Hello and welcome to the skeptic sky to the universe. Today is Wednesday, December 21st, 2005. This is your host, Steven Ovella, president of the New England Skeptical Society.

With me tonight are Evan Bernstein. Hello everyone.

I'm Perry DeAngeloos. And Bob Ovella. Hello. So the news today, the big news this week is Victory in Dover.

Yay!

Judge John Jones handed down a 139 page decision. And this is the case, the name of the case is Tammy Kitsmiller at all versus the Dover area school district.

This was regarding the teaching of intelligent design we've been talking about over the last few months.

So this was the equally awaited decision. I don't think there was really much doubt, at least not in my mind that the judge was going to decide against the school district basically ruling that teaching of intelligent design in the public schools is unconstitutional.

The real question was how broad or narrow his decision was going to be. Well, I've perused a lot of the 139 page decision. I've got to tell you this judge did not leave his stone unturned. This was, I think, the broadest decision we could have hoped for.

I wonder what kind of help he had. I guess going through a court case like that, I'm sure you end up well versed in the topic, but I wonder what outside sources he approached and coming up with this. I mean, he didn't write this 139 page himself. Did he? I'm sure he's got guys that, you know,

have him in his cliques. I mean, stuff off everything. I mean, yeah, he has definitely had six weeks of testimony. Right. He had a lot of precedence, you know, a lot of cases that he was summarizing. He actually took the time to go through the history of creationism in this country and the history of the legal cases.

So a lot of it was material he would have had available to him. And then the rest is commenting specifically on testimony that was given before him.

Right. Which is what he should do. He should base his decision on the case presented to him. So a few things that struck me reading through it actually many things, but some things that I think are very significant.

The judge who again, I think was trying to really establish an iron clad decision here that cannot be circumvented.

He commented specifically on the fact that ID, intelligent design, has historical connections to creationism. And multiple times in the decision he wrote that, you know, a reasonable person assessing this, understanding the cultural and historical context.

So very, very specifically was putting intelligent design into its historical context, saying, you know, again, tying it to its religious antecedents.

There were some specific piece of information he cited. For example, the of pandas and people book that was specifically referred to in the Dover law, basically saying that you have to teach intelligent design in the public schools.

There were multiple drafts of this book available. And one draft, earlier drafts, used the word creationism, you know, I think 150 times. And the final draft essentially was a search and replace for replaced the word creationism with the word intelligent design.

And not only that, the timing was significant. When it went, when it was changed. And that occurred right after the legal case that basically said that creationism could not be taught in public schools. So it's okay, well, it's just changed the word creationism for intelligent design and try again.

And also Steve, I'm not sure if you're aware of the circumstances under which the book got into the school was very, very shady. It was kind of like wandered in a sense. It was a description that I read where somebody involved, you know, he had somebody by the book and give it to the school or something.

It was a little underhanded for me.

It's very kind of.

So if you may recall guys when Chris Mooney was on the show, we were talking about this topic because he had been covering from a journalist point of view and covering the trial.

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