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Kevin Padian's testimony and slides in the Kitzmiller case
The expert witness testimony given by paleontologist Kevin Padian was a highlight of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. His testimony and the slides he showed to the court are now available here, via the links at the bottom of his page.
In 1925, the state of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of "any theory that denies the divine creation of man and teaches instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The ACLU offered to defend any teacher accused of violating the Act, and John Scopes agreed to incriminate himself by teaching evolution.
Here are the now-famous word-count charts used by Barbara Forrest in her testimony in Kitzmiller v. Dover. These charts showed that the words "creation" and "creationist" were systematically changed to "intelligent design" and "design proponent" in the drafts for the book Of Pandas and People, in the aftermath of the 1987 Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard .
Click the images for an enlarged view:
An excerpt from Nicholas Matzke's article Design on Trial: How NCSE Helped Win the Kitzmiller Case. Reports of the National Center for Science Education 26(1-2), 37-44.
(Some HTML links have been added, otherwise the text is original.)
Legal challenges to anti-evolution policies began with the Scopes Trial of 1925, a case the evolution advocates actually lost.
Since 1968, however, U.S. courts have consistently held that "creationism" is a particular religious viewpoint and that teaching it in public schools would violate the First Amendment of the Constitution.
For a one page summary of important court cases, see Ten Major Court Cases about Creationism and Evolution.
Below are links to complete transcripts of testimony at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.
In 1968, in Epperson v. Arkansas, the United States Supreme Court invalidated a 1928 Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of evolution. The Court held the statute to be an unconstitutional attempt to advance a particular religious viewpoint:
The law's effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read.
In 1982, in McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, a United States federal court held that an Arkansas "balanced treatment" statute violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Arkansas statute required public schools to give balanced treatment to "creation-science" and "evolution-science". In a decision that gave a detailed definition of the term "science", the court declared that "creation science" is not, in fact, science.
The May 2006 issue of Nature Immunology contains a "Commentary" essay on the role that evolutionary immunology played in the now-famous cross-examination of Michael Behe on Day 12 of the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in the fall of 2005. The essay is coauthored by Nick Matzke, NCSE Public Information Project Director and a key behind-the-scenes player in the Kitzmiller case. Matzke teamed up with two immunologists to write the article: Andrea Bottaro (Department of Medicine, Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the James P. Wilmot Cancer Center, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry) and Matt Inlay (Department of Pathology, Beckman Center, Stanford University). Both are contributors to the Panda's Thumb weblog, and have written detailed critiques of Behe's claims about immunology (Bottaro, Inlay). These critiques served as an inspiration and guide for Matzke during preparation of the immune system section of the Behe cross-examination.