"Intelligent design" (ID)--the thinking man's creationism--keeps popping up like mushrooms after a summer rain. Last month it cropped up in Pennsylvania, where the Dover Area School Board revised its precollege science curriculum to include discussion of "gaps/problems" in Darwinian theory and of "other theories of evolution including ... intelligent design."
"This is the first instance that we know of that a school district has stated in black and white that it expects ID to be taught," says Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. Both parents and teachers reportedly resisted the move, which was pushed through by board member William Buckingham, head of the curriculum committee. He complained that a biology text adopted by the board was "laced with Darwinism." Even the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, promulgator of ID, has expressed discomfort with the move, which observers think is an open invitation to a lawsuit.
