The link to part 1/12 of Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial on YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O-vsq48ZoU

While driving home from Butler with my dad on Friday afternoon for Spring Break, the four hour drive led us to cover many topics, one of which was our Evolution-Creationism class. I was telling him about the homework I was planning on getting done over break, which included a blog post and my book review’s first draft. Then I went on to explain the two books I was reading, The Lie: Evolution and Scientific Creationism. We got into a heated but fun debate (yes I fully admit to being a nerd and debating a school topic on my first day of break). I was trying to form a valid defense of the merit of Creationism science based on what I had read while he got to tell me how ridiculous I sounded trying to tout the Creationist beliefs and he was amazed at how un-based in reality some of their claims were.
This led him to remember a documentary he had watched awhile back called Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. It was a special done by PBS detailing the events of the Dover Pennsylvania trial from start to finish including all the testimony. My dad loves history and much of my childhood was spent watching documentaries with my dad, his form of quality time. So it was not an out of the ordinary occurrence for him to have watched a show about what I was learning in class and then insist that I watch it. So while suffering from a very different sleep schedule, brought on by college life, than the rest of my family, I watched the documentary over break one evening/morning.
As I watched the 12 parts of the show on YouTube, I was pleasantly surprised that I had already read about the majority of the evidence cited in the testimony in books assigned for this class. One argument I’m sure we all remember from our reading was the theory of Irreducible Complexity. During the trial Kenneth Miller debunked the Irreducible Complexity theory in an easy to understand example of the mouse trap being used for other functions if part of it are taken away. He also debunked the theory using the very example that intelligent design debaters has used as their poster child for Irreducible Complexity, bacterial flagellum. They did this by discussing the discovery that a component of the bacterial flagellum’s, that Intelligent design experts argued served no other purpose was also present in the bacteria yersinia pestis (my favorite disease ever since I did a 5th grade science report on it) also known as the Black Plague. In Yersinia pestis, that component, slightly modified, serves a totally different purpose than it does it the bacterial flagellum.
The documentary even talked about the transition species found between fish and reptiles that was discovered right before the case happened and was still being written up in a paper and so therefore could not be used in testimony. It’s the same transition species that we read about in our book for class.
The documentary systematically goes through the evidence and point by point proves Intelligent Design is religion not science and therefore should not be in taught in the schools. I found that the documentary really pulled all that we have covered so far in our class together quite nicely in an easy yet scientific way. Through dramatized episodes of the testimonies taken straight from the court transcripts, PBS brought the case and the science surrounding the Evolution-Creationism Controversy to life in a way PowerPoint and pictures or text in a book can’t quite manage. I recommend the 120 minute documentary to anyone interested in a summary source about what our class is all about.