The trial was an opportunity for intelligent design advocates to make their case for why their belief qualifies as a scientific alternative to evolution. The downside was that real scientists would be present to debunk their specious arguments, something they don’t have to concern themselves with in their books and Internet material intended for mass consumption.

The results were predictable. The judge correctly ruled that intelligent design was not science, and could not sever itself from its creationist and religious roots. Therefore, intelligent design could not be offered as an alternative to evolution in public-school science classes.

Regrettably, this cultural fight isn’t over. It’s a sad fact — and national embarrassment — that a majority of Republicans (68 percent according to a 2007 Gallup poll) including some of their presidential candidates, reject evolution. Creationist activists — our cultural agents of ignorance — continue their efforts to undermine science and inflict their religious beliefs on public schools.

Today, rather than regurgitate discredited creationists’ arguments, I’d rather mention a few noteworthy and fascinating illustrations of the predictive power of evolution.

For example, evolutionary theory states that humans share a common ancestor with great apes (e.g. chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan). However, this theory runs headlong into a stubborn fact. The great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have only 23 pairs. What happened to the extra ape chromosome pair?

Losing that much genetic material would likely have been lethal, so if evolution is correct, this material must still be in our genome. But where? Evolution makes the testable prediction that two ancestral ape chromosomes fused into one.

I spent a significant fraction of my adult life analyzing human chromosomes at MSU’s Cytogenetics Laboratory. Anyone familiar with the banding patterns of human chromosomes would have no difficulty recognizing their ape counterparts, many of which are nearly identical.

A casual analysis of human and ape chromosomes provides evidence that the human chromosome 2 resulted from a fusion of two smaller ape chromosomes. As was presented in the aforementioned trial, modern molecular genetic technology provides definitive confirmation that our chromosome 2 is the product of a head-to-head fusion of two chromosomes that stayed separate in other primates, beautifully confirming the evolutionary prediction.

My second example has to do with fossils.

As was detailed in the Nova program, “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” in 1999, paleontologist Neil Shubin set out to find a specific type of transitional fossil. Shubin explained, “What evolution enables us to do is to make specific predictions about what we should find in the fossil record ? if we go to rocks of the right age, and the rocks of the right type, we should find transitions between two great forms of life, between fish and amphibian.”

The fossilized creature his team found was named “Tiktaalik.” It was exactly the type of transitional form Shubin was looking for, found exactly where evolutionary theory predicted it would be.

These two examples exist among mountains of similarly amazing, specific and successful evolutionary predictions. Over the years, the theory of evolution has produced thousands of testable hypotheses capable of disproving itself.

In contrast, intelligent design creationism represents an attempt to spin incomplete scientific understanding into positive evidence for a preexisting religious belief. Intelligent design makes no specific and testable predictions that could invalidate its central assumption, and offers no compelling explanation for why all this spectacular evolutionary evidence exists.

Faced with the evidence, intelligent design proponents must simply say, “The ‘designer’ works in mysterious ways.”