It is an enduring problem for lawyers and constitutional scholars that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, seldom see cases that have been intelligently designed to test abstract conceptions of the law. Instead, the courts must tie their rulings to the specific circumstances of a case—plaintiffs who happen to feel wronged, defendants who find themselves in the line of litigious fire, attorneys who bring their own idiosyncrasies and resources to the proceedings. Even cases about such central constitutional issues as the separation of church and state become mixed up in chance. Edward Humes's Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul might not live up to the ambitions of its subtitle, but it does an excellent job of tracing the ways in which a major trial over the legality of teaching creationism in the public schools hinged in part on the personalities and predilections of its leading participants.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Humes in 2005 traveled to the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania, to observe a federal district court trial over the Dover Township school board's attempt to introduce intelligent design into high school biology. ID supporters argue that many features of life on earth are too complex to have evolved in the way that scientists believe. For example, they assert that the eye shows clear evidence of design. It is functional only when all its parts are in place, so the completed eye could not have evolved by discrete stages. Although ID supporters are pretty certain that the unnamed “designer” of such complexity is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, their strategic silence on the matter allows them to portray ID as a secular alternative to Darwinian evolution. In the years leading up to the Dover case, they had reason to be cautious. Prior Supreme Court rulings had already banned public schools from teaching creationism as a violation of the Establishment Clause, and the Court had ruled as well that creationism's lineal descendant, scientific creationism, was still a religion, despite the lip service it paid to science.

However, in the early 1990s a small group of conservative Christians, led by the Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson and funded by a conservative think tank, the Discovery Institute, developed ID as a strategy to attack evolution while skirting First Amendment objections to creationism. They felt a sense of urgency. Like other creationists, ID activists saw evolution as central to the modern materialist worldview, and thus responsible for a host of social ills, ranging from abortion and crime to the secularization of the public sphere. As part of their long-term plan for the “regeneration” of this endangered American society, Johnson and his allies aimed directly at the “trunk” of the problem—Darwinian evolution. Although they hoped to develop ID someday as a robust alternative approach to evolutionary science, they decided early on that their chances for success were better in the politicized world of public education than in the laboratory and peer-reviewed scientific journals. Their strategy consisted of pushing schools to “teach the controversy” between evolution and ID, raising doubts about evolution with the ultimate goal of replacing Darwin with ID. In 2005, the Dover School Board presented them with an opportunity to test that approach when a majority of the board voted to make the ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, part of the biology curriculum, even though the biology teachers in Dover, much like their counterparts across the nation, spent precious little time on evolution in the first place. The driving forces on the board had discussed their move with the Discovery Institute and had also received assurances that the Thomas More Law Center—an organization devoted to defending conservative religious causes—would represent them in the lawsuit that was sure to follow. As expected, the move provoked a court case, but Humes explains that the controversy also almost tore the community apart as well, as neighbor turned against neighbor in the war for the public schools.

As became clear in the testimony for Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District before the Federal Circuit Court, the board majority did not follow the script the Discovery Institute had written. Where Discovery presented ID purely as a secular alternative, its supporters on the board were initially very public about their religious motivations and unapologetic about branding their opponents “atheists.” Only before the court did they claim that religion had never played a part in their decision. The judge was later to excoriate them for lying, and lying quite poorly, about their religious intent. Intelligent design did have its day in court, though. Several of ID's leading lights took the witness stand, but under fierce questioning from the plaintiffs' attorneys (coordinated by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State) these worthies fared poorly, at one point admitting that ID had produced almost nothing by way of scientific research, at another admitting that ID's elastic definition of “science” could just as well open the schoolhouse door to astrology and other pseudosciences. In this most gripping part of the book, Humes paints a vivid picture of the ways in which the plaintiffs' attorneys tore the witnesses apart. Finally, the plaintiffs produced a “smoking gun” proving that Of Pandas and People was, quite literally, just creationism in a new package. A researcher discovered that the authors of Pandas had taken the manuscript of an avowedly creationist textbook and simply replaced all references to “creation science” with the phrase “Intelligent Design.”

In the end, the judge in the case had little trouble finding for the plaintiffs, but in his long opinion he also went to great lengths to discuss the merits of the testimony that experts on both sides of the case had laid out before him. Along the way, he allowed that, whatever else it might be, ID was not science, and it did not belong in the public schools.

Although Humes offers fine thumbnail sketches of the contending forces and handles the intellectual arguments well, his intent is more to narrate than to analyze. He favors the plaintiffs but is remarkably sympathetic to most of the proponents of ID. His narrative does not end happily. ID leaders and the school board majority fall into mutual recriminations; wounds in the community heal slowly, if at all; and evolution's defenders, despite their victory, recognize that this is but one battle in a larger war. The judge in Kitzmiller, who faced conservative condemnation and even death threats in the wake of his decision, perhaps knows better than anybody that no court case can lay to rest the controversy over evolution in this most pious of nations.