The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, Pa.(Brief article)(Book review)

* The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, Pa. GORDY SLACK. Jossey-Bass, $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0787987862

Slack, the former editor of natural history magazine Pacific Discovery, has long covered clashes between scientists and creationists, and he knows both sides thoroughly--his own father, an experimental psychologist, took up creationism in the late 1990s, following a conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. In 2005, online magazine Salon assigned Slack to cover a federal court case in which a group of parents sued a Pennsylvania school board after it voted to include creationist material in high …