links for 2009-01-30

"Support academic freedom." Mmmmyeah.

Margaret Talbot pens the story of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. "You sometimes hear it said that a courtroom is not a proper venue for debating science. In this case, it proved to be an ideal forum … The trial also allowed the lawyers to act as proxies for the rest of us, and ask of scientists questions that we'd probably be too embarrassed to ask ourselves. In a courtroom, you must lay an intellectual foundation in order to earn a line of questioning — and so the lawyers stripped matters neatly back to the first principles of science."

An in-depth video primer on the history of and cases behind evolution and intelligent design.

I have no qualms with ID being discussed in philosophy classes, as long as the nature of science has been established adequately first.