Photograph by Al Denelsbeck.

The year 2025 is the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. Celebrations were held throughout the year as part of the 100th anniversary of Scopes. I got to attend the July 2025 Nashville Scopes Trial event on the campus of Vanderbilt University, where I got to reconnect with many Doverians and other veterans of the evolution wars. Many of those talks are now online on YouTube. Just after that, I also got to see my 100-year old grandmother one last time. She passed away soon after at the age of 101. Her life spanned the entire American creation/evolution debate from 1924-2025. Ironically, grandma sending me creationism books when I was a kid in the 1980s is part of what got me into the creation/evolution debate in the first place.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve found my family history and the creationism debate crashing together: back in 2009, I gave a talk to the University of Oklahoma Zoology Department as part of their series for the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species, then found myself sharing a bed-and-breakfast with Richard Dawkins who was giving a talk to the whole University. In the space of 24 hours I found myself dining with my creationist grandma and someone who was basically her arch-nemesis.

We invite readers to give their own reflections on Dover, the science/creationism debate and subsequent developments, or personal updates in the comments below. Also, if they like, Kitzmiller participants can send me comments for me to add as edits to the main post (this may take a bit, as I’m now on holiday with the Aussie side of the family; the kids tell me there is a koala down the road).

I will post several updates from this year which I hope you will enjoy. I should have blogged these at the time, but, well, 3 kids and a day job!

1. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). The biology class you WISHED You Could Have Taken. Talk for: Bay Area Skeptics, host Eugenie C. Scott. June 14, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7UKOqCn9ao&t=13s Slides: http://phylo.wikidot.com/local–files/nicholas-j-matzke/Matzke_ID_flagellum_v7.pptx

2. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). “Science at a Crossroads.” Preface, pp. 6-9 of: Bartholomew, Robert E. (2025). The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar: Separating Fact from Folklore: A Scientific Appraisal of the Maramataka. Auckland, New Zealand: Robert Bartholomew. pp. 1-90. ISBN 9780473737030. https://aotearoabooks.co.nz/the-science-of-the-maori-lunar-calendar/

3. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Interview: Matauranga Maori, der Mond, Neuseeland und die Wissenschaft. (In English: Mātauranga Māori, the Moon, New Zealand, and Science.) Interviewer: Andreas Edmüller. Der Skeptiker 3325, 3/2025, pp. 146-149. https://www.gwup.org/produkt/skeptiker-3-2025/#tab-id-2

4. Matzke, Nicholas J. (2025). Mendel was of his time, but Mendelism is modern. Review of: Kostas Kampourakis, How We Get Mendel Wrong, and Why It Matters: Challenging the Narrative of Mendelian Genetics, Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2024, ISBN 9781032456904, 250 pp. Journal of Historical Biology, accepted August 10, 2025. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10739-025-09835-6 . Sharable Link: https://rdcu.be/eH3Zu

5. Update on antievolution legislation. I had intended to update the Matzke (2015) analysis of the “evolution of antievolution legislation.” I have progressed this through the data coding stage, but now it’s the holidays so it will take a bit longer to do the phylogenetics. However, it’s interesting to paste all the bills since 2015 together to see the wacky stuff that is still proposed, and sometimes passed (like in West Virginia in 2024; see my comments in Science on that, published just before I wrote a letter to Science on a similar scale of weirdness in science education coming from the other political side, in New Zealand).

Continue Reading

Lately, the Discovery Institute’s ID site Science and Culture has had almost no arguments that would convince any scientist that Intelligent Design contributed to the diversity of life. Michael Behe’s arguments are the same as before, and William Dembski’s latest versions of his specified complexity argument leaves out any discussion of why having a large value (of his Algorithmic Specified Complexity) cannot be achieved by ordinary evolutionary processes.

But at S&C they are getting a bit angry at evolutionary biologists. For stealing credit that belongs to ID advocates. A post on December 12, is titled “All the Evidence Points to Design, but the Credit Goes to … You Know What”. Even more remarkably, its author is “Science and Culture”. This makes it an official statement by the site. Or else none of their people want to take credit or blame for it.

They simply point to an article at BioEssays on “spatiotemporal cues in cell division”, in particular to its last paragraph, which contains the sentence (boldface text is S&C’s emphasis):

Why evolution selected chromosomes as a platform to integrate different signals is easily explained by the need to concentrate mitotic regulators (and their control) which would otherwise dilute in a vast cytoplasmic ocean.

and S&C’s comment is

Many years ago, William Dembski said that one of the most objectionable aspects of modern evolutionary theory was the undeserved, unearned credit it steals from the exquisite, transcendentally elegant work of the Designer. Put more bluntly, evolution is a credit thief, a lowdown sleazy embezzler. If we could personify evolution, we’d have ChatGPT make a drawing of the word as a convict with a prison serial number across its chest. But if you just put your thumb over the word “evolution” in the phrase we highlighted, all the evidence for design is still there, and it’s just too cool for words.

See, all the wonderful details of biological systems must be evidence for Intelligent Design, it’s so obvious that they figure anyone can see this. If a biologist lapses into teleological language that personifies evolution, this must mean they acknowledge that Design Intervention happened, but are too scared to admit it, and give credit to a personified Evolution instead.

Well, the matter can be looked at another way …

Continue Reading

Judge John Jones III of Dover, Pennsylvania, fame is now president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A certain little bird told us today of an interview with President Jones reported by Seth Kaplan of television station WHTM in Harrisburg: The ‘deadly’ fact that doomed ‘intelligent design’ in Dover schools 20 years ago this month. The interview was interesting, in part because President Jones, as the little bird put it, discusses the case itself, not legal matters. In particular, President Jones pointed out many problems with the defense’s case, including,

• Side-by-side comparisons between the version of “Of Pandas and People” on the school library shelf and a previous version: “The prior edition had the words ‘creation science,’ and they simply changed those words in the in the (sic) later edition of the book to to ‘intelligent design’ — pretty deadly if you’re trying to say that that intelligent design is not the successor to creation science,” Jones said.
• “When asked who the designer was, they [defense witnesses] were compelled in honesty to say that they felt the designer was God,” Jones said. “Fair enough, but that makes it difficult to uphold as a scientific concept.”

Mr. Kaplan’s article, linked above, is worth reading in its entirety.

Photograph by Ron Wittmann.