PARENTS in a rural Pennsylvania town are mounting the first legal test of the controversial theory of the origin of life known as intelligent design.

Eleven parents are suing the Dover school board for requiring teachers to cast doubt on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and to offer intelligent design as an alternative.

The landmark case, dubbed Scopes II, comes eight decades after the infamous Scopes “monkey trial” in which a teacher named John Scopes was convicted of illegally teaching evolution in a Tennessee school, rather than sticking to the biblical version of the creation. Lawyers on both sides expect the case to go all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Conservative Christians are pushing intelligent design to bypass the 1987 ban on creationism in schools. It argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection cannot explain the emergence of highly-complex life forms, and that a higher intelligence must have created them.

The parents’ lawyers told the court in the nearby city of Harrisburg that intelligent design was merely “a 21st-century version of creationism”.

They accused the school board of trying to teach religion under the guise of science in violation of the constitutional separation of Church and State and the 1987 Supreme Court ban. But a lawyer from a Christian non-profit group representing the school board countered that the case was really about “free inquiry in education, not a religious agenda”.

The intelligent design movement has been gaining momentum with more than two dozen state and local authorities across the US seeking to incorporate intelligent design into school curricula over the last year. It received a further boost when President Bush suggested last month that pupils should be taught intelligent design and evolution “so people can understand what the debate is about”.

The row in Dover erupted when the elected school board voted 6-3 to require teachers to read a four-paragraph statement to 14-year-old biology pupils.

“Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence . . .” the statement says.

Eric Rothschild, representing the parents, told the judge that the school board’s own documents showed that its members had initially discussed teaching creationism until they were warned off it by lawyers.

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