In late December, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III offered a welcome and definitive ruling in the case against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district: Intelligent design is not science and should not be presented in science classes as a viable alternative to evolution. As the judge put it, "The fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions."
That conclusion is unlikely to surprise most readers of Discover. Nonetheless, the text of the ruling, an excerpt of which is available on Discover.com, is worth reading for its concise and eloquent description of scientific endeavor. The proponents of intelligent design have spun a campaign out of "teaching the controversy"—of using their largely hollow questions about evolution to wedge in their ...
