"Judgment Day" on PBS

PBS just aired an analysis and reconstruction of the 2005 Dover trial, in which some concerned parents sued the local school board for trying to force religion, in the form of intelligent design, to be taught as science. pbs.org will have it up for online viewing later this week here if you missed it tonight. I highly recommend it. Both sides are presented, but the clear religious foundation of intelligent design is exposed, and a good amount of evidence for evolution, particularly the link between humans and other apes, is presented.

The presentation of one of the key witnesses for the prosecution in that case, UC-Berkeley paleontologist Kevin Padian, is available here. It's long, but presents a good case for macroevolution (more properly called speciation, referring to the process by which new species of animals arise through natural selection), complete with the slides he used at the trial. It was intended for a lay audience consisting of lawyers and a judge, so it's great reading for someone who doesn't have a scientific background or who wants to better understand the science of evolution without slogging through a lot of jargon.