They've also been able to point out a handful of relatively small errors in the evolutionary theory taught from U.S. science textbooks.

Meanwhile, the media that are supposed to look critically at movements such as intelligent design seem content with simply presenting the controversy and ignoring the evidence against its arguments and the political masterplan of its braintrust.

All this allows the handful of intelligent design adherents, many of whom are scientists themselves, to take advantage of America's existing Christian right political network and turn a tiny chorus of voices into a very big sound at school boards, state legislatures and even the U.S. Congress, where U.S. Rep. Thomas E. Petri (R-Wis.) is a board member of the think tank that supports the country's pre-eminent intelligent design organization.

This rankles scientists, the ones who care anyway. They still fight over the details of Darwinian evolution but take its existence for granted, because the evidence for it is overwhelming.

"Even people who don't think of themselves as focused on evolution generally start from an evolutionary perspective," says Ichiro Matsumura, an Emory University biologist whose job it is to make evolution work at the microscopic level in the laboratory. "It's a tool that we use."

For example, instead of working on a human eye in the lab, a scientist might work on the simpler structure of a fruit fly's eye, because she knows that, because of evolution, what's true for the fruit fly will probably be true for the human.

For most non-scientists, though, Darwinian evolution -- the theory that life evolved from simple organisms through the process of natural selection and mutation -- is a collection of half-forgotten textbook definitions, pictures of dark-colored moths and the voyage of Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle, if we were taught it in the first place. And in Georgia, that's not a sure thing.

Put another way: If your child isn't going to become a biologist, what's the harm in teaching a discredited or muddled version of evolution when it's rare that we use it in our everyday lives? Washington University biologist Ursula Goodenough suggests that no matter what job you do, the potential for harm is profound.

Muddling evolution's teaching with religious debate "exacerbates an inherent anti-intellectual predilection of your basic American, and that feeds into having a poor regard for education and a poor regard for open-mindedness and all the things we say are important for a democratic society," Goodenough says.

Also, in these ecologically fragile times, where individuals are being asked to make changes in their lives for the collective good, it can be argued that ignorance of evolution compounds the potential for harm. Because if we see ourselves chosen first among all creatures, and fail to recognize the connections between the species, maybe it's easier for us to keep making the convenient but lazy choices that harm the Earth.

"I, for one, feel very strongly that once one understands the evolutionary story ... one sees the whole enterprise and astonishing rarity of what we have here and the imperative, the commandment, to preserve it as inherently obvious," Goodenough concludes.

Finding the beginning in an end

Try to find references to intelligent design pre-dating 1991. It's tough. William Paley, in the late 18th century, and C.S. Lewis, in the first half of the 20th century tried to impute intelligent design to the universe and man.
Science caught up with each, and many of their arguments now seem quaint and wrong-headed.

The intelligent design being discussed today is a mere baby compared to most types of creationism, though it borrows heavily from Paley. The movement steps into the void left by adherents of biblical literalism, so-called new- or flat-earth creationists, whose Flintstones-ian view of the origins of life hold that the earth was created in six days with all the flora and fauna present and accounted for. They believe the earth is roughly 5,000 or 6,000 years old instead of the 4.5 billion years that is generally accepted.

The old-school creationist movement, though, has largely gone the way of the dinosaur -- thanks largely to, well, dinosaur fossils and thousands of other facts gathered by scientists.

Phillip Johnson, a retired University of California-Berkeley law professor, laid the groundwork for the current intelligent design movement with his 1991 book Darwin on Trial. But intelligent design didn't catch on until actual scientists, who allow that evolution has occurred, started working the ground that Johnson had cleared. After all, it was easy for evolutionary biologists to dismiss a lawyer.

Michael Behe is somewhat more problematic. Behe is a biochemistry professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. His 1996 book, Darwin's Black Box, is intelligent design's touchstone. Using logical reasoning and writing in thoroughly readable and engaging prose, Behe points out the gaps in science's knowledge about evolution at the molecular level (but also ignores a number of examples). He uses his expertise as a biochemist to describe complicated, biochemical processes, such as how vision occurs. He shows how many different, vitally important reactions must take place to accomplish the processes.

Given the intricate, interdependent chemical reactions that occur, Behe reasons, it is impossible that step-by-step evolution can take place. All of the chemicals and biological mechanisms -- whether it's the process of vision or the super-heated spray of the bombardier beetle -- must be present, in exactly the same amounts, for the biological processes to take place.

It's a phenomenon that he refers to as irreducible complexity. You can look at a mousetrap, with its interdependent parts, or an outboard motor, and infer the same thing, he says.

So the question to Behe becomes: Well, if no intermediate forms are likely given the irreducible complexity of the biochemical reactions, how did evolution take place? That's where the designer comes in, the force that set life and evolution in motion.

"We have found ... systems in the cell, and we don't know of any process which could have produced them, Darwinian claims not withstanding, because I don't believe they have been substantiated," Behe says. "I do think there is a being, i.e. God, who potentially could have done something like this."

If you don't know much about biology at the cellular level -- how many of us do? -- Behe's arguments make perfect sense and they're argued in a way that's understandable and convincing, two characteristics science often lacks. That explains intelligent design's amazingly rapid climb into the public discourse. And scientists concede that he scores some points.

"I certainly have to admit that evolutionists don't know how everything happened, and some structures are more difficult to explain than others," says Emory's Matsumura.

But he adds: "What will probably happen is that at some point, there will be enough evidence to understand how the eye evolved, and then these intelligent design people will probably just move on to some other thing that is not that well explained. They're evolving, too."

The problem with Behe's book, and intelligent design theory on the whole, is that none of it's provable through scientific experiments. There's no empirical data. It's all reasoning and argument, rhetoric and faith, a last ditch position for trying to affirm the existence of God through science. Behe says he cannot figure out how certain processes could have evolved through natural selection or mutation, so he simply guesses that that means there's a design to those processes. That's reasoning, not science.

To date, not one article about intelligent design has appeared in a peer-reviewed science journal -- a sort of litmus test for whether you're doing science in the first place. Johnson pooh-poohs that detail and turns the argument on its head.

"Darwinists try to impose a definition of 'science' that makes evolutionary naturalism unchallengeable, so they can avoid dealing impartially with the evidence," he writes in an e-mail message. "Those journals typically disqualify IDT research on philosophical grounds, so it does not matter."

But if the science community doesn't accept intelligent design as science, why has it made such dramatic gains?

"Good ideas catch on quick," quips Mark Edwards, spokesman for the Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture, the branch of the conservative think tank Discovery Institute devoted to promulgating intelligent design. The real answer is more insidious. They have a plan, a plan aided by the seasoned grassroots operatives of the Christian right.

An internal memo, reportedly lifted from Center for the Renewal of Science & Culture, called "The Wedge Strategy" surfaced in 1999. Johnson has spoken and written about the "Wedge" publicly, as Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor Barbara Forrest points out in her chapter of Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, but the "Wedge" document provides a convenient thumbnail for design's plans. It lays out a five-year strategic plan, as well as a three-part strategy -- 1. Scientific Research, Writing and Publicity. 2. Publicity and Opinion-making. 3. Cultural Confrontation and Renewal.

So far, the Center is batting two-for-three with only the scientific research lagging. The document, which uses language similar or identical to other Center writings, also makes clear the Center's position in the fight it's waging. It "seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies."

In Johnson's 2000 book The Wedge of Truth, he goes further: "The 'Wedge of Truth' ... enables people to recognize that 'In the beginning was the Word' is as true scientifically as it is in every other respect."

Neither Johnson nor the Center for Renewal will confirm whether "The Wedge Strategy" belongs to the Center for Renewal, a fact that rankles Skip Evans, the network project director for the National Center for Science Education.

"Can you imagine the National Science Foundation being asked, 'Is this your document? Did you guys write this?' And then they say, 'We're not going to say,'" Evans asks rhetorically. "That's the way political organizations operate."

And Johnson and Behe both downplay how well organized the intelligent design movement is. Instead Johnson states via e-mail that "the ITD movement is an informal association with very limited funding, especially in comparison to the government and university resources available to the Darwinists."

Forrest takes issue with Johnson's modesty.

"I would not call being guaranteed by Howard Ahmanson $1.5 million for five years 'limited funding,' especially when you add in what they are getting from other sources, which increases their budget," Forrest says. Ahmanson is the head of Fieldstead and Company and until 1995, a board member of the Christian fundamentalist group Chalcedon Foundation. "That is not chump change, and it is lots more than the budget of the National Center for Science Education."

And that's what brings you back to the schools. The Supreme Court has made it clear that purely religious explanations for the origins of man taught in science classrooms violate the First Amendment prohibition against the establishment of religion. What the court has also said, however, is that school systems cannot practice "viewpoint discrimination."

So the intelligent design movement is busy trying to establish itself as a science, as a viewpoint, so when its time comes in court, it will be ready to win. Moreover, the definition of "science" might get a little fuzzy if you add an additional conservative justice or two.

Thus far, in front of school boards at least, intelligent design has downplayed its religious roots and concentrated on the philosophical challenges it poses to Darwin, an important point if it ever wants to win in court.

Johnson stands as the exception to that rule. "The philosophy that generates [Darwinian evolution] is a universal acid that undermines not only moral standards but ultimately science itself," he states in an e-mail. Johnson also doesn't have a problem talking about God's place in the intellectual world.

"If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind," he wrote in Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds.

Most intelligent design proponents, however, are much more coy about what motivates their "science." But case after case, the band of scientists at the movement's core have definite beliefs about God. Behe, for instance, has links on his personal website to EWTN Global Catholic Network. Jonathan Wells, a Center fellow, meanwhile, is an ordained minister in the Unification Church, a sect of Christianity led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who the story goes, had an encounter with Jesus on a mountainside in Korea. Wells has said Moon helped convince him to devote his life to destroying Darwinism.

Back to Cobb
The Cobb County case explains exactly why intelligent design, in the face of all the evidence against it, manages to be taken seriously by politicians. The school board and county administrators find themselves in the uneasy intersection where making sure children get the best education possible collides with getting re-elected. Their own sorry understanding of science compounds the mess.

Take Cobb County School Board Vice Chairman Gordon O'Neill. He explains that the board was just doing its part in representing the people of Cobb, and many of them believe God created the earth and life as we know it. The disclaimer was ultimately a compromise between two factions. O'Neill concedes that the disclaimer does single out Darwinian evolution as uniquely flawed among other scientific theories, such as the theory of special relativity. But, he says, "I think that is relevant to the value that we place on the concept of a Supreme Being and his or her role in the progress of man over time."

So what you have here is a compromise between people who want good science and people interested in faith -- two things that have little to do with one another -- but the ideas, in political hands, become conflated and confused. A debate that might be appropriate for a political science or religious studies classroom then gets re-routed to biology 101.

"In education, what children are taught is not decided by the vote of the majority," Forrest cautions. "It's decided by the best scholarship. If you teach science by the will of the majority, then you're going to end up teaching a lot of things that don't belong in the classroom."

But now the door's open to intelligent design, and some of the people who called for eliminating the teaching of evolution in the classroom, presented the board with information on the movement, O'Neill says.

"I looked at it. I was quite interested in what he had to say," O'Neill continues, referring to a video he watched that contained information about IDT. But he adds: "I think this is as far as the administration could go without crossing the line in another direction. Right now, I don't see the environment being particularly interested in introducing intelligent design."

We'll see, though one thing's nearly certain. When evolution does come up again, the media will almost certainly do a lousy job of trying to explain the issue to the public.

This is one case where the mainstream press's adherence to the quaint but antiquated idea of objectivity has actually helped obscure the truth for a public that's scientifically illiterate.

A vast majority of the hundreds of stories written about intelligent design since 1998 use the Holy Grail of journalistic forms, the point-counterpoint. Take the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's April story about the Cobb textbook flap. As sidebars to the piece, a conversation with Berkeley's Johnson is featured on the left side of the page while a Georgia State biologist gets the right side. The juxtaposition gives a weight to the intelligent design community that it doesn't carry in the real world.

"Promoting a false equivalence really doesn't help, and there is a false equivalence between these ideas," says Kenneth Miller, a Brown University biologist and co-author of one of the biology textbooks Cobb students will read in the fall. A representative story might have 10,000 biologists who support Darwinian evolution and one intelligent design proponent.

Meanwhile, a search of media online archives for the words "wedge strategy" turns up only six stories, so newspapers have generally neglected to mention intelligent design's designs on society. And the media rarely ever takes the time to investigate any of the claims made by IDT adherents even though it's pretty easy to do.

Obviously, that's not to say the media should ignore intelligent design. The movement is making news. But when readers have only a point-counterpoint to go on, intelligent design seems like a reasonable argument.

Because Americans, unless we're talking about a cure for cancer, have a built-in distrust for science and a desire to have God's existence proven. To make matters worse, scientists don't have the reputation for being skilled or even concerned with presenting their side of what is essentially a political debate.

In poll after poll, Americans affirm their belief in God -- upward of 90 percent of the population. Conversely, only about 3 percent of Americans say they're atheists, so intelligent design has a ready-made audience.

"What's really driving this is this wish on the part of millions of Americans that evolutionary theory weren't true," Washington University's Goodenough says.

It's not surprising then that in an August 2001 Zogby poll of Americans that 71 percent of the respondents thought that biology teachers should teach Darwin's theory of evolution along with the scientific evidence against it, a poll the intelligent design crew loves to cite.

Of course, intelligent design has yet to meet the threshold of "scientific evidence," but Evans, the network project director for the National Center for Science Education, says there's more to the numbers than an aversion to Darwin and a love for God.

"If you asked, 'Should students be given both the evidence for the theory of relativity and the evidence against it?' you'd get the exact same numbers," Evans says. "What those polls are really saying is something about how Americans feel about fairness."

And that's a commendable trait. Usually.

So then it's left to scientists to convey to Americans why evolution is the best science to explain the origins of life, and they're not doing a very good job. First, the scientific community is almost always in the position of reacting to the political debate, while intelligent design proponents are rarely ever on the defensive to affirm their position. When scientists do join the fight, they often approach the argument without a very strong understanding of their audience. And that feeds into the general public's warped view of scientists.

If Hollywood is truly a reflection of society, then scientists are either quite mad and looking to take over the world or they're good-natured but socially inept geeks who'd rather look through a microscope instead of making out.

There's also some inherent wariness about scientists, a famous American anti-intellectualism that fosters a mistrust between your average citizen and a thrice-degreed biologist, who's spent thousands of dollars getting himself educated, Matsumura says.

"We in the scientific community are our own worst enemies," according to Miller. "We are so involved and fascinated, rightly so, by our own research and our own research problems that we don't often take the time to make it clear to the person on the street exactly why science is so interesting and so important."

Take the recent tracing of the family tree of the anthrax strain that killed a Florida man. Scientists used techniques taken from evolutionary theory to trace the spores back to a handful of labs, Miller says, yet no one from the scientific community took the time to point that out. Why should they? Matsumura argues. There's no pay off for taking on a big fight.

"In our daily careers, we get credit for writing papers or getting individual grants, that sort of thing, but if somehow we work hard and get that sticker removed from the Cobb County textbooks, well, there's no credit for us," he says.

Richard Dawkins, probably evolution's most enthusiastic -- and strident -- proponent, told an audience during one of his speeches that science should start petitioning for time in Sunday school. But his half-joke made a serious point. If it wants to try, after nearly 80 years, to move beyond the question of whether God should be taught in the science classroom, the science community will have to get better organized and be more proactive in telling people how evolution affects our everyday lives, whether that means a better, more profound understanding of the world in which we live or the emergence of a new, Alzheimer's-fighting drug on the market.

The community also might have to be willing to follow the intelligent design movement's lead and approach evolution from a more political perspective and figure out what resonates with average Americans.

As Matsumura points out, biologists aren't looking to win people to a faith. And maybe if scientists were in public view more often to explain why what they're doing is important, they would find an audience more familiar with their language and therefore more willing to accept the basic tenets of the science.

"Education [is] the key," Evans says. "If we can equip the public with a better understanding of what science is and what scientists do and how they do it, I think they would be much better prepared to deal with these issues when they come to their communities."

Unfortunately, in Cobb County -- and in all likelihood, other Georgia counties will follow its lead -- that education will come under attack this fall, and the county will be left with questions, questions that students will be asking teachers ill-prepared to give answers.

"The net effect in the classroom is not going to be that people will see the fallacy of the IDT debate and will embrace evolution," Goodenough predicts. "The take-home is going to be that all of these people will think evolution isn't right.

"The outcome of that is they don't learn what it is that is the evidence for evolution. They just learn that 'Oh. These scientists doctor their textbooks, they're circling their wagons and they're all atheists,' you know, totally inappropriate things to take with you in a scientific theory. The scientific theory is it's a good idea to learn what the evidence for evolution really is. Lord knows that's not taught."

And what happens in its place is a rejection of science, and that doesn't bode well for society, Forrest argues, because you're combining that rejection of science with political activism in a way that could prove constitutionally challenging when these children become judges, teachers and school board members.