HARRISBURG -- Board members who succeeded in introducing "intelligent design" to students in Dover Area School District were wary of evolutionary theory and explicit in their desire to balance the teaching of evolution with a more Christian-friendly philosophy, three plaintiffs testified yesterday during the second day of a landmark federal trial.

	Carolyn Kaster, Associated Press Plantiff Bryan Rehm says science faculty were forced to watch a video explaining why Charles Darwin's theories on evolution were being improperly taught to school students. Click photo for larger image.

Two board members in particular -- William Buckingham and Alan Bonsell -- were mentioned frequently. Bonsell wanted students to hear about creationism, the Biblical account of the earth's origins, testified Aralene Callahan, a parent and also a former school board member in Dover, York County.

"If evolution was part of the biology curriculum, creationism should be shared 50-50," Callahan quoted Bonsell as saying.

Buckingham, according to the testimony, expressed fears that the biology textbooks he'd reviewed were "laced with Darwinism," and too one-sided in their deference to evolution. At a board meeting, Buckingham criticized a college student who studied evolution, saying the man had been "brainwashed."

Buckingham said somebody needed to take a stand for Jesus, witnesses said. His wife, Charlotte, quoted Old Testament verses during public board meetings, one plaintiff testified.

Throughout the second day, attorneys for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area tried to show that the school board, over a two-year period, had discussed God, religion and creationism and shown a general antipathy toward evolutionary theory, before ultimately voting to inform ninth-grade biology students that evolutionary theory has inexplicable gaps, and that intelligent design "is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view."

The theme of the discussions will be crucial as U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III considers whether the Dover board violated the Constitution's church-state separation clause, as the plaintiffs claim in their lawsuit, filed last year. The school's policy took effect in January, when the statement was first read to students.

The subtext is crucial because the judge will apply two tests -- first, he'll consider whether the statement that's read to students has the effect of bringing religion into the public school setting. If he can't find that effect, he will look for the intent behind the action.

That intent seemed boldly clear to the three plaintiffs who testified yesterday.

The plaintiffs specifically seek to knock down the four-paragraph statement, but more broadly, the case is about more than permanent injunctions. It is America's first court test of whether the term "intelligent design" can be taught, or at least mentioned, to students taking a science course.

And the world is watching this case -- educators and scientists, conservatives and liberals, clergy and politicians, not to mention dozens in the media, including a radio station from New Zealand.

Bryan Rehm -- a parent, a plaintiff, and a former Dover Area science teacher -- said that the science faculty had been forced to watch a video explaining why Charles Darwin's theories on evolution were being improperly taught to school students.

Board members seemed especially concerned with the idea that modern man had evolved from an earlier relative, even though that subject wasn't directly addressed at Dover. "We don't teach monkey-to-man," he said yesterday.

The plaintiffs' testimony has been largely corroborated by local newspaper accounts of the school board meetings. But Buckingham and Bonsell have denied making some of the statements attributed to them or have suggested those comments were taken out of context by newspaper reporters.

That's why the legal team representing the 11 parents who sued has subpoenaed two freelance reporters, Heidi Bernhard-Bubb of the York Dispatch, and Joe Maldonado of the York Daily Record. "The reporters are needed to validate the historical record," said Witold Walczak, attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The reporters were deposed yesterday, but Walczak said he was uncertain whether they would testify today, when the non-jury trial resumes.

Before the plaintiffs took the stand, Dover's defense team, a firm that litigates for free on behalf of "Christians and time-honored family values," completed their cross-examination of expert witness Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and co-author of a popular biology textbook.

On Monday, he testified that "intelligent design is not science," and aimed to refute several core claims made in the book "Of Pandas and People," which is the beginner's manual to intelligent design, and is mentioned in the four-paragraph statement read to students.

Yesterday, the defense team danced through a list of renowned biologists -- Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and Francis Crick included -- and offered quotes and book snippets from these biologists, showing that they can talk about religion and God without compromising their standing as scientists.

Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning DNA researcher, suggested in a book that life could have been put on Earth by space aliens. That fits neatly into the intelligent design concept, whose supporters try not to identify the designer whom they believe is behind nature's complex machinery.

One "need not be a fundamentalist Christian to believe in intelligent design," said defense attorney Robert Muise. He also noted that Miller describes himself as a "creationist," in that Miller, a Roman Catholic, believes that "God is the author of nature." Later, Miller said that "just because a scientist makes a statement, doesn't make it scientific."