Margaret Talbot has a nice piece on the Dover “Intelligent Design” trial in The New Yorker (issue dated 12/5/05). She got the same impression being in the courtroom that I got reading the transcripts: that judge John E. Jones III is a sharp and funny guy. She also got the other impression I got: that the judgment, due around New Year, is an easy win for the plaintiffs (i.e. anti-I.D.-ers).

Talbot is especially interesting on the local social dynamics of the case. Sample:

“You couldn’t really say that the divide in Dover was between old-timers and newcomers — both sides included people whose families had lived in town for generations — or between religious and secular people. Bryan Rehm, one of the plaintiffs, belongs to the United Church of Christ; he and his wife, Christy, run a vacation Bible school…. Even the political divisions didn’t trrack precisely. Steven Stough, a registered Republican who is a middle-school teacher and track coach, was one of the first parents to call the ACLU hot line in Philadelphia.

At election time this year, the school-board candidates who pledged to keep intelligent design in the curriculum ran on a Republican ticket, but the opposing slate was made up of four Republicans and four Democrats.”

The clearest indicator Talbot could find was, in fact, that people who avidly read the local newspapers were anti-I.D., while people who scorned to read them were pro-I.D. This is odd, since one of the two local papers, the York Daily Record, has a pro-I.D. editorial line!

It was a fascinating case, and an interesting bit of current American sociology. The trial transcripts — which are, as Talbot says, a pretty good course in philosophy of science all by themselves — can be read on the National Council for Science Education website here.