"Monkey Girl": A new book about the Dover Intelligent Design Trial

Here is Washington Post review of a new book about the 2005 Dover trial over the teaching of Intelligent Design in public schools:
Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and The Battle for America's Soul

In 2004, when the Dover, Penn., school board voted to require biology classes to use a supplemental textbook that promoted the theory of intelligent design rather than evolution, the conflict that erupted was about far more than semantics. As Edward Humes describes in this lively and thoughtful book, Dover -- like Dayton, Tenn., during the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" -- became a proving ground for clashing beliefs about the origins of life and constitutional questions about the separation of church and state.

"The scientific community sees the creationist critics of evolution as yahoos, religious zealots, and scientifically suspect charlatans," writes Humes. "The creationists see the evolutionists as immoral and dishonest purveyors of a pseudoreligion called Darwinism that makes God superfluous." Each side is guilty of misrepresenting the other. In Dover, the people on each side believed those on the other were attempting to indoctrinate their children. And everyone soon realized that this local controversy had national implications.

Humes takes the title of his book, Monkey Girl, from the taunt leveled at a child whose mother objected to the new policy. Some parents, including teachers in the school district, viewed intelligent design as a stealth form of creation science. Although many of these parents were Christians (two even taught Sunday school), they felt that teaching ID in a public school classroom improperly injected religion into education. They brought their case, Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District, with the aid of the ACLU, the National Center for Science Education and lawyers from the Philadelphia firm Pepper Hamilton.

You can download the official judgement at the ACLU site (its 14o pages - but its fantastically written and nicely demonstrates why ID should not be taught in science classrooms):

Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican, emerges as the hero in Humes's tale. In his eloquent ruling for the plaintiffs, which should be read by every student of law, he noted, "This case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy." Even before Jones issued his ruling, the citizens of Dover reached their own verdict: In the next school board election, "every one of the eight incumbents who favored intelligent design was ousted," Humes writes.

Read the full review here