The Georgia trial over stickers placed in a science textbook written by a Brown professor was resolved Jan. 14 when U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled the sticker was unconstitutional.
Stating that evolution was "a theory, not a fact," the sticker was placed in the ninth-grade biology text in 2002 after parents complained to the Cobb County school board that alternative ideas about the origin of life were not presented. A group of parents represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued the school board, claiming the stickers violate the separation of church and state.
Professor of Biology Ken Miller testified for the plaintiffs in the four-day trial in November 2004. As the author of the textbook, he was called in to defend the presentation of evolution in the book.
Cooper spent two months writing the 44-page ruling, which calls for the stickers to be removed immediately from the textbooks. In the verdict he wrote, "By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories."
The school board decided Jan. 18 to appeal the decision at the Southern Circuit Court of Appeals. Miller said he is confident the verdict will be upheld by the higher court, despite the lack of clear precedents to the case.
Miller is already involved in another case in Dover, Pa., where the area school board recently instituted a policy that requires teachers to read a two-paragraph statement explaining an alternative theory to evolution called intelligent design. This policy makes Dover District the first in the country to require the presentation of intelligent design in its classrooms.
Intelligent design posits that the diversity and complexity of life on Earth is so great that it could not have developed through the natural Darwinian processes of evolution. Instead it is attributed to design by an unnamed higher intelligence.
Similar to the Georgia case, Miller's textbook lies at the heart of the controversy. He said the Dover high school teachers chose his textbook, but the school board was required to approve it. The president of the board recommended including intelligent design in the curriculum after reading Miller's book. The president of the board told a local television network that the textbook was "laced with Darwinism from beginning to end" and that its contents should include creationism, Miller said.
Early this month, all Dover science teachers refused to read the statement to their ninth-grade students, citing the Pennsylvania code of education, which states that teachers cannot present information they believe to be false. Instead, the statement was read to students by a school administrator.
A group of 32 University of Pennsylvania professors, including representatives of the departments of biology and philosophy and the associate dean for natural sciences, wrote an open letter to the Dover Area School Board condemning the teaching of intelligent design. The letter read, "Science education should be based on ideas that are well supported by evidence. Intelligent design does not meet this criterion: It is a form of creationism propped up by a biased and selective view of evidence."
Paul Sniegowski, an assistant professor of biology at Penn who co-authored the letter, said its writers hoped to convince the board that the policy was not good science education. "I felt I couldn't sit by and not voice our concern," he said.
Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center, a non-profit conservative Christian organization, replied with an open letter to the Penn professors. It stated, "If the level of inquiry supporting your letter is an example of the type of inquiry you make before arriving at scientific conclusions, I suggest that at the very least, your students should get their tuition money back, and more appropriately, the University should fire you as a scientist."
The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 11 parents in Dover against the school board for requiring the teaching of intelligent design. Miller, who recently met with lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said he estimates town residents are split "straight down the middle" in their support of or opposition to the lawsuit.
The case is set to appear in court in September. Snielgowski said he hoped for "the same outcome as in Cobb County."
Thompson, whose organization has been selected to represent the Dover school board in the upcoming trial, condemned the Cobb County ruling.
