The Nineties in America - Salem Press (2009)

public debate between prominent Darwinian evolu-
tionists and neocreationists. In 2005, several people
in this debate were called as expert witnesses in the
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Districtcase. A group of
parents of high school students had challenged the
Dover district’s requirement for biology teachers to
present intelligent design arguments as an alterna-
tive to Darwinian evolution. In a well-documented
decision, Judge John E. Jones III ruled in favor of the
parents, concluding that intelligent design was un-
able to uncouple itself from its religious roots.
Therefore, the school district’s promotion of intelli-
gent design violated the establishment clause of the
First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Despite
these and other defeats suffered by the intelligent
design movement, it continued to garner support
and advocacy by many members of the conservative
Christian community. Consequently, the intelligent
design controversy has not yet reached closure.

Further Reading
Behe, Michael J.The Edge of Evolution: The Search for
the Limits of Darwinism.New York: Free Press,

2007. This successor to Behe’sDarwin’s Black Box:
      The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution(1996) ex-
      tends his arguments from cell structures that are
      “beyond random mutation and natural selection”
      to the “edge of evolution,” where Darwinian ex-
      planations are inadequate. Extensive notes, four
      appendixes, and an index.
      Davis, Percival, and Dean H. Kenyon.Of Pandas and
      People: The Central Question of Biological Origins.
      Dallas: Haughton, 1993. This revised edition ed-
      ited by Charles B. Thaxton was, in this and other
      versions, at the center of the controversy over an
      intelligent design textbook in high school science
      courses. Glossary and index.
      Johnson, Phillip E.Darwin on Trial.Washington,
      D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991. This book has been
      called the “founding document” of the intelli-
      gent design movement. Research notes and an
      index.
      Pennock, Robert T.Tower of Babel: The Evidence
      Against the New Creationism.Cambridge, Mass.:
      MIT Press, 1999. The author, a philosopher of sci-
      ence, has written “the most detailed and compre-
      hensive” critique of the intelligent design move-
      ment while elucidating the context within which
      it originated and developed. Notes, references,
      and an index.

Scott, Eugenie C.Evolution vs. Creationism: An Intro-

duction.Berkeley: University of California Press,

2004. Written by a committed evolutionist, this
      book provides an accessible primer to the debate
      over the teaching of evolution in the United
      States. “References for Further Exploration,”
      name index, and subject index.
      Robert J. Paradowski

See also Education in the United States; Home-

schooling; Religion and spirituality in the United

States; Science and technology; Supreme Court de-

cisions.

 Internet

Definition A worldwide network of computer

networks

In the 1990’s, the Internet grew from about 100,000

hosts—connected by the new, and largely untested, trans-

mission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) net-

working protocol—to over one and a half million hosts,

connected by a robust TCP/IP internetworking infrastruc-

ture. The 1990’s also marked the rapid development of the

World Wide Web as an important way of distributing infor-

mation and doing business.

Computers were first used in the 1950’s, and from

their inception scientists tried to connect them so

that they could share printers and data. In 1962,

J. C. R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Tech-

nology (MIT) gave the first description of an inter-

net as a network of networks. The technology of

the 1960’s used dedicated circuits to connect com-

puters, and this technique did not support large

internets. In 1964, Leonard Kleinrock of MIT de-

scribed a new technology, packet switching, which

sent messages from one computer to another by

breaking a message into packets and sending the

packets one at a time rather than the entire message

all at once.

During the 1970’s and 1980’s, packet-switched

networking developed at a fast pace and demon-

strated that it was capable of supporting large

internetworks. The TCP/IP network protocol was a

packet-switched internetwork protocol, defined in a

paper by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf in 1974. TCP

was a transport protocol to connect individual com-

puters, and IP was a protocol that facilitated the

The Nineties in America Internet
453