Chapter I

Not all of the Kansas II witnesses were called on to testify on the Minority Report revisions directly. Chemist Nancy Bryson, for example, traveled to Kansas as an example of persecution (she left the Mississippi University for Women after delivering an antievolutionary seminar), with the American Family Association weighing in on her case, Talk.Origins Archive (2005g), reprising an earlier appearance before the Texas State Board of Education, Keller (2003). But this time she had her Irigonegaray moment, indicating she was “undecided” on the age of the Earth but gave as her “best range” estimate “Anywhere from 4.5 billion years to ten thousand years.”

Creationist invocations of the Bryson case have ranged quite far afield, all the way to Victoria Clark (2006) on the Australia staff of The Epoch Times (a Chinese-American magazine devoted mainly to criticizing abuses in the PRC). At Hallee the Homemaker (2010n) husband Gregg included the Bryson case among the reams of creationist claims he repeats at his wife’s website—likewise for Christopher Johnson (2011a) of Creation Liberty Evangelism, sandwiched in between complaints about modern astrophysics (from the Big Bang to the formation of heavier elements) and objecting “that evolution is a religion by definition, not part of science.” For Answers in Genesis (2003), this “sad story of personal attacks, dirty politics, anti-creationist discrimination, apparent hypocrisy and backpedaling” occurred solely because Bryson had “covered some of the most popular arguments against evolution, such as the lack of ‘transitional’ fossils and the profound lack of evidence for chemical evolution.” Thompson & Harrub (2003h) were more oblique, saying only that she had “presented alternative views of origins (including intelligent design)”—which is also how CreationWiki (2010g) described it, with Thompson & Harrub among their limited sources. Casey Luskin (2014o) joined the parade in his complaints about Neil de Grasse Tyson’s reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, briefly noting Bryson in a listing of persecuted Darwin critics (but did not mention her Kansas II testimony nor details about her criticism of evolution).

As to what had actually happened, all of the antievolutionist accounts (from short to long) simply repeated Bryson’s version of her experience—which, come to think of it, is what Bryson had done with her own sources. We can know that because of an interview Bryson (2003) gave that was more specific than her testimony at Kansas II on what she had taught and her resources underpinning it:

In the 1990s I had read books by Phillip Johnson and Michael Behe that had persuaded me that evolution is far from being a “fact”. A major article in the December 2001 Chronicle of Higher Education had covered the Intelligent Design movement in universities. I shared this article Spring 2002 with my supervisor, Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Vagn Hansen. I had suggested that a course outlining flaws in the neo-Darwinian synthesis and describing ID as an alternative view might work well as a distance learning offering (The VPAA was wanting MUW to establish a position in the d.l. market). Dr. Hansen was unreceptive. Dismissive, in fact.

Anxious for an avenue to discuss an interest of mine, I volunteered in Oct. 02 to make an Honors Forum presentation. The talk occurred Thurs Feb 20. I told the audience of around 50 that one of my objectives was to introduce them to some “contrarian” thinking about evolution by highly-credentialed academicians. I discussed the nonexistence of evidence for chemical (prebiotic) evolution, the “Haeckel’s embryos fraud” from developmental biology, evolution-disconfirming evidence from paleontology (the Cambrian explosion), and the subjectivity of paleoanthropology in its interpretation of the place of human-like fossil skulls in “human evolution”. I went on to point out that the General Biology text we use here at MUW greatly misleads students by presenting false “evidence” for evolution and by ignoring the overwhelming disconfirming evidence.

I closed in introducing ID by reading a most discourteous, not to mention ignorant, quote about the developing area from a recent issue of Scientific American. I continued with a description of the ID movement from perhaps its most prominent proponent, William Dembski. I pointed out that intelligent design had great scientific currency throughout history up until the rise of uniformitarianism (Lyell and Darwin) in the mid-nineteenth century. I finished with quotes from contemporary philosophers of science who question whether restricting science to methodological naturalism does anything but limit its truth-finding mission.

At the conclusion of the talk, senior professor of biology Dr. William Parker asked to speak. I said “sure”. He rose and read a 4-to-5 minute prepared diatribe against me and my talk. He said I was unqualified to speak on the subject of evolution and said the presentation was “religion masquerading as science”. When I asked him to identify even one incorrect statement I had made, he could not. An assistant professor of biology (Parker’s protégé) made a similar protest. Again, she was unable to find any error in my talk. The students were uniformly supportive and enthusiastic about the talk, at least a dozen coming up afterwards to thank me. In the written evaluation of my talk given by the Honors Forum director, all responding students (low 20’s) said they enjoyed my talk, and expressed disapproval of Parker’s behavior.

The next morning, a Friday, a congratulatory email from a freshman biology major had been sent to me and copied to others on the science/math student list serve. It was followed by an email also sent out on the list serve, and copied to the VPAA, by Dr. Parker. His email contained untruths and is, I believe, actionable. None of the life sciences faculty, him included, have credentials as evolutionary biologists.

Some initial observations: it takes 4-5 minutes to read aloud only a couple pages of text, so Parker’s response could not have been especially long. Given that Bryson’s interview later noted her interest in “Christian apologetics” was known to her colleagues from the time she arrived on campus, and that she had signaled her special focus on the antievolution issue through the McMurtrie (2001) article over a year before the seminar, Parker would have had ample time to become concerned about what Bryson proposed to discuss at her seminar.

As for Bryson’s swipe at Parker’s proficiency, his emeritus home page Parker (2007) at the Mississippi University for Women listed dozens of his published papers on reptiles (lizards, snakes and turtles) including their ecology, biology and systematics. Apparently hard work at the ground floor of evolutionary biology was invisible to Bryson, flying high as she was through the Olympian clouds of Intelligent Design.

Regarding specifically the Cambrian Explosion issue, though, where exactly had she got her material? Of her “highly-credentialed academicians” Behe and Dembski didn’t address Cambrian data at all, leaving only Phillip Johnson to have relied on. But his coverage of the topic in Darwin on Trial is a model of evading relevant information, detailed in Chapter 2 of Downard (2004), and subsequent ID reiterations (notably Meyer’s lengthier Darwin’s Doubt) have not improved on that.

Her allusion to the Scientific American article was also curious. If it was Rennie (2002b), on “15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense,” Bryson was on similar turf as Apologetics Press and Hartwig above, bristling at anyone with the temerity to challenge the legitimacy of ID or creationism in general. Recalling that Bryson showed indecision about the age of the Earth in Kansas II, something hard to imagine any non-Young Earth Creationist doing in the 21st century, one can legitimately question to what extent she was teetering on the YEC sinkhole all along, as well as reminding us of the methodological element as to whether she had ever delved into any of the technical details (such as reading criticisms of her ID academicians or consulting primary sources independently) to warrant her enthusiasm, or was simply repeating secondarily arguments she had come to accept as unassailably true and was ever so anxious to share with whoever would listen.

All this could be inferred just based on Bryson’s own interview, but curiosity prompted me in January 2014 to click the email contact on his university home page to see what William Parker had to say about the matter. Parker and his biology and chemistry colleagues “have extremely negative memories of Bryson’s time at our university.” When he first heard about Bryson’s planned seminar he “queried her about its content. She refused to answer. I asked the honors program director to give time for rebuttal or information from some of the biology faculty and he refused.” His account of the seminar and its aftermath supplied some revealing details about who attended Bryson’s lecture, with implications for its larger context:

I stood up and ad-libbed over a partially prepared statement including the fact that she had ignored requests from her professionally competent biology faculty to participate in this program and to discuss the subject matter with her. I stated that many of her points were taken out of context and that her entire talk was religion masquerading as science. She had packed the audience with high school students from a local religious school and they cheered when she asked me what she had said wrong. In her talk, she trashed the course content and textbooks of some of the on-going biology courses in her own division.

Later, the honors program allowed one of the biology faculty to cover some of the biochemical/genetic aspects of her talk, but the latter was nowhere referred to in this later talk, although she did bring a couple of creationist engineers from MSU who yelled out religious epithets after the talk.

Bryson was not fired from the university. She was asked to step down as division head. After threatening lawsuits, she was reinstated for the remainder of her contract. She stayed at the institution for another year as a regular faculty member and left after that, whether of her own accord or not I do not know. She has held temporary positions at other southern colleges since then.

Bryson’s actions were the worst cases of professional malfeasance I saw in my professional career. Not only going around the faculty who taught courses in the subject matter, but also trashing many of us in our evaluations later in the same semester; the poor example she set for students and faculty.

A similar set of issues involved another teacher who lost his job over the issue of evolution criticism and who appeared at Kansas II for that same reason, science teacher Roger DeHart, Talk.Origins Archive (2005f). He had evidently observed Irigonegaray in action with previous witnesses, so when his turn came he promptly agreed with Sanford’s ballpark geochronology numbers: 5,000 to 100,000 years: This ready admission of a YEC time frame in his thinking put into focus years of notoriety DeHart had acquired as a teacher supposedly dismissed only for trying to make available to his students non-creationist ID science evidence critical of Darwinism.

There was plenty of initial reporting on the DeHart case: regionally by Kelley (1998a-b), Seattle Times (1999), Goffredo (2000; 2001a-b), Frankel (2001a-b), Shapiro (2001), Downey (2002), as well as a thorough chronology of events and relevant documents assembled by local activists Ken Atkins et al. (2002) moved to action over what DeHart was doing in and out of the classroom. National coverage included Gibeaut (1999), Savoye (2000) and Watanabe (2001) in print; DeHart was interviewed on CNN (2000) and the case was covered by Abernathy & Valente (2000) and Abernathy & de Sam Lazaro (2001) for PBS’s Religion & Ethics show. Critics of ID weighed in, of course: American Civil Liberties Union (1998; 2001), Matsumura (1999d). How antievolutionists reported the DeHart case will be dealt with shortly.

Piecing together what had taken place, devout Baptist DeHart had taught biology at secular and Christian schools since the 1970s, including criticism of evolution without directly mentioning God or the Bible (as though the message wouldn’t be tagging along whenever a creationist argument was trotted out via only its “scientific” justification). As has usually been the case with creationist teachers, DeHart was well liked by his students and consequently fairly effective in his ancillary mission of convincing many to share his doubts about evolution—an outcome not always equally congenial for their parents, as John Gibeaut (1999) discovered in his exploration of the affair for the American Bar Association Journal.

In 1987 DeHart began teaching at Edison High School in Burlington, Washington and over the next decade adopted the Intelligent Design apologetic terminology, including the “were you there?” historical/empirical science methods dichotomy. Devoting a day to design issues during the two-week evolution unit, DeHart’s assembled lengthy excerpts from Of Pandas and People for class handouts while skipping the human origins part of the assigned textbook and calling attention to what he deemed to be “errors” in its content. He later added clips from Inherit the Wind and quizzed his students on it afterward (a reminder of the position that film has among Kulturkampf antievolutionists, explored in section 1.6)—though this cinema selection may have occasionally backfired, with one student recalling it as a show that “pretty much stomps creationism,” Kelley (1998b).

DeHart made a point of retrieving his handouts afterward from students, and never seemed to have retained any of the articles he employed so that higher-ups in the school administration could see them too—an odd mixture of clerical tidiness and sloppiness that suggested someone trying to avoid leaving a paper trail. But the “Inherit the Wind” quizzes ended up with the students, and in 1997 one of them happened to answer DeHart’s question “Do you think both sides or views should be studied?” this way:

No, I do not. Religion is supposed to be separated from the schools. Evolution, however, should be taught because it is the “scientific” version of how we came about and has nothing to do with religion. And of course, the beginning of our existence is important. Those who want to form an educated opinion, however, should study many religions, not just the Creation story, as well as evolution. Atkins et al. (2002).

To this rather poised and thoughtful answer (the student was herself religious), DeHart appended one terse comment in caps: “INTERESTING. YOUR BELIEF SOUNDS BIGGOTED.” The student’s father brought this little matter to the attention of the ACLU, after which DeHart (1997) wrote a self-serving response to the school superintendent, insisting that “I have always used the district approved curriculum and am very careful not to convey creationism as ‘the correct’ view. Rather I provide materials and instruction designed to raise my students’ awareness of creation as something that is believed by a significant portion of the populace.”

Though it would seem DeHart was more than capable of conveying a range of signals in other ways. Concerning DeHart’s repeated profession of playing things “right down the middle” so that students “wouldn’t know which side of the line I was on,” one of DeHart’s students interviewed by Gibeaut recollected a very different schoolroom ambiance:

To hear Garann R. Means tell it, someone else must have been teaching biology when she took the course seven years ago. Means, 20, now a college junior, remembers a debate over evolution DeHart orchestrated as a class exercise, but which turned out more like a segment from the Jerry Springer Show.

“He was making fun of me and goading the class into laughing at me,” Means says. “He was like a comedian in a nightclub. It wasn’t about debate. It wasn’t about science. It was about proselytizing on DeHart’s part.” Gibeaut (1999).

Notwithstanding these episodes, DeHart’s special educational perspective was accommodated to a remarkable degree at Burlington-Edison. A mitigating factor was that the 1997 flap was the first public accusation against DeHart (a similar circumstance would occur in the Freshwater case discussed below), and by then DeHart had acquired legal assistance after consultation with the Rutherford Institute. He was genuinely popular with students (though perhaps less so for those who disagreed with his unspoken opinions) and had sizable support in a small community open to creationist arguments (as 1998 swung into 1999, one local church sponsored a Ken Ham “Back to Genesis” video series, and DeHart was among speakers at another church creationism fest). Political attitudes played a part as well, with one school board member saying they weren’t about to give into the ACLU here, and not a few of the district school officials were averse to controversy—or even some of the facts on the ground, as the superintendent at the time of the “Inherit the Wind” incident didn’t bother to read the material DeHart was using in class before deciding all was copacetic.

Though his principal was to monitor his classroom activity more closely after the ACLU complaint (she had not even known he was using supplemental material until the fuss ensued), so long as DeHart didn’t explicitly mention “God” or “Intelligent Design” (which given his previous tactical rationalizing he could readily assent to), DeHart was given leave to use a shorter Pandas cribbing to discuss “irreducible complexity” in his 1999 class provided he balance that with a critical evolutionary take by Ken Miller. DeHart showed his forthright adherence to team playing and fair presentation of both sides by keeping the Pandas material on the table but never getting around to using the Miller response.

Through 2000 DeHart spoke on his travails and even was spotted signing autographs at Dembski’s short-lived Michael Polanyi Center, spiraling ever closer to the Discovery Institute sun. He presented a “Science Curriculum Module for Teaching the Cambrian Explosion” at a Discovery Institute symposium on “Darwin, Design and Democracy: Teaching the Evidence in Science Education” held in Kansas City, Missouri (June 15, 2000) in the wake of the kerfuffle over the Kansas science standards. That nothing uncongenial to creationist sensibilities went on there was indicated by the fact that Tom Willis’ CSAMA (2000) was happy to promote it.

By now Icons of Evolution was on the scene and DeHart had more secondary grist to feed into his antievolution mill, proposing to distribute copies of science articles steeped in Icons apologetics: Coyne (1998) and Wells (1999b) on the Peppered Moth, Wells (1999a) and Gould (2000a) concerning Haeckel’s embryo illustrations, and Heeren (2000a) on new fossil fish finds. None of the non-Wells pieces on their own meant what antievolutionists wanted them to—it was only by straining them through the Icons sieve and ignoring all other context could they serve as ammunition (just what DeHart had been doing for years with his Pandas snippets), meaning it was the provenance of the ideological sieve and not the articles themselves that rendered their use problematic.

This time the Burlington district disallowed DeHart’s latest supplement request and (claiming staffing needs) reassigned him from biology to earth science for the upcoming Fall 2001 term, which DeHart would not accept and quit that summer. He quickly moved to Pilchuck High School in Marysville, Washington, but they also shied away from assigning him to biology, settling on earth science as Burlington-Edison had, where there would be less opportunity for biological origins controversies to bubble up (evidently unaware that YEC had just as many issues with geology, though in that venue criticism could not be so easily hidden behind an “Intelligent Design” veneer).

DeHart taught only the one year at Marysville, settling finally at Oaks Christian High School in California for the next decade, Les Lane (2013). When an “Icons of Evolution” video was produced, DeHart’s “censorship” plight was included, duly recommended by Chuck Colson (2002b) at Breakpoint, and DeHart (2004) closed the apologetic circle by compiling an Icons of Evolution Study Guide. His appearance at Kansas II generated another spurt of media and critical attention, Cavanaugh (2005), American RadioWorks (2005) and Cox (2005), where DeHart regularly repeated his dedication to presenting only scientific evidence without the teensiest of connection to the Bible or religion. Among those, only Cox called attention to DeHart’s YEC Irigonegaray’s moment on the age of the Earth.

More recently, DeHart has contributed biology course planning for the Yongsan International School of Seoul—operated by International Christian Schools to appeal to the children of foreign investors, they gained some notoriety for bending the rules on admission standards for students of some Korean administrators, Kang (2008). For the Yongsan biology course, DeHart (2012a) followed the same pattern he had at Burlington: covering the main evolutionary textbook but supplementing it with a selective range of antievolutionary material. Most were Evolution News & News postings (at least his parasitism was topical) and extracts from ID books and lectures, but an ICR piece showed up too: Kenneth Cumming (1991) on speciation issues. As at Burlington, there was no indication that DeHart included any serious criticism of antievolutionary positions, or even had investigated whether his secondary resources were accurately representing the technical literature they had cited (this was particularly so for the Cumming article).

The methodological side of the creation/evolution debate (what constitutes evidence and to what extent certain ideologies, including but hardly confined to the YEC domain, might be more than peripherally compromised when tackling evolutionary data points) did not figure in the DeHart coverage because none of the reviewers and interviewers and apologists thought to ask about it. Mainstream treatments have played into this dynamic insofar as they aimed at “evenhanded” coverage where the opposing camps’ positions were quoted but not investigated. Methodology naturally slipped even farther into the shadows wherever media coverage was sufficiently uncritical of Intelligent Design’s pretensions to scientific credibility that it could be coopted in the design community without qualms, as Watanabe (2001) was in the Los Angeles Times, scooped up by the Discovery Institute along with others on the daisy chain, from adventistradio.com to the Apologetics Index (operating then at the old gospel.com website).

The presence of a religious perspective contributed to this “view from afar” approach in proportion to the desire to avoid conflict. PBS’s Religion & Ethics has consistently supported the validity of evolutionary science as they have navigated through the debates over the years, trying to calm the waters during the Darwin Bicentennial with Abernathy & de Sam Lazaro (2009) and providing background guides to their archived coverage of ID and the DeHart case, Religion & Ethics (2007a-e). But their three “Student Organizer” questionnaires addressed only sociopolitical aspects, not methodological metrics. So respondents were asked whether they thought ID should be included with evolution instruction or if it would be divisive if it were—not things like whether it would be appropriate for a “Teaching All the Controversy” science unit to actively engage the evidence being proffered for ID (or the unmentioned YEC option) with the possibility of finding it unsatisfactory to begin with, or whether doing that would be desirable even at the risk of offending the religious concerns of some parents or students who believed otherwise.

This is no hypothetical concern, but a real and extensive minefield offering a host of opportunities for teachers to misstep. For example, Eugenie Scott (2010c, 243-244) recalled “the teacher who asked a student to provide a reference for his claim that Darwin recanted evolution on his deathbed and was threatened with a lawsuit by the student’s father.” The Darwin recantation was a myth, meaning a proper citation for it would have been impossible. So what is a teacher to do? Pander to the student’s false belief by letting it slide, or risk trouble by prodding the student to document it?

The methodological concerns of how evidence is assembled and assessed is ever-present in the antievolution controversy, that propensity for secondary redaction and quote mining. Arguably it was the most powerful factor framing apologetic discussion of the DeHart case. What participants actually did took a back seat to what they may have said about what they did, and that in turn was nestled in a still larger structure: what the apologist wanted to have been said or done. Having laid out the “who did what and when” chronology for DeHart, how did antievolutionists parse things?

Julie Foster (2000a) at WorldNetDaily, Mark Hartwig (2000b) for Focus on the Family (where he served as “religion and society analyst”), Nancy Pearcey (2000d) at World Magazine, Answers in Genesis (2000a,f), WorldNetDaily (2001) again, Catherina Hurlburt (2001) at Concerned Women for America, and the creationist Encyclopedia of Biblical Knowledge’s A Storehouse of Knowledge (2014) all objected to the 1997 ACLU complaint without mentioning anything about the “Inherit the Wind” quiz that had sparked it, allowing DeHart to be perceived as the victim of some baseless vendetta (“DeHart is being hounded by the American Civil Liberties Union” according to AiG) orchestrated by those opposed to America’s children learning about the flaws in evolutionary theory—the “Darwinian thought police” as John West (2002d) put it. Honors for evasion here may be split among CreationWiki (2010l)—who had to have stepped right over the facts in their summary because they cited Atkins et al. (2002) at this point—with Christopher Johnson (2011a) and Casey Luskin (2014o) sprinting past the lot of them by not even acknowledging that there had been a parental complaint.

Pearcey and Answers in Genesis struck a sympathetic chord for their faithful readers by stressing how DeHart hadn’t mentioned God or religion in class—a point Watanabe (2001) had made too, but which represented a bit of misdirection since that wasn’t DeHart’s salient problem. California creationist Ron Graff (then pastor at the Solid Ground Church in Alta Loma) would be one of those seeing things in the same way in the “Creation and The Genesis Flood” summary of the case at his Prophecy Central website, Graff (2002), indiscriminately drawing on ID and YEC resources along with End Times prophecy fulfillment and the discovery of Noah’s Ark. Since 2011 Graff has focused on Prophecy Central (those End Times keep on coming) while the Solid Ground Church continues to run the Alta Loma Christian School (2011) with a preschool through 8th grade curriculum using creationist A Beka, ASCI and Bob Jones University material for their science courses (more on those later).

Pearcey’s World turn on DeHart’s martyrdom percolated through the Kulturkampf network. Rev. Gise VanBaren (2000) copied Pearcey’s version en bloc for The Standard Bearer religious magazine, while Gary Hardaway (2001) representing the local “Concerned Christian Citizens” (an organization no longer active as of January 2014) did at least interview DeHart but still ended up extensively repeating Pearcey’s gloss.

Much was made of the science articles DeHart wanted to use during the 2000 term, though often only vaguely. Christopher Johnson (2011) said only that DeHart was prohibited from “passing out up-to-date science journals to correct bad information.” In “The Student Wedge Update” at the Intelligent Design Undergraduate Research Center, J. Alder (2001b) complained how the school board “censored” DeHart’s supplemental material drawn from “scientific journals” (no mention of his Of Pandas and People use). The IDURC (a spin off from the Access Research Network) had run out of researching steam by 2014, giving a piquant irony to the optimistic expectation of Alder (2001a) that Intelligent Design was “on the forefront” of a movement promising “the overdue revolution in scientific thought.”

Luskin (2014o) included DeHart on the same listing as Bryson above, trimming the issues down to one of having been “denied the right to have his students read articles from mainstream science publications that made scientific criticisms of certain pieces of evidence typically offered to support Darwinian theory. One of the forbidden articles was written by noted evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould. Although DeHart complied with this ban, he was later removed from teaching biology.” Hartwig (2000b) was more specific when he played namedropper: “The district even rejected his request to distribute articles from such mainstream journals as Nature, Natural History and The American Biology Teacher.” A Storehouse of Knowledge (2014) likewise included Nature among DeHart’s “articles from prestigious secular scientific journals which showed the textbooks to be wrong in places.”

Double standard alarm: it was a gutsy maneuver for Luskin, Hartwig and the Encyclopedia of Biblical Knowledge to bring Gould or those journals up by name in the first place, given how little credence antievolutionists (ID or YEC) have ever given to Gould’s extensive evolutionary judgments (including The Structure of Evolutionary Theory that alone runs several thousand pages) or the stacks of technical papers emanating from Nature over many decades. One should further note that Gould’s article appeared in Natural History, a fine magazine but one aimed for a general readership, and The American Biology Teacher addresses educational practices, not technical disputes—and on occasion issues of controversy, which is how Duane Gish (1973) and Jonathan Wells (1999a) turned up in The American Biology Teacher too. But this time we are to accept just those few select examples that crossed the secondary path of our intrepid biology teacher (and all, it would seem, without much in the way of “critical analysis”).

Pearcey (2000d) meanwhile cast her grappling hook even higher:

the administration imposed even more draconian restrictions. Mr. DeHart wanted to alert students to recent reversals in key evidence for Neo-Darwinism, and sought approval to distribute articles from mainstream scientific journals to correct old, outdated information in the textbooks. Astonishingly, the principle said no. In short, the ACLU’s intimidation tactics have been so successful that Mr. DeHart is being compelled to teach a caricature of the scientific method.

Unfortunately, none of the articles DeHart wanted to use could be regarded as dislodging “key evidence for Neo-Darwinism” (which involved a far broader set of interlocking genetic and biological foundations than seen in the truncated ID account). But then Johnson, Alder, Hartwig, the Encyclopedia of Biblical Knowledge and Pearcey all spared their readers the trouble that might have ensued should any try checking on their content or relevance: none offered actual citations, let alone critical context for them. The Icons claims about moths and embryos and such were simply repeated as though established truth, with Hardaway pumping this into DeHart having “actually been commanded to suppress data and teach falsehoods.” That “critical analysis” the design camp was constantly advising educators to use clearly not on display here.

Even more revealing of the underlying methodology of ID apologetics (and perhaps the curious tortucan capacity to trip up on historical sequencing) was the fact that neither Johnson nor Alder nor Luskin nor Hartwig nor Pearcey (or Pearcey’s secondary appendages VanBaren and Hardaway) noted how the district’s decision on DeHart’s plan had only come after the teacher’s bad faith failure to balance his “irreducible complexity” discussions—no spur of the moment act of suppression, but a reluctant necessity taken by a board initially sympathetic to him after years of cutting him slack. Though given the secondary character of so much antievolutionary writing, none of DeHart’s many defenders would have committed any technical sins of omission here to the extent that they were unacquainted with what had actually gone on in Burlington.

Several years of controversial water had spilled over the DeHart dam by the time Phillip Johnson called attention to him, which he did in 2001 in the second Joe Baker Weekly Wedge Update piece:

The prime event of the past week was the “Banned in Burlington” teach-in at the Seattle area high school where science teacher Roger DeHart has come under attack for “teaching the controversy” rather than sticking to the official story about evolution in the textbooks. A mostly supportive crowd cheered DeHart along with Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman, Gonzaga University law professor David DeWolf, and Jonathan Wells. DeWolf made the point that even a law review article taking the Darwinist line agreed that DeHart’s teaching was within all legal boundaries. The opposition was represented by some faculty from Western Washington University, who were driven to the fall-back position that learning about the textbook errors is “too sophisticated” a subject for high school students. Of course the errors aren’t corrected at the graduate school level either, and most evolutionary biology professors still seem to think that the non-existent early embryonic similarities are “just what our theory predicts.” Phillip Johnson (2001c).

Here was the enabling culture of the evolved Intelligent Design activism at full throttle. The factual details were lost in the trumpet blowing (such as those “non-existent” embryonic similarities that have been known to science since the 1830s, as we’ll see in later chapters). As with Joe Baker, no attention was paid to what DeHart actually believed or had done in class, or who occupied the subculture defending him beyond the confines of the Discovery Institute glee club.