The deadly fact that doomed intelligent design

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.