Dover Pennsylvania intelligent design trial: Some links you might find helpful

Evolution News and Views provides day-to-day coverage from people sympathetic to intelligent design who are actually there or very familiar with the issues.

Even if you are not sympathetic to intelligent design, you would be much better off listening to them than to a TV reporter who has had about half an hour to “learn about the issues” AND figure out how to upload Scopes trial graphics from 1925 at the same time.

Here’s the statement that students were supposed to hear, according to the Dover school board. I don’t think most students will know what to make of it, so I can’t see why this is happening at the school level. Like many people who follow this controversy, I am much more concerned about censorship at the university level.

Readers who insist that there is not positive case for design may also be interested in A Positive Case for Design.

Other takes:

- The Darwin lobby weighs in.

- Local paper online group Lancaster Online captures local reactions.

On the whole, you are better off to go to the design lobby and to the Darwin lobby, above, for news, rather than to typical mainstream media.

Thre are a few honourable exceptions, but much as it pains me, as a journalist, to say it, I do not have a good feeling about the ability of most legacy media organizations to cover the story. It took me three years to clearly understand what the controversy is about. Sure, many people in the media are way smarter than me, but they are not going to get there just by listening to cranks, conspirazoids, hysterics, ward heelers, witch hunters, flacks, and lobbyists. My book, By Design or by Chance?, flogged at the very bottom of this page, cites something like 77 other books (according to some unhappy person whose job it was to count). I wouldn't have put two and one half years into doing all that research and boiling it down into an easy read if the answers were obvious and easily found in an afternoon.