Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul (2007)

Read the book: https://amzn.to/3ye18WR

Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul is a 2007 non fiction book about the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial of 2005. Author Edward Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, interviewed interested parties to the controversy around a school board's decision to introduce the concept of intelligent design into public school lessons on science. The book describes in detail the experiences of those caught up in the actions of the school board and the ensuing Dover trial, in the context of the intelligent design movement and the ascendency of the American religious right whose opposition to evolution led them to campaign to redefine science to accept supernatural explanations of natural phenomena.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Girl

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005) was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design, ultimately found by the court to not be science.[2][3] In October 2004, the Dover Area School District of York County, Pennsylvania, changed its biology teaching curriculum to require that intelligent design be presented as an alternative to evolution theory, and that Of Pandas and People, a textbook advocating intelligent design, was to be used as a reference book. The prominence of this textbook during the trial was such that the case is sometimes referred to as the Dover Panda Trial, a name which recalls the popular name of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, 80 years earlier. The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The judge's decision sparked considerable response from both supporters and critics.

Eleven parents of students in Dover, York County, Pennsylvania, near the city of York, sued the Dover Area School District over the school board requirement that a statement presenting intelligent design as "an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view" was to be read aloud in ninth-grade science classes when evolution was taught. The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) and Pepper Hamilton LLP. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) acted as consultants for the plaintiffs. The defendants were represented by the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC). The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, publisher of Of Pandas and People, tried to join the lawsuit late as a defendant but was denied for multiple reasons.

The suit was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania seeking declaratory and injunctive relief. Since it sought a purely equitable remedy, under the Seventh Amendment, the right to a jury trial did not apply. It was tried in a bench trial from September 26, 2005, to November 4, 2005, before Judge John E. Jones III, a Republican appointed in 2002 by George W. Bush.

A War on Science, a 49-minute BBC Horizon television documentary about intelligent design, including the Kitzmiller v. Dover court battle. It prominently features Oxford University professor and biologist Richard Dawkins. It was first broadcast on 26 January 2006. Intelligent design supporters and promoters Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, Stephen C. Meyer and William A. Dembski also appear in the documentary.
Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, a Public Broadcasting Service NOVA television documentary aired in November 2007. It features interviews with Jones, witnesses, and lawyers as well as re-enacted scenes from the proceedings.

The University of Montana Law Review published three articles addressing this topic in its winter 2007 issue. David K. DeWolf, John G. West and Casey Luskin, senior fellows or officers of the Discovery Institute, argued that intelligent design is a valid scientific theory, that the Jones court should not have addressed the question of whether it was a scientific theory, and that the decision will have no effect on the development and adoption of intelligent design as an alternative to standard evolutionary theory. Peter Irons responded to the DeWolf et al. article, arguing that the decision was extremely well reasoned, and that it marks the end to legal efforts by the intelligent design movement to introduce creationism in public schools. It had been an essential part of the ruling to consider whether ID was a legitimate scientific theory as claimed by its proponents, and DeWolf, et al. had implicitly recognised this by citing the Lemon test, which would have been irrelevant if ID were legitimate science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School_District