Debating Evolution

Kathryn Sharkey
ksharkey@smu.edu

The SMU community gathered last night at the showing of the NOVA documentary “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial,” chronicled the Dover, Pa. trial, followed by a panel discussion in Caruth auditorium based on the trail case Tammy Kitzmiller, et al v. Dover Area School District, et al.

The documentary and debate were part of the Darwin series SMU is celebrating through February 2010. The panel featured the U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III and plaintiff lawyer Eric Rothschild from the case, Dover area resident and journalist Laurie Lebo, and a NOVA producer of the documentary Paula Apsell.

The trial resulted from the Dover School District’s desire to introduce the theory of Intelligent Design along with Darwin’s theory of evolution into ninth grade biology classrooms. The charges raised in the court against Intelligent Design called for a repackaging of creationism, which teaches that God created of all life on Earth and nothing came into existence through natural selection or evolution. Creationism was banned in the classroom in the 1987 case “Edwards v. Aguillard.”

The court ultimately ruled in favor of Tammy Kitzmiller stating “Intelligent Design is not science” because it is “grounded in religion” therefore introducing it into classrooms would violate the establishment clause of the Constitution which mandates the separation of church and state.

“We really wanted the core people in the case and in the film on the discussion panel,” Rachel Lyon chair of Cinema Television at SMU and moderator of the discussion said.

“The presence of Paula Apsell, a film producer along with two local and two national actors in the trial is the best way of delving into the guts of why this is a case of a wolf in wolf’s clothing,” she said.

The panel addressed the legal, ethical, personal, scientific, artistic, and creative issues involved in the trial, media coverage of the trial, and making of the documentary.

The documentary states that somewhere between one third and one half of the U.S. population does not believe in evolution. The discussion of religion, science, film, law, and ethics provided a menagerie of ways to analyze the topic of evolution in America, which continues to strike at the hearts of Americans.