46 Evolution and the Fossil Record
repeatedly to cover his tracks, apparently at the instructions of the lawyers from the Dis-
covery Institute. As Brown and Alston sum it up, “To know William Buckingham is to know
the millions of our fellow Americans who are ignorant not only of the theory they’d like to
discredit, but also of the pseudo-theory with which they’d like to replace it; who, knowing
full well that they lack the basic data to make a decision between the two, do so anyway
and loudly at that; and who lie through their teeth when asked exactly what it is that moti-
vates them to do these sorts of things in the first place. William Buckingham lied because he
believed it was necessary to do so in order to preserve the truth as he saw it—that literalized
Christianity is the one true religion, and that Darwinism is its greatest threat” (26).
During the course of the trial, the witnesses for ID creationism were repeatedly exposed
for their bad science, and the documents that were introduced show the clear imprint of hav-
ing been recycled from older creationist documents. The most striking evidence of this was
the discovery of different editions of the textbook Of Pandas and People (Davis and Kenyon
2004). Early drafts were full of conventional creationism, but when a federal case struck
down young-earth creationism for the final time, the authors just cut and pasted a few
phrases here and there to remove the references to “God,” “creation,” and “creationism.”
In one place, the plaintiffs’ legal team exposed a tell-tale palimpsest: the phrase “cdesign
proponentsists,” where the phrase “design proponents” has been clumsily and incompletely
pasted over the word “creationists.”
At the time of Judge Jones’s decision, analysts thought that the Dover verdict would be
the death knell for future attempts by ID creationists to win victories by legal means, because
in most cases courts follow precedents established by other courts (especially if they are
thorough and well-reasoned). But ID creationism was extinguished even more completely
than anyone could have imagined. Even though the Discovery Institute keeps pushing it, no
school district has tried to adopt any ID school materials in the 11 years since the original
Dover decision. Even more surprising, the entire notion of ID creationism has abruptly died
from American discourse. A simple Google Trends search of terms like “intelligent design”
done by Nick Matzke shows that it virtually vanished from the Internet after 2006, with
almost no real discussion since then. “Intelligent design” creationism is really and truly dead.
Since the Dover decision, the Discovery Institute refused to accept this, and keeps on
cranking out books and literature and propaganda. As Nick Matzke (2015) wrote:
Of course, the Discovery Institute is still around, still desperately trying to re-write
history, claiming that they never supported teaching ID in public schools (when they
clearly did, as even the Thomas More Law Center noted), that they never supported
what the school board in Dover was doing (never mind that it was the DI’s care pack-
age of ID materials, particularly Icons of Evolution stuff, that ginned up the school
board in the first place, which was exactly the intent of all of the emotional language
about “fraud” etc. in Icons), that the Dover Area School Board was a bad place for a
test case because of obvious religious motivations (never mind that ID is and always
has been mostly a wing of apologetics for conservative evangelicals, and in fact that
audience is still the only one where ID events, books, etc. have much of an audience
today), and that ID isn’t creationism relabeled.Now the Discovery Institute is trying to put on a brave face and claim that “intelligent
design” is alive and well. On the tenth anniversary of the Dover decision, their site had