Your OFFICIAL program to the Scopes II Kansas Monkey Trial

Irigonegaray says he was stunned to learn that the board had set aside $40,000 to pay for the anticipated travel expenses of witnesses -- $20,000 for each side. "At a time when our children's education is at stake because we don't even have a budget, our board was going to spend $40,000 to conduct a debate without a purpose," he says. "So I objected."

The board reacted by lowering the amount of travel funds to $5,000 for each side, but Irigonegaray says he won't spend any of the money allotted to his side. "I won't take a penny that I think is stealing from Kansas children."

Irigonegaray, in fact, will call no witnesses at all. "We're not calling scientists to debate evolution. That's not going to happen. To debate whether evolution is true is to debate whether the Earth is round or flat. There's no argument. It [intelligent design] is a minority view of a religious group asserting that all other Christians are wrong."

"Pedro will keep it to legal, not scientific issues," says Steve Case, an assistant research professor at the University of Kansas who served on the standards committee and helped write the majority-backed, pro-evolution guidelines. He says he's glad that Irigonegaray has taken on the role of opposing the anti-evolutionists and will question the legality of the procedure. "It's an intelligent-design forum on the state dime, and it probably violates the establishment clause of the Constitution. It's evangelism, and it's a clear preference for one Christian view over another Christian view," he says.

But if Irigonegaray hopes to inject some legal reality into the farcical procedures, he'll run into ID's own local legal attack dog, John Calvert.

Calvert and Harris are the principals behind the Kansas-based Intelligent Design Network, which works to convince school boards around the country that evolution is on the run. Calvert was involved in the adoption of anti-evolution changes that were written into Ohio's school standards three years ago. And he and Harris have kept up a full-court press on the Kansas board.

"I think you're going to hear about the scientific controversy," Calvert tells the Pitch, describing what he expects to happen in the hearings. "There is a scientific controversy about evolution. The problem is, if evolution was treated like any other science -- objectively -- there wouldn't be a problem."

Talking with Calvert and his partner Harris, you hear that word -- objectivity -- a lot. It's no wonder they use it frequently -- who could be against scientists being objective? But ID adherents speak less frequently about what it is that they want scientists to be so open to: explanations for the proliferation of life that are outside the normal realm of science. That is, a supernatural designer that has put its stamp on the natural world.

Clever use of language is a hallmark of ID, which has had a slick, legalistic gloss from the start. Many credit Phillip Johnson, a lawyer and former Berkeley law professor, with sparking the movement in 1991 with his book Darwin on Trial. Evolutionists have complained that Johnson used well-worn legal tricks by distorting the writings of scientists through selective quotations to create an impression that evolution itself was losing favor with the scientific community. Not true at all, biologists say -- the distortions in Johnson's book have been exposed since its publication.

Johnson had played on the fact that evolution has, well, evolved since Darwin's The Origin of Species was published nearly 150 years ago, and scientists do have disagreements over its details. It's the nature of science, after all, that any theory can be rocked by the newest discoveries -- and can be completely overthrown if new evidence demands it. But despite the claims of ID proponents, evolution's central tenets are more strongly supported by the world's scientific community today than at any time in the past.

Those tenets are often confused and conflated by creationists and the mainstream press, but they remain the cornerstone of many different scientific fields. The first states that life-forms change over time. It was Darwin's insight that one of the processes producing that change -- natural selection -- relies on variations arising in organisms that are selected for their survival benefit through pressures applied by local environments over succeeding generations. Second, the fossil record and anatomical studies suggest that all species on Earth share common ancestors and can ultimately be traced back to a single common ancestral organism.

Over billions of years, that process of variation and selection has produced an astonishing array of life. But such spans of time are alien to the human mind, which measures time in seconds, hours and (a relatively few) years. From the start, Darwin's theories were met with the understandable skepticism that random variations over time could really produce something as complex as a human eye, to take a classic example -- and one that Darwin himself addressed.

Nine years ago, the new darling of evolution's skeptics became the flagellum, the hairlike thing that helps bacteria move. Michael Behe, a biochemist and devout Catholic at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, argued in his book Darwin's Black Box that certain biological structures, such as the flagellum, were simply too complex -- "irreducibly complex" in Behe's lingo -- to arise from Darwinian forces.