Dover Intelligent Design Trial -- The Plaintiffs Rest

The last expert witness for the plaintiffs was Kevin Padian, a Berkeley paleontologist. He testified that some specific claims made in the ID textbook, "Of Pandas and People," were erroneous or outdated. He also argued that gaps in the fossil record and inconsistencies in the evidence in no way invalidated the concept of common descent. He also traced evolutionary links between dinosaurs and birds. His key testimony was:

One of Padian’s concerns with intelligent design — the idea that life’s complexities demand an intelligent designer — is that it shuts down the search for answers, he said. “It worries me that students would be told that you can’t get from A to B with natural causes,” he said.

Of course one could argue that his faith that natural causes can get you from A to B, in the absence of direct evidence, is nothing more than an article of faith that past successes of evolutionary theory will be replicated in all future cases. But the response to that argument is that no matter how evidentiary links are established, the AI people can simply point to cases where they have not yet been traced. The negative cannot ever be proved.

Read it here.

Next week the defendants begin to present their case.

Stay tuned....