Dover Lawsuit
stcynic | October 22, 2005I got this amusing email last night from someone named John Schroeder, suggesting that the TMLC attorneys in the Dover case are getting a bit desperate. The email says:
Testimony in the trial should get really interesting by the middle of next week.
At the request of Ms Sherry Doran of the Thomas More Law Center, I have mailed to Richard Thompson on this date a copy of my recently published book, Darwinism:Sorcery in the Classroom. If he employs the scientific data it contains in his defense of the school board decision, the ACLU may have to eat some evolved crow.
Schroeder is the founder of…
stcynic | October 22, 2005One of the interesting segments of the Michael Behe cross examination begins on page 42 of the Day12AM transcript, and it concerns a paper that Behe wrote with David Snoke. That paper, called Simulating Evolution by Gene Duplication of Protein Feature that Requires Multiple Amino Acid Residues, was based upon a computer simulation that attempted to answer the question of how long it would take cumulative point mutations in a single gene to produce a new trait - the interaction of two proteins - requiring a change in multiple amino acid residues if there was no selective advantage to preserve…
stcynic | October 21, 2005The latest transcript is out. It is the day 12 am transcript, which is part 2 of the cross examination of Michael Behe. There's a laugh-out-loud moment near the start. Before they began the cross of Behe, our attorneys wanted to alert the judge that they might be using material from the next draft of the textbook Of Pandas and People, just a couple short passages, during the questioning. That draft is protected by a court order and cannot be released publicly, so they wanted to alert the judge that they were going to use a small bit of it in case he wanted to do that part of the questioning…
stcynic | October 21, 2005I'm going to make a series of posts breaking down the testimony of Michael Behe in the Dover trial. The transcript for the direct examination and the first part of the cross examination are available now. Behe is really the only science witness the defense has in this case, with Dembski having been withdrawn earlier, and he is crucial to the defense's argument that ID is a genuine scientific theory. Unfortunately for them, Behe crashed and burned badly under cross examination. One inconsistency after another was picked up on and magnified, and you can see in the transcript how questions were…
stcynic | October 21, 2005One of the local Dover area papers, the York Dispatch, has an article about the Panda's Thumb and in particular about the t-shirts, mugs and stickers that Wes Elsberry has put together about the trial, available at Cafe Press. Some of them are fairly amusing.
stcynic | October 21, 2005The first part of the cross examination of Michael Behe is now available for download. I'll have comments when I've had a chance to read it later today. This is only the first part of the cross examination, which continued the next day. I'll have a link up as soon as the next day's transcript is available.
stcynic | October 20, 2005The ACLU-PA blog has an interesting post on a key point in the cross examination of Michael Behe in the Dover trial. Behe was asked whether his book, Darwin's Black Box, had gone through a peer review process similar to the process used for articles submitted to scholarly journal:
It has been stated here before that Behe has not submitted his own work on intelligent design for peer review. At the same time, Behe agreed, when asked by plaintiff's counsel Eric Rothschild if the "peer review for Darwin's Black Box was analogous to peer review in the [scientific] literature." It was, according to…
stcynic | October 20, 2005Now that the trial is well under way, it's a good time to revisit some predictions made on this blog last December. My friend Dan Ray, who teaches constitutional law, wrote a thorough analysis of the issues with some predictions about the strategies of both sides that have been dead on accurate. Well worth rereading at this point.
stcynic | October 19, 2005We won't have a transcript of the Behe cross examination for a few days yet, but here are a couple of reports on it. Laurie Goodstein's article in the NY Times details some of the problems that Behe ran into. For instance, he is arguing for an incredibly broad definition of science, one not accepted by any scientific organization. Under questioning, he admitted that under his definition, astrology would be considered a scientific theory. The cross examination poked a lot of big holes in Behe's testimony and in the defendant's case:
The cross-examination of Professor Behe on Tuesday made it…
stcynic | October 18, 2005Michael Behe was cross examined today by our side in the Dover trial. I can't wait for the transcripts to come out. My sources who were in the courtroom tell me that the cross-ex was a disasterfor Behe and the other side. More details as I get them.
stcynic | October 14, 2005The second part of Barbara Forrest's testimony at the Dover trial has finally been posted. It's a fairly large PDF file.
stcynic | October 13, 2005I was going to write about this, but Dave Thomas did such a good job I'll just refer you to his work. In the Dover trial, as you'll recall, Barbara Forrest testified that the book Of Pandas and People originally used the term "creation" to describe the idea that species appear abruptly with all their major features intact, then after the Edwards decision they simply changed it to "intelligent design". This is incredibly damaging testimony, and the TMLC attorneys were not the only ones frantic to come up with a response to it. The Discovery Institute has been busy throwing explanations at the…
stcynic | October 12, 2005Some are probably wondering why there haven't been any updates on the Dover trial the last couple days. They took a short break from the trial and are resuming today. The plaintiff's case is wrapping up this week. Today, Bertha Spahr, chairman of the Dover science department, will finish her testimony that began last week. Tomorrow Brian Alters will take the stand, he's the plaintiff's expert in science education. And on Friday the last plaintiff's witness, Kevin Padian, will testify. Padian is a paleontologist from Berkeley. That will wrap up our case. Next week will begin the defendant's…
stcynic | October 11, 2005Casey Luskin, formerly of the IDEA club and now working for the Discovery Institute, has been busily blogging the Dover trial over the last couple weeks, posting responses to the testimony of the expert witnesses. Unfortunately for the DI, it's clear that he is just in way, way over his head here. Richard Hoppe already debunked his response to Rob Pennock's testimony about AVIDA, I've debunked his entry claiming that ID does not require a supernatural creator, and now Mike Dunford has taken aim at his absurd claims about Ken Miller's testimony regarding chromosomal fusing in humans and apes.…
stcynic | October 10, 2005My buddy Burt Humburg is featured in a story in the York Daily Record, which has been doing a great job of covering the Dover situation as it has developed over the last year and a half. I met Burt at a conference at Berkeley in 2003 and he was a riot. On leave from his medical residency at the time, he was taking full advantage of his few precious days of freedom by imbibing large amounts of wine underneath a giant T-rex skeleton (one of the cooler places I've ever seen for a cocktail party). Burt has a knack for being right in the middle of every anti-evolution controversy in the country.…
stcynic | October 8, 2005In reading Barbara Forrest's testimony, it quickly becomes clear why the defense has objected so vociferously to her being allowed to testify as an expert witness. On the issues that are really at the core of this case, she is the witness who does the most damage to the arguments of the defense. Remember that the Supreme Court has already ruled 7-2 in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creation science (i.e. creationism) in public school science classrooms is a violation of the establishment clause. The single most important issue in the Dover case is whether intelligent design is a genuine…
stcynic | October 7, 2005Thanks to Dave S for letting me know that the transcript of the first part of Barbara Forrest's testimony is now available. You can download it from this page, along with earlier transcripts. Want a good indication of how important her testimony is at this trial? On top of the major freakout going on among the ID crowd to discredit her, look at the size of the transcript. It's 3 times as long as all the other transcripts combined, and it doesn't even include the cross-examination of her by the defense attorneys, just the direct examination by the plaintiffs and all of the arguing over whether…
stcynic | October 6, 2005Mike Argento, a columnist for the York Daily Record, writes about the testimony of Barbara Forrest and it seems that he definitely got the point of the whole exercise, from the historical record she referenced to the shameful tactics of the TMLC attorneys. First, he writes of their attempts to impeach her testimony by questioning her about her association with humanist groups:
Along about the 658th hour of Dr. Barbara Forrest's stay on the witness stand, during Day Six of the Dover Panda Trial, I started looking for her horns.
Never did see them.
It was right about the time that defense…
stcynic | October 6, 2005Remember a few days ago, when John West of the Discovery Institute was trying to discredit Barbara Forrest by quoting, in a highly distorted fashion, from a pretrial hearing on the defense's attempts to have her barred from testifying? West claimed that the judge had "skewered" Forrest, when in fact all he had done was distinguish what types of quotes she could offer from ID advocates in her testimony based on some technical distinctions in the rules of evidence.
On Wednesday, Forrest took the witness stand and according to folks who were watching, it was the defense attorneys who were…
stcynic | October 5, 2005I mentioned the brief filed by 85 scientists asking the judge not to rule on the question of what is and is not science, a brief written by DI fellow David DeWolf. Over on the Panda's Thumb, Timothy Sandefur has written a blistering critique of the dishonest rhetoric found in that brief. Also pay particular attention to a long comment by Pim Van Meurs, who goes into a lot of detail on some of the false factual claims in the brief. Sandefur sums up the vacuity of their argument perfectly:
The brief makes no scientific argument at all, and gives no indication of where the court might look to…