On Scopes and Dover Trials, Philosopher Robert Pennock Twists History and Science

Michigan State University professor of philosophy Robert Pennock testified during the Dover trial as an expert witness in support of the plaintiffs who sought to ban the teaching of intelligent design. He recently wrote a triumphalist article in the journal American Scientist linking the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial and the 20th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling.¹ Unfortunately, Pennock’s article omits key facts about both.

Crucial Omissions of Scopes Trial History

On the Scopes trial, Pennock neglects to mention that the view of human evolution taught in Hunter’s A Civic Biology, the textbook that was the focus of the trial, argued for a form of evolution-based scientific racism. Reflecting repugnant evolutionary racist views common in that era, the textbook stated that “the Ethiopian or negro type” was at the bottom, and “the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” were “the highest type of all.” Moreover, the textbook depicted the poor, the sick, and the disabled as “parasites,” claiming that “if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.”² Of course we’re sure that Pennock (and virtually all other readers today) would condemn these racist and eugenic views that were taught as “evolution” and “scientific” at that time.³ But it’s unfortunate that Pennock ignores this sordid aspect of the history of the Scopes trial, which should not be forgotten. 

Conflating Intelligent Design with Creationism

When it comes to intelligent design (ID), Pennock misleadingly charges that the “fundamental beliefs” of “ID creationists” are “continuous with those of creation-science” — despite the fact that he elsewhere acknowledges that many ID proponents (including these authors) accept an old earth. We would add that some ID proponents, like Michael Denton, are not even traditional theists, and other leading ID proponents, such as Michael Behe, accept common descent. All ID proponents accept that Darwinian mechanisms are real, though they dispute overblown macro-evolutionary claims about the creative power of mutation-selection; Behe for example proposes that standard evolutionary mechanisms might explain diversification below the family level.⁴ Even Eugenie Scott notes, “most ID proponents do not embrace a Young Earth, Flood Geology, and sudden creation tenets associated with YEC [Young Earth Creationism].”⁵ Thus Pennock’s longstanding and persistent use of the misleading term “ID creationists” and his insinuation that ID proponents would want to “build God into their technology in a substantive way” come across as smears intended to misinform readers.

Twisting the History of the Pandas Textbook

On the Dover case, Pennock claims the court specifically “ruled” that ID is “creationism relabeled,” even though that phrase appears nowhere in the decision. While it’s true that the Dover judge did rule that ID is creationism, Pennock’s (and the judge’s) basis for this claim is flawed. 

Pennock implies that “intelligent design” was invented in response to the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court ruling, even though pre-Edwards drafts of the Pandas textbook at stake in the case used the term “intelligent design.”⁶ The Edwards ruling found that creationism was unconstitutional because it referred to a “supernatural creator,” and Pennock claims that ID requires “supernatural creation.” Yet he again ignores that pre-publication drafts of Pandas said the opposite. As John West notes, “Pandas carefully distinguishes between ‘supernatural’ causes and ‘intelligent’ causes, for intelligent causes are amenable to scientific investigation, whereas it is impossible to detect whether a cause is ‘supernatural.’”⁷ One pre-publication draft of Pandas provides a typically clear statement to this effect: “observable instances of information cannot tell us if the intellect behind them is natural or supernatural. This is not a question that science can answer.”⁸ Such reasoning differs crucially from creationism, which (as the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Edwards) always appeals to the supernatural. ID does not do this. Thus, even when using language referring to “creationism” or derivative terms, the Pandas textbook differed from classical creationism in fundamental philosophical, scientific, and legally important ways. 

If ID is so different from creationism, why did early drafts of Pandas use “creationist” terminology? It’s simple: Early drafts of Pandas were first written in the early 1980s when there was no other widely known terminology available; at that time, “creationism” was not strongly associated with young-earth creationism but carried the more generic sense of “belief in a creator.” It was really the only game in town that stood out as an alternative term to neo-Darwinian evolution. The critic might then ask, “If the Pandas textbook was so different from creationism, then why didn’t the authors choose different terminology?” That’s the point — that’s exactly what they eventually did! 

As the Pandas project progressed, the authors increasingly appreciated that what they were doing was distinct from standard creationism, and new terminology was needed to reflect this fact. Pennock gets the reasoning backwards: The later adoption of “intelligent design” terminology in the Pandas textbook was not to mask similarities with creationism, but rather to accurately reflect the ID project’s differences from creationism. And just what are those differences? (A) intelligent design does not require the Bible or argue for a young earth, global flood, or the sudden creation of everything, and (B) biological design arguments limit the conclusions that can be drawn from a scientific investigation, and thus do not tread into debates over “natural” vs. “supernatural.” As the final Pandas textbook said, “All it [ID] implies is that life had an intelligent source.” It is frustrating to see Pennock misrepresent and malign good motives.

Designed to Evolve

On the science side, Pennock cites his own work and Dover testimony about “evolutionary computation” in the Avida program, claiming that it shows “No divine intelligence was needed to engineer these functional designs.” We can’t speak to his claims about the divine, but the Avida genetic algorithm he references precisely shows the need for intelligence to build complexity. Avida uses “mutations” that are pre-programmed and intelligently engineered to yield great leaps in complexity, not blind “slight modifications” that Darwin’s theory requires. As pro-ID computer scientist Winston Ewert put it, Avida was “designed to evolve.”⁹ Another peer-reviewed scientific paper found that Avida succeeds only because it “makes use of external information sources to assist in the search.”¹⁰ This “external information” is coded by an intelligent human into the Avida program to stack the deck and thus achieve a predetermined goal. Further extensive ID-based research into evolutionary algorithms has demonstrated that they invariably smuggle in intelligently programmed “active information.” The ID research community’s work on evolutionary algorithms has all but silenced Pennock’s outdated claims that genetic algorithms somehow demonstrate the grand creative power of Darwinian mechanisms.¹¹ What genetic algorithms actually show is that evolution only works on small, micro-evolutionary scales (as in the refined turbine blade shape and other examples Pennock cites) or when evolution is intelligently designed and guided. It is one thing to use a genetic algorithm to optimize an existing turbine blade shape; quite another to have it evolve an entire jet engine from iron ore.

Pennock’s peculiar comments about the “folly of creationist supernatural engineering” or how “engineers continue to reject supernatural shortcuts” are also misguided — and bizarre — critiques of intelligent design. ID knows nothing about “supernatural shortcuts,” but it does investigate where we can recognize the known effects of intelligent agency in natural systems. Pennock strangely compares teaching intelligent design to the “engineering analogy” of “substituting propellers with prayer wheels,” yet engineers use intelligent design constantly; arguably it’s all they do. The ID research program, which today boasts dozens of research projects and has published over 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers, includes many engineers who recognize that the fruitfulness of applying engineering methods to the study of biology demonstrates that biological systems are intelligently engineered.¹²

Myths About Science and Religion

Despite Pennock’s repeated mockery of the “supernatural” and his endorsement of Stephen Jay Gould’s view that “religion and science are ‘nonoverlapping magisteria,’” his article fails to note that today’s historians of science broadly concur that the overall relationship between science and religion has been positive and mutually beneficial. Thus, Ronald Numbers explained, “The greatest myth in the history of science and religion holds that they have been in a state of constant conflict,”¹³ and David Lindberg writes: “There was no warfare between science and the church.”¹⁴

Gould’s “NOMA” model of science and religion, which Pennock apparently endorses, tries to pretend that science and religion inhabit completely separate realms. The intent behind the model is to insulate religion from any potential critique by science, but NOMA is an empirically false model that ignores the fact that religion often makes real claims about the world, and science often makes claims about topics relevant to religion (e.g., evolutionary psychology claiming to explain how religion evolved). The idea that science and religion are completely separate is a myth. It is simply not true. Scientists would do well to distance themselves from popular myths (such as the Inherit the Wind movie which so badly misrepresents the historical Scopes trial) that overlook the many positive interactions between science and religion.¹⁵ We hope and presume that Pennock would agree with us. 

Trying to Win a Debate Without Having One

Finally, when Pennock invokes “methodological naturalism,” this doesn’t prove that ID isn’t science; rather it proves that critics like Pennock cannot answer ID arguments. The theory of intelligent design is based upon our empirically based and observation-driven knowledge of what intelligent agents produce when they act. We can study intelligent agents, understand what types of information they generate, and use scientific methods to reliably recognize the effects of intelligent action to determine when an intelligent agent has been at work in the past. This makes intelligent causation a proper subject for scientific study. Full stop. 

Pennock and many of his colleagues seek to take a shortcut in their efforts to reject intelligent design — not by directly addressing the claims of ID, but by imposing a rule called “methodological naturalism.” According to this rule, intelligent causes are a priori excluded from scientific investigation, with no further exploration needed. Methodological naturalism is thus a science stopper that prevents us from investigating when intelligent causation is the best explanation for a given dataset. 

There is no reason for Pennock’s rule other than to short-circuit the origins debate so he can rule intelligent design out-of-court without addressing the evidence demonstrating design in nature. In origins investigations, demanding strictly materialistic or naturalistic answers can blind us to what may actually have happened, just as a murder trial outcome may be distorted if the judge tells the jury that they may only consider suicide or accidental death, not homicide, as valid verdicts. ID proponents argue that if science is to seek truth, it should be open to possible intelligent influence in the history of the universe. When Pennock insists otherwise, he imposes the philosophy of naturalism on the scientific pursuit of truth — the opposite of what the open-minded spirit of scientific inquiry is supposed to look like.

Dover Redux

Books and scholarly articles could be — and have been — written detailing the factual and legal errors in the Dover ruling.¹⁶ Pennock lauds the ruling, but there’s good reasons why the leading anti-ID legal scholar Jay Wexler wrote that “The part of Kitzmiller that finds ID not to be science is unnecessary, unconvincing, not particularly suited to the judicial role, and even perhaps dangerous both to science and to freedom of religion.”¹⁷ ID critics who care about accuracy would do well to distance themselves from Kitzmiller. ID proponents, on the other hand, have a vibrant and active research program which is finding that viewing biological systems as purposely designed opens new vistas for productive scientific research.¹⁸

Notes

1. “On a Wing and a Prayer?” American Scientist 313(6), Nov-Dec 2025.
2. George William Hunter, A Civic Biology (New York: American Book Company, 1914), pp. 196, 263.
3. See John West, Human Zoos: America’s Forgotten History of Scientific Racism (2018), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY6Zrol5QEk
4. See Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution (Free Press, 2007) and Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution (HarperOne, 2019).
5. Eugenie C. Scott, Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, p. 128 (Greenwood Press, 2004).
6. See for example “Creation Biology” (1983) p. 006644, or “Biology and Creation” (1986) pp. 003001, 003002, 003082. 
7. John G. West, “Dover in Review, pt. 3: Did Judge Jones accurately describe the content and early versions of the ID textbook Of Pandas and People?,” December 28, 2005, https://scienceandculture.com/2005/12/dover_in_review_pt_3_did_judge/
8. Biology and Creation (1986), p. 13 (Batesstamp 2390)
9. Winston Ewert, “Digital Irreducible Complexity: A Survey of Irreducible Complexity in Computer Simulations,” BIO-Complexity, 2014, (1). 
10. Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert J. Marks, “Active Information in Metabiology,” BIO-Complexity, 2013, (4).
11. Eric Holloway and Robert Marks, “Observation of Unbounded Novelty in Evolutionary Algorithms is Unknowable,” In Rutkowski, L., Scherer, R., Korytkowski, M., Pedrycz, W., Tadeusiewicz, R., Zurada, J. (eds) Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing. ICAISC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10841 (Springer, Cham, 2018); Winston Ewert, Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Coevolutionary Searches,” BIO-Complexity, 2017 (1); Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Measuring meaningful information in images: algorithmic specified complexity,” IET Computer Vision, Vol. 9(6): 884-894 (December, 2015); Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, ”Algorithmic Specified Complexity in the Game of Life,” Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions, Vol. 45 (4): 584-594 (April, 2015); Winston Ewert, “Digital Irreducible Complexity: A Survey of Irreducible Complexity in Computer Simulations,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2014 (1); Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “On the Improbability of Algorithmically Specified Complexity,” Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 45th Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory (SSST), Baylor University, March 11, 2013, pp. 68-70; Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Active Information in Metabiology,” BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2013 (4); Winston Ewert, W. A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Relative Search Performance,” Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 45th Southeastern Symposium on Systems Theory, Baylor University, March 11, 2013, pp. 41-50; Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Ann K. Gauger, Robert J. Marks II, “Time and Information in Evolution,” BIO-Complexity, 2012 (4); Winston Ewert, W. A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Climbing the Steiner Tree — Sources of Active Information in a Genetic Algorithm for Solving the Euclidean Steiner Tree Problem,” BIO-Complexity, 2012 (1); William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol. 14 (5):475-486 (2010); Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” 42nd South Eastern Symposium on System Theory, pp. 290-297 (March, 2010); Winston Ewert, William Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 3047-3053 (Oct., 2009); William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search,” Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, pp. 2647-2652 (Oct., 2009b); William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part A: Systems and Humans, 39 (5): pp. 1051-1061 (Sept., 2009a).
12. Some peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers which apply engineering methods to understand biological systems include: Snoke, D. Systems Biology as a Research Program for Intelligent Design. BIO-Complexity 2014, 2014, doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2014.3; Fudge, G.L.; Reeves, E.B. A Model-Based Reverse System Engineering Methodology for Analyzing Complex Biological Systems with a Case Study in Glycolysis. IEEE Open J. Syst. Eng. 2024, 2, 119–134, doi:10.1109/ojse.2024.3431868; Schulz, W.A. An Engineering Perspective on the Bacterial Flagellum: Part 1— Constructive View. BIO-Complexity 2021, 2021, doi:10.5048/bio-c.2021.1; Burgess, S. A Review of Linkage Mechanisms in Animal Joints and Related Bioinspired Designs. Bioinspir. Biomim. 2021, 16, 041001, doi:10.1088/1748-3190/abf744; Burgess, S. Why the Ankle-Foot Complex Is a Masterpiece of Engineering and a Rebuttal of “Bad Design” Arguments. BIO-Complexity 2022, 2022, doi:10.5048/bio-c.2022.3; Burgess, S.; Beeston, A.; Carr, J.; Siempou, K.; Simmonds, M.; Zanker, Y. A Bio-Inspired Arched Foot with Individual Toe Joints and Plantar Fascia. Biomimetics (Basel) 2023, 8, 455, doi:10.3390/biomimetics8060455; Burgess, S. Universal Optimal Design in the Vertebrate Limb Pattern and Lessons for Bioinspired Design. Bioinspir. Biomim. 2024, 19, 051004, doi:10.1088/1748-3190/ad66a3; Burgess, S.C. How Multifunctioning Joints Produce Highly Agile Limbs in Animals with Lessons for Robotics. Biomimetics (Basel) 2024, 9, 529, doi:10.3390/biomimetics9090529; Burgess, S.C.; Etoundi, A.C. Performance Maps for a Bio-Inspired Robotic Condylar Hinge Joint. J. Mech. Des. N. Y. 2014, 136, 115002, doi:10.1115/1.4028168; Conn, A.T.; Ling, C.S.; Burgess, S.C. Biomimetic Analysis of Insect Wing Kinematics for Flapping MAVs. Int. J. Micro Air Veh. 2011, 3, 1–11, doi:10.1260/1756-8293.3.1.1; Burgess, S.C. Multi-Functioning and Multi-Optimisation in Feathers. International Journal of Design & Nature2007, 1, 1–10; Johansen, J.D. Bacterial Chemotaxis Control Process Analysis with SysML. Syst. Eng. 2024, 27, 827–849, doi:10.1002/sys.21752; 243. McIntosh, A.C. Evidence of Design in Bird Feathers and Avian Respiration. International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics 2009, 4, 154–169.
13. Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard University Press, 2010), 1.
14. David Lindberg, “Medieval Science and Religion,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, Gary Ferngren ed. (Garland, 2000), p. 266.
15. Michael Keas, Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2019).
16. For example, see David K. DeWolf, John G. West, Casey Luskin, Jonathan Witt, Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller v. Dover Decision (Discovery Institute Press, 2006); David DeWolf, John West, and Casey Luskin, “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” Montana Law Review, 68: 7-57 (Winter, 2007).
17. Jay Wexler, “Kitzmiller and the ‘Is it Science?’ Question,” 5 First Amendment Law Review 90 (2006).
18. See https://www.discovery.org/id/research/