The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is providing a week of deeply incisive, deeply sober coverage of the controversy between Darwinism and Design. They've done so much research that they can't fit it all in, so I want to quote one excerpt from last evening's broadcast, and then provide another clip that, unfortunately, ended up on the cutting room floor:

JS: "Then there's Dover, PA. Its school board now requires ninth grade biology students to hear a three paragraph precautionary preamble to the study of evolution. It also encourages them to read Of Pandas and People, a pro-intelligent design textbook. Dover native Jeffrey Brown is not happy. He disagrees with the ruling." Clip of Brown: "I read Of Pandas and People and by the second paragraph I felt that they were calling me an atheist because I did not subscribe to their particular viewpoint on intelligent design."

What are those horrid opening paragraphs? The material from the cutting room floor reveals the brutal details:

Brown's mentor, Professor Emeritus Falduh A. Rall, Ph.D., Dynamic Evolutionary Biohistory, was palpably disturbed by the opening paragraph's vicious smear.

Clip of Rall reading from Of Pandas and People, hands shaking: "It begins with such promise, a quotation from everybody's favorite atheist, Carl Sagan: 'We live in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organization, economic well-being, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religous perspectives, and human self-knowledge, as well as in our undersanding of that vast universe in which we are embedded like a grain of sand in a cosmic ocean. As long as there have been human beings, we have posed the deep and fundamental questions, which evoke wonder and stir us into at least a tentative and trembling awareness, questions on the origins of consciousness; life on our planet; the beginnings of the Earth; the formaton of the Sun; the possibility of intelligent beings somewhere up there in the depths of the sky; as well as, the grandest inquiry of all--on the advent, nature and ultimate destiny of the universe.'

"But then, oh, oh! (Rall gives Brown a comforting squeeze on the shoulder) Then the vicious smear campaign begins. Darwinists, stop up your ears. It's too painful. Here are the paragraphs that follow: 'Carl Sagan, one of the foremost popularizers of science in our time, has drawn our attention to ancient, important, and fascinating questions. How did this immense universe come into existence? How did the earth come to harbor life? What does it all mean, if anything, and how do mere mortals like ourselves fit into the overall scheme of things, if indeed there be a scheme? As Dr. Sagan reminds us, we are not the first to wonder, nor are we likely to be the last.

"Two different concepts of the origins of living things have long histories extending from acient times to the present. While both have taken varied forms through the centuries, there is, nevertheless, a central core idea that modern proponents of each view hold in common with their forebears. Through all the ages some have held the concept of life emerging from simple substance. What the substance is, what form the first life took, and the mechanisms of emergence, chance or law, are details that have changed to characterize many different theories of natural origin. Likewise, proponents of intelligent design throughout history have shared the concept that life, like a manufactured object, is the result of intelligent shaping of matter. Within intelligent design also, the details as to how gradual or abrupt, and over what span of time, differ."

(Rall looks up from the book, face ashen): I feel so humiliated, and I'm a grown man. I fought in the wars (At Berkeley. We wanted to smoke Peyote and read Ginsberg; they forced us us to sit at desks and read Shakespeare). I'm old, callused. But can you imagine the emotional scars a tender, teen Darwinist might feel when the school adminstrator, at the beginning of the semester, stomps into the classroom--jackbooted, Medievalist thug! Taliban!--and tells the class there's a book in the school library offering another perspective on biological origins, intelligent design?

Shot of reporter, weeping with him, arm around a befuddled chimp.

Rall, beginning to tear the book to shreds. "Lighter! Fire! Burn! Every page is an attack on the First Amendment, or the Second Amendment. Don't ask me to be specific at a time like this. Maybe both. The wall of separation! A hole, a hole in the dike! Quick, plug it up or God will leak all over everything. We'll be wallowing around in a theocracy before you can say 'The universe is all there is, ever was, or ever ever ever will be.' Geocentrism, flat earths, scientists burned at the stake! Quick, seize the enemies of the Enlightenment! Fire them! Humiliate them! To arms!"

Cut away to World Vision commercial.