March 28, 2007
 
The past is never dead. It's not even past. --
   William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”
 
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you, it’s the things you know that ain’t so. -- Attributed to Mark Twain, anonymous and Josh Billings
 
When I said I thought it would be kind of good to learn more about evolution, some other kids started calling me Monkey Girl. ‘Cause they said God made them, but that I must’ve come from chimps. – 14 year old daughter of Tammy Kitzmiller, Dover, PA resident
 
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Monkey Girl’ Explores Dover, PA Intelligent Design Versus Evolution Case; It’s Also an Examination of America’s Cultural Divide
 
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
I was busy with many things in the fall and winter of 2005 and missed the media coverage of Kitzmiller, et al v Dover Area School District, which resulted in a federal court ruling in Pennsylvania that equated so-called “intelligent design” in the Dover (PA) Area School District with creationism. The latter had been banned in public schools following the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court Edwards decision.
 
Thanks to “Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul” (Ecco, a HarperCollins Imprint, 400 pages, $25.95) Edward Humes gives the wondering reader an exhaustive yet readable account about something that a lot of people thought had been settled a long time ago: The teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the nation’s public schools.
 
I had heard rumblings of intelligent design/creationism cases in Kansas a few years ago, but the Pennsylvania case -- the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st Century -- was an eye-opener to me. The 130-page decision by Federal District Judge John E. Jones III, handed down after 40 days of testimony, equated the Dover school board’s actions in promoting intelligent design with a creationism.
 
The case pitted the science teachers and concerned parents of the rural district south of York, PA – and 30 miles from the Three-Mile Island Nuclear power plant -- against fundamentalist religion backers on the school board led by former police office Bill Buckingham who repeatedly denied that the nation’s founders had separated church and state.
 
Humes describes how Buckingham bullied the other school board members into formulating a one-minute speech that was designed to be read to the students in Dover, stating that there are alternatives to Darwin’s theory of evolution, first enunciated in the British scientist’s landmark 1859 “The Origin of Species.” (The book’s full title is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”) In addition to the speech, the board bought supplemental textbooks promoting intelligent design.
 
About the “Scopes Monkey Trial”: It was a show trial in Dayton, Tenn. in the summer of 1925, with science teacher John Scopes allowing himself to be the guinea pig in a battle between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow.
 
Humes notes it was also an attempt to bring money into the coffers of the small eastern Tennessee town as well as test the validity of Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, the Butler act, passed in early 1925. It ended up making the place north of Chattanooga the nation’s laughingstock. For more about the trial, which inspired first the 1955 play followed by the 1960 movie “Inherit the Wind,” see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
 
Sensing an opportunity for a definitive test of “intelligent design,” the Thomas More Law Center, founded -- and funded -- by Domino’s Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan, supplied lawyers for the defense. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, was also involved on the defense side.
 
On the other side, the American Civil Liberties Union provided support and enlisted the aid of a prominent Philadelphia law firm to work for free – pro bono – for the plaintiffs. In his chapter titled “Send Lawyers, Geeks, and Money” (all of the chapters are cleverly titled with titles like “Monkey Suit” and “The Waters of Kansas Part.”) Humes describes the scientists and other experts enlisted by both sides to present their arguments for and against Charles Darwin.
 
Humes is fair and balanced, but he obviously believes in evolution, as do most educated Americans, according to a Gallup Poll taken in November 2004 (see page 354 in the notes section for a detailed breakout of the results by education, place of residence, religion, church attendance, etc.). Essentially, the poll revealed that Southerners are most likely to be supporters of creationism or intelligent design and not believe in Darwin. People in the West tend to believe in evolution. The more people attend church, the less likely they are to believe in evolution and the more formally educated a person is, the less likely he/she believes in creationism, the poll reveals.
 
The plaintiffs were anything but Godless, Humes points out, with most of them believing Christians and a few even teaching Sunday school. Buckingham was an OxyContin addict, with the drug taken at first to relieve excruciating back pain. Humes makes every effort to be fair to this conflicted former cop and ex-Marine.
 
Humes provides enough back story in the first half of the book on the culture clash between believers of evolution and those who believe in a “young Earth,” created about 6,000 years ago, with people and dinosaurs coexisting, to justify his ambitious subtitle. The second half of "Monkey Girl" is devoted to the trial itself, held without a jury in the Federal Courthouse in Harrisburg, PA, the state capital.
 
The defense at first was delighted with the choice of Judge Jones, a 2002 George W. Bush appointee, a solid Republican and a friend of former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. But the judge surprised everyone with his independence of thought, Humes shows, making him the eventual hero of “Monkey Girl,” at least to supporters of evolution.
 
Lively, entertaining and authoritative, “Monkey Girl” is an important book for anyone wishing to understand the complexities of American culture. If you thought the battle over evolution has been fought and won in the wake of the Kitzmiller decision, you don’t know the power of proponents of creationism and “intelligent design.” I’m glad I’m not a science teacher in 21st Century America!
 
Publisher’s web site: www.eccobooks.com
 
Link to text of decision of Judge John E. Jones III :
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover_decision.html