Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial (18 of 50)

Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

NARRATOR: For help, the plaintiffs turned to researcher Nick Matzke and his colleagues at an organization called The National Center for Science Education, which tracks challenges to evolution in public schools.
MATZKE: The last time any lawyer took biology was probably in ninth grade, and I spent months and months on email, at meetings explaining science, explaining evolution to the lawyers.
NARRATOR: To make their case before a judge who had no particular scientific training, the lawyers for the parents assembled a team of expert witnesses.
And as their first witness, they called biologist Ken Miller, co-author of the textbook that Bill Buckingham had called laced with Darwinism.
ATTORNEY: Dr.Miller, what is evolution?

Most biologists would describe evolution as the process of change over time that characterizes the natural history of life on this planet.
And what was Darwin's contribution to evolution?
Darwin pointed out that there's a struggle for existence, whether we like to admit it or not.
He realized that those organisms that had the characteristics that suited them best in that struggle, those were the ones that would hand those characteristics down to the next generation, and that therefore the average characteristics of a population could change in one direction or another, and they could change quite dramatically, and that's the essential idea of natural selection.
NARRATOR: Starting with Ken Miller, the plaintiffs walked Judge Jones through the conflict at the heart of this case.
Miller testified how Darwin's theory pictures the history of life as a tree, species gradually evolving into others over millions of years, producing new branches and twigs, a process that gives rise to all the variety of life from bacteria to Darwin's finches to ourselves.
But intelligent design takes a different view, as the movement's own literature shows.
Intelligent design teaches a history of life in which organisms appear abruptly, are unrelated, and linked only by their designer.
MATZKE: What's really being advocated is the idea that organisms poofed into existence through the miraculous act of an intelligent designer, i.e., God.
Um, that's the view that intelligent design promotes.