Darwin in court: eighteen months after the "monkey trial" in Dover, Pennsylvania, a bumper crop of books puts the battle in perspective and asks, What's next?

   I am inclined to believe
   The story of Adam and Eve.
   There's no chimpanzee
   In my pedigree
   And you can't make a monkey of me.
      --From the song "You Can't Make a Monkey
        Out of Me," popular during the Scopes-trial era;
        [c]Billy Rose and Clarence Gaskill, 1925

Every few years in America (and nowhere else) God tells someone to haul Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology into court. No other scientific theory--not atomic theory, not string theory, not the big bang--has ever been put on trial in a court of law. That may be because "Darwin matters," to borrow a phrase from Michael Shermer, a historian of science and self-labeled "former fundamentalist." Shermer's essential little book, Why Darwin Matters, shows how the revolutionary Darwinian time bomb is still ticking. Subtitled The Case Against Intelligent Design, the book refutes creationism's latest incarnation and chronicles the recent brouhaha over high school textbooks in Dover, a small town in rural Pennsylvania.

Three years ago, members of the Dover school board decided to require teachers or administrators to read a formal disclaimer in ninth-grade biology class, urging students to be skeptical of Darwin's "theory" of evolution and to consider intelligent design (ID) as an alternative explanation for the origin of life. They also sought to introduce an auxiliary textbook that promotes ID, Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins, by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon. Tammy Kitzmiller, a working mother with two daughters in the high school, along with ten other parents, sued the board for violating their constitutional rights under the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was the first time anyone had challenged a public school district in the federal courts about the teaching of ID, which the parents argued was not a scientific theory at all.

Board members protested that their agenda was not about religion, but rather about teaching an important new scientific idea. A new idea? Hardly. In 1831, when Charles Darwin, then a young theology student, set sail aboard HMS Beagle, he believed in design by a Creator. He also accepted the church-approved doctrine that the Earth's species had been created instantaneously and in their present form. Like the seventeenth-century theologian William Paley, Darwin thought that such marvels of natural engineering as the human eye and the eagle's wing were "evidences" of the Creator's handiwork. Paley's famous watchmaker analogy--if you find an intricate timepiece, you must conclude it had a maker--was a well-worn form of argument for the existence of God, traceable back to Thomas Aquinas and beyond.

In John Brockman's anthology Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement, the historian of science Frank Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley, has concisely traced Darwin's path in rejecting those ideas. During the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin began to see that animals and plants had been patched together and modified throughout a period of organic evolution. Evolutionary history, with all its quirky and sometimes inefficient pathways, is embedded in our bones.

Does nature ever produce a downright unintelligent design? That question is addressed (unforgettably, but alas, unsatisfactorily) in the lighthearted documentary Flock of Dodos, made by Randy Olson, a marine-biologist-turned-filmmaker. In Olson's film, James Hanken, the director of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, gives his Award for Most Unintelligent Design to--of all animals--the rabbit. "It's a truly disgusting design," he adds.

When rabbits chew and swallow their veggies, Hanken explains in the film, they shunt the food past both large and small intestines to a special fermentation pouch, known as the cecum, from which they expel marble-size pellets called cecotropes. Then, at night, your pet bunny eats its own droppings. This time, however, they are processed in the intestines, where the half-digested food is absorbed, and the resulting waste discharged as true feces. Who knew? Olson's night-vision camera shows a rabbit filmed in the dark, and, sure enough, you can actually see what's up, doc. "For every example of intelligent design in nature," says Hanken, "I can cite you ten others of unintelligent design."

But that's just one way of looking at it. The rabbit works well enough to have survived, after all, so it must be a successful design--no matter what we might think about the "intelligence" of a design that requires an animal to eat its own excreta. Indeed, it is peculiar for a biologist to maintain that some living things are less intelligently designed than others. If all biological systems arose from natural, mechanistic processes, they're all unintelligently designed.

Although the phrase "intelligent design" does invite "unintelligent design" as its opposite, the operative word is "design." Creationists believe that you can't get something as complicated and finely tuned as a rabbit through unplanned, intermediate steps. The greater the intricacies, they insist, the higher the intellect must have been to create it. That biologists think that they could improve on the design of the rabbit is ultimately no answer to the creationists' argument, particularly if the improvements merely reflect human prejudices about what is an optimal or beautiful design.