College professor testifies intelligent design based on science

A Pennsylvania school board arguing its right to introduce intelligent design as an alternative to evolution began its defence yesterday with a college professor who testified the theory was based in science.

Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, said intelligent design - which holds that nature is so complex it must have been the work of a creator - was based on observable phenomena and was not a religiously inspired idea.

Eleven parents of students are suing the Dover school board, claiming its new policy of introducing intelligent design in the classroom violates the US constitutional separation of church and state.

The federal trial over teaching theories of human origins, which has echoes of the famed Scopes Monkey trial of 1925 when lawyers squared off in a Tennessee courthouse over the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution, entered its fourth week.

The case marks the first time teaching intelligent design has been challenged in court and is being closely watched in at least 30 states where similar initiatives to dilute the teaching of evolution are being considered.

Behe, a Catholic with nine children, said intelligent design relied completely on physical, observable, empirical facts about nature plus logical inference.

He denied that intelligent design was a form of creationism - the belief that God created the world.

Opponents claim the theory is a thinly veiled version of creationism, which the US Supreme Court has said cannot be taught in public schools.

Behe said intelligent design was shown by the "purposeful arrangements of parts in biological organisms whose operation is not properly explained by Darwinism".

He cited an organism called bacterial flagellum as an example of intelligent design.

The operation of flagellum, by which bacteria were distributed within the body, depended on an intricate combination of parts whose interaction could not be explained by evolution.

Witnesses for the plaintiffs testified earlier in the trial that intelligent design was not scientific and had no place in high school classes.

- REUTERS