“It is humanity’s unique blessing and peculiar curse to be the only species on Earth, as far as we know, that worries so obsessively and at such great expense about where we came from and why we’re here.” (Epilogue, pg. 339)

Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes is a consummate storyteller. In Monkey Girl, he paints a vivid picture of everyone involved in the 2005 court case, Kitzmiller. vs. Dover Area School District, showing how the U.S. divide between evolution and Intelligent Design dramatically played out in one small Pennsylvania town.  Along the way, he sets the trial’s story in the context of the historical evolution-creationism debate in this country.

The thinking (or lack thereof) and incompetent behavior of the creationist members of the Dover School Board borders on ludicrous. It’s apparent they cared less for the public education of their students than for standing up for a “man who died on a cross 2000 years ago.” Humes writes a page-turner as he traces their bungling skullduggery in trying to get Intelligent Design taught in the school’s biology class.

Perhaps the most disturbing facts that emerged from the trial were the chain of events that clearly showed how School Board members who call themselves believers lied to try to impose their religious beliefs on others, then lied under oath to try to cover it up.

It’s also uncomfortable to watch how the School Board pitted Christian against Christian in their zeal to have their way. Board members, parents, and students who favored the separation of Church and State were publicly criticized for not being Christian enough, or for being atheists. At the trial’s end, when the presiding judge, a Conservative Bush appointee, ruled that Intelligent Design is not science, the creationist Board and its supporters accused him of being a liberal judicial activist for defending the Constitution.

The Dover trial is a sad reminder of how many US citizens are unaware of what the US Constitution means. The men who forged that document had a profound understanding of the importance of the separation of church and state, based on experience, not conjecture. Their founding of our new country grew directly out of the anguish and turmoil of centuries of European religious wars in which persecution often meant lengthy incarceration or death.

Unfortunately for the US, it seems the battle to discredit evolution and replace it with creationism is not over. We can only hope that concerned citizens like those in Dover, PA, will continue to speak out and take legal means where necessary and judges like John E. Jones will continue to rule fairly to protect our Constitutional rights.

Related posts:

1. Book Review – Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them)
2. Children of Imperfect Design
3. Are Religion and Science Reconciling?

Many people will tell you that a god must exist — just look around!  There’s all this incredible stuff, and where there is incredible stuff, there must be an incredible-stuff maker.

In more sober wording, the argument goes, “There must be a creator because life on earth appears designed.  And not just designed, but intelligently designed.”

If not intelligent design, all Christians, to one degree or another, are believers in “intentional design.”  They have to be.  The Christian god must have intentionally designed the Earth and biological life for humans to appear.  Without humans there would be no passion play.  The whole death and resurrection of the messiah would not have been the same if the “most evolved” species had been dolphins.  At least I don’t think so.  Without Jesus, four limbs and a cross, no Christianity.

Take the Christ out of Christianity and what have you got?

A creator god with omniscient intention is an “intelligent designer” by another name.  How intelligently has our universe been designed?  The female spotted hyena, whose blood flows with a hearty dose of testosterone, has hermaphroditic sexual genitalia.  Her clitoris is a penis-like structure she must give birth through.  Intelligent design?  An omnipotent creator would have had to slap-dash this design together, as if working with what already was and then modifying it according to what works in the short-term.  A god could do anything.  What was this god thinking when he designed the hyena? Intoxicated design, maybe.

An additionally disturbing fact about the female spotted hyena is that she is the alpha of her kind.  She is bigger and stronger than the relatively submissive males.  The male hyena was fashioned from a rib of the female.

And what of human hermaphrodites (the inter-sexed), more of whom enter the world each day?  Certainly none of them become that way by exercising their free will.  One in three thousand births
results in a child with ambiguous genitalia.  This is not something a human decides to do.  A god done it.  And he done messed up.

Baboon males will yank on each other’s penises as a sign of greeting.  Baboons are “just” animals, so their behavior would have to fall under design.  Had I designed baboons I would have never thought of that.  Very creative.  There is a species of pig whose cuspids grow so long they pierce their own upper jaw.  If the pigs live long enough, the teeth will eventually penetrate their skulls and kill them.
Then there’s the fly that injects its offspring into a cricket.   The fly larvae eat the cricket alive from inside out, which is cruelty to arthropods.

Intelligent design?  How do you explain mushrooms with mold growing on them?  Why both a white rhino and a black rhino?  What purpose can one fill that the other can’t?  The word “design” implies purpose.  Why so many species of bee?  Wouldn’t one all-purpose bee fit the bill?  And mosquitoes? . . . Those should never have gotten beyond the research-and-development stage.

Why do we have both apples and pears?  Why not 100 completely different fruit, as different as, say, a watermelon and a raspberry, in contrast with as different as a banana and a plantain?  There are a lot of redundant elements in the intelligently designed universe.  We’ve got mosquitos that suck blood, ticks that suck blood, and we’ve got leaches, too.  We’ve got birds that fly, insects that fly, mammals that fly, and fish that nearly fly.  Consider the poor rabbit.  This animal is on the dinner menu of coyotes, fox, bear, weasels, owls, hawks, and humans.  Apparently that is why god made bunnies hornier than toads.  Speaking of which, there are a whole bunch of species of toad in North America alone.  Why so many toads?  Was the creator god redundant, or did an ancestral population of toad encounter environmental selective pressures and different breeding success and thus give rise to new forms, etc., etc.?

If a Christian does believe in evolution, in the least their god must have guided the whole messy affair.  For, along with Jesus, we were made in this god’s image, whether or not we needed braces to straighten our teeth.

As you have probably noticed, human beings have armpit hair (unless it is shaved).  What’s the purpose of armpit hair?  To keep us warmer?  No.  When nearing physical maturity it grows to make us smellier.  The hair holds bod oils and the bacteria that live and breed in them, giving rise to body odor.  We may not perceive functionality in body odor today, but that doesn’t mask the question of the intelligently-designed purpose of B.O.  Rather, it highlights it.  Interestingly, despite that fact that our sense of smell is not nearly as keen as our sight or hearing, the olfactory bulb in the human brain – odor detection H.Q., if you will – is the only sensory organ with a nerve-signal output that bypasses the “switch-board” thalamus and goes directly to the emotional command-and-control area of the brain.  Why?

Our species is presently much more sight-oriented than smell.  While chimpanzees rely heavily on body odors to identify one another, humans use facial and vocal features.  But apparently that was not the case in the distant past.  This neatly explains armpit hair and the special case of the olfactory bulb.  Intelligent design does not.

And on and on I could go.  But I won’t.  Instead, I’ll end two simple questions: 1) Did Jesus have armpit hair?  2) Why?

Related posts:

1. Book Review – Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, & the Battle for America’s Soul