It’s officially over — basically declared as ancient history…happening so swiftly you’d swear it happened by some kind of… intelligent design:
DOVER, Pa. — Dover’s much-maligned school policy of presenting “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution was officially relegated to the history books Tuesday night.
On a voice vote, and with no discussion beforehand, the newly elected Dover Area School Board unanimously rescinded the policy. Two weeks earlier, a judge ruled the policy unconstitutional.
And so it vanishes…just as the school board that instituted it vanished (helped along by voters) and the requirement to raise the concept in classrooms vanished (helped along by the court). More from the Washington Post:
Dover biology teacher Jennifer Miller was relieved Tuesday night to know the policy was officially off the books.
“I will feel comfortable again teaching what I’d always felt comfortable teaching,” she after the meeting, attended by a crowd of about 100 people.
School board members declined to comment after the vote.
Most of the previous board members who had defended the policy were ousted in the November election, replaced by candidates who pledged to eliminate the policy.
Policy defenders had said they were trying to improve science education by exposing students to alternatives with the policy. But the judge said the board’s real purpose was “to promote religion in the public school classroom,” and said intelligent design could not be taught as an alternative to evolution in biology classes.
But is this the end of this concept? The judge in effect said: “No dice. This is creationism and an attempt to bring the Bible into the classrooms.” However, ntelligent design’s proponents show no signs whatsoever of being ready to abandon their campaign to get the concept in schools so it could emerge in a new incarnation, as the Cincinnati Post notes:
The supporters of intelligent design are persistent, though, and this much-watched Pennsylvania case that was decided recently will not be the end of it….
Intelligent design holds that life is so complex that it must have been designed by some superintelligent force or being. As science, the proposition has the drawback of being unable to be tested or replicated in any meaningful way. And, according to a recent New York Times report, the intelligent-design movement may be running out of steam, having failed to attract academic support or peer-reviewed papers. And many leading theologians and religious scholars see no conflict between their faith and evolution.
Just as creationism mutated into intelligent design, many observers believe intelligent design will return in a new guise, perhaps as something called sudden-emergence theory. Creationism, thus, is changing in response to its environment; it is, in a sense, evolving in a Darwinian sort of way.
In other words, this merely may be a time out in the heated debate and frenzied efforts on both sides to put or keep it out of the classroom. But the debate and frenzied efforts will begin again, real soon…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.