Evolution News and Views to Expand Dover Coverage with Trial Transcripts

The major media coverage of the lawsuit against the Dover School District is predictably thin on content. So as a public service, Evolution News and Views is going to try to post selected transcripts from the trial so that you can read for yourself what’s going on at the trial, unfiltered by the reporters and pundits. (Of course, we’re going to continue to offer our own analysis of what’s happening at the trial!) Because of the prohibitive expense in purchasing transcripts, we unfortunately won’t be able to provide a complete daily transcript of the trial. But we are going to try to post transcripts for some of the highlights.

Refutation of Irreducible Complexity? Get a Vida!** [updated]

Today at the Dover Trial, plaintiffs’ expert witness, philosopher of science Dr. Robert Pennock, focused on 4 topics: (1) methodological naturalism, (2) methodological naturalism, (3) his Avida paper, and (4) methodological naturalism. Additionally, he also talked about methodological naturalism and his Avida paper. Today I will address only two of these many topics: Dr. Pennock’s Avida paper and in another post, methodological naturalism (MN). First I will address the Avida Paper The “Avida paper” was published as “The Evolution of Biological Complexity,” in Nature, 423:139-144, by E. Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert T. Pennock, and Christoph Adami (May 8, 2003). Pennock and his other co-authors claim the paper “demonstrate[s] the validity of the hypothesis, first articulated by Darwin and supported today Read More ›

The Positive Case for Design

Harrisburg, PA — At the end of yesterday’s testimony in Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the plaintiffs’ team highlighted for reporters a key plank of their argument against the Dover Policy calling student’s attention to a book in the school library about intelligent design. Plaintiffs reiterated evolutionist Dr. Kenneth Miller’s testimony that whereas design theorist Dr. Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument is testable and, therefore, scientific, “Irreducible complexity is just a negative argument against Darwinism, not a positive argument for design.” Thus, while irreducible complexity is a scientific hypothesis, the design inference supposedly is not. Miller insisted this holds for all intelligent design hypotheses. None of them, Miller argued, contains positive evidence for design. But in fact, design theorists do provide a Read More ›

Did Edwards vs. Aguillard Spawn Intelligent Design? No

Harrisburg, PA — The plaintiffs in the Kitzmiller vs. Dover trial are arguing that intelligent design sprang up in the wake of the 1987 Supreme Court decision against creation science, and the National Center for Science Education’s Nick Matzke is repeating the talking point to reporters: “Intelligent design is just a new label for creationism,” Mr. Matzke noted. “It is just the latest legal strategy for creationism. It evolved in 1987 right after the Supreme Court ruled against creationism and said that that was unconstitutional.” The assertion is demonstrably false. The idea of intelligent design reaches back to Socrates and Plato, and the term “intelligent design” as an alternative to blind evolution was used as early as 1897. More recently, Read More ›