CONSIDER LESSONS, COMPLEXITY OF INTELLIGENT-DESIGN CASE
by Dan Margolies
Kansas City Star (Kansas), page B10
December 9, 2007
In 2005, federal Judge John Jones III found himself in the national spotlight when he presided over a trial about the introduction of intelligent design into public school classrooms.
Jones, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2002 by President Bush, ruled that the Dover, Pa., school board violated the constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools when it sought to introduce intelligent design in high school biology courses.
His 139-page decision concluded that intelligent design — the notion that life is too complex to have arisen though natural selection and must have been designed by an intelligent agent — was not science and “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.”
The case was the subject of a two-hour edition last month of the PBS program “Nova,” and its significance was such that Time magazine in 2006 included Jones in its Time100 list, the 100 most influential people in the world.
On Thursday, Jones was the keynote speaker at the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association’s annual meeting at the Muehlebach Hotel. Jones addressed nearly 1,000 lawyers and judges and spoke about judicial independence.
Before his speech, he sat down with Kansas City Star business and legal affairs reporter Dan Margolies to talk about the Dover case. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
