defence of science during the trial.

The trial itself was pure theatre at times, with Charles Darwin’s great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman travelling all the way from England to cover the event and be interviewed by the press. But Judge John E. Jones III’s ruling was clear—and scathing. ID was not science and should not be taught in schools, and the board had acted with ‘breathtaking inanity’. The reach of the ruling did not go far, but the precedent was significant; Kitzmiller was almost a 21st-century Scopes Trial. It was the first legal case involving ID specifically (after a 1987 Supreme Court ruling dealt the death blow to old-fashioned creationists’ attempts to impose their theology in public schools), and it is often viewed as one of the major defeats of anti-evolution litigation in the US.

Yet, more than twenty years on, ID is still here, and growing. The movement’s public relations machine quickly downplayed the ruling and seemed to imply that they didn’t think it was important anyway. The defeat has certainly not diminished the ID movement’s ambition. They are well-resourced, have a wide-ranging propaganda operation, and ID is a mandatory part of the curricula in religious universities such as Biola, Veritas, and Liberty. Their penetration into the homeschooling world is deep, as is that of Young Earth Creationism. Kitzmiller was a significant battle and a great, nearly decisive victory. It weakened the ID movement. But it did not kill it. The war goes on.

1. Aware of potential constitutional difficulties, the Discovery Institute were more cautious in their approach to teaching ID than the board and defence counsel and several witnesses associated with the institute withdrew from appearing at the trial—not Michael Behe, though, who was humiliated by Miller. ↩︎