Reply #13: Doubtful, imho [View All]

He friggin' nuked the ID crowd with that verdict. The Pat Robertsons and such can attack him, sure, but he holds all the aces in the PR retort/sound bite game- he has all the proof in the world that these Dover Christian activists and their 'experts' and lawyers were a conspiracy, know no science, knowingly violate the laws and court orders, and knowingly perjured themselves on the stand in his courtroom in the most ridiculous and deliberate ways.

Looking at the political evolution of the Creationist game- it's very well outlined in the Dover verdict, along with the court verdicts that finished off each political strategy- they really only have one place left to go.

It shows the game on their side starting off as purely a religious/occultic assertion politics in the Scopes Monkey Trial and, as the court verdicts pile up, these assertions diminishing to the point of pretending they're not even talking about supernaturalism. The Dover verdict really annihilates that last false flag- "intelligent design"- effort to smuggle supernaturalism into the teaching of biology. But as their supernaturalist assertion diminishes, the Creationists have put increasing emphasis on their other assertion, the supposed refuting of evolutionary biology on its own terms. In the time of the Scopes trial they merely scoffed at it all as 'unbelievable'. Now that prong of the game, attacking evolutionary theory and its evidence, is all that remains.

This has been sort of realized by the American biology community recently. Mark Kirschner, a pretty famous biologist at Harvard University, put the call out a few weeks or months ago that American biologists need do some serious work now to deal with this last phase of the problem. Basically, the Creationist set is going to go through all of modern biology's results and thinking now and will try identify the areas in which evolutionary biologists have the weakest evidence or explanations to offer the public. They'll try all of them out and figure out where biologists can least counter them. And then they'll try to get a But Evolution Is Fatally Flawed/Wrong theory introduced into public schools. Kirschner is trying to rally the scientists to counter the effort properly, for the backwater areas of research to clean up their lazy act and thinking so that all areas of biological research have clean and simple defenses.

As I see it, the Creationists will at first find a couple of obscure problems and embarrassments to exploit, but they'll get pushed back on and abandon all of them. Predictably, the great last ditch effort and big problem/issue that the Creationist game will end up at in a couple of years is the material origin of biological life on Earth itself. That is, however, the one major problem in biology that the theory of evolution approaches very closely but doesn't- inherently can't- circumference intellectually.

So the Evolution Wars are close to over, but there's one last phase left imho.