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evolution, but the fact that I don t fully understand how it works doesn t
keep it from working. I don t begin to understand how pictures appear on my
television screen, but that doesn t keep them from showing up. And it doesn t
mean God put them there. The laws of physics and people who are smarter about
those laws than I am put them there.
And if we need any further proof of unintelligent design, I said, really
getting wound up, all we need to do is look at the Kansas Board of Education.
Those people are the very incarnation of dumb design. I waved the morning
newspaper.
My opponent was not ready to give up. We are made in the image of God, he
insisted.
Then God must be evolving, too, I snapped. And I hope he s got some divine
dentist up there in heaven to extract his wisdom teeth, because once they get
impacted, God s gonna have one hell of a toothache. I wadded the newspaper
into a ball.
I heard a gasp, and then a snicker, and the class jester called out, Amen,
brother! And then someone at the back of the room began to clap. Slowly,
steadily. Soon more of the students began to clap, and before long, almost all
of them were clapping.
The young man in row three stood up. I opened my mouth to tell him to sit
down, but then I noticed his face. It was a bright mottled red, and he looked
on the verge of tears. He stared at me for a long moment, with eyes full of
hurt and betrayal. Then he walked up the aisle and out of the lecture hall,
accompanied by catcalls and whistles.
I gathered up my notes, the pelvis, and the crumpled newspaper, and exited by
the lower door. As I traipsed down the sidewalk from McClung Museum to the
underbelly of Neyland Stadium and the stairwell to my office and my collection
of still-evolving skeletons, I accused myself of going too far, speaking too
harshly, because I d gone into class already mad about the newspaper article.
It was important for scientists to defend good science and expose
pseudoscience. But it was also important to do it gently, at least when
students were involved. Damn, Bill, I said to myself, and at myself. Damn.
CHAPTER 9
TESTIFYING AT A HEARING to revoke a physician s medical license wasn t exactly
the same as testifying in court, but it was damn close. This hearing looked
like a trial and it quacked like a trial, complete with lawyers and oaths to
tell the truth.
The Tennessee Department of Health and Environment had a lawyer whose job was
to ask me easy questions, and Dr. Garland Hamilton the medical examiner whose
license was on the chopping block, so to speak had a lawyer whose job was to
chip away at my answers.
The case that had prompted the state to try to revoke its own regional medical
examiner s license was a fascinating one. A man named Eddie Meacham called the
911 dispatcher in Knoxville one Saturday night to say that his friend had just
collapsed. By the time the ambulance arrived, Billy Ray Ledbetter was dead,
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with a bloody wound in his lower back. Dr. Hamilton performed an autopsy,
found copious amounts of blood in Ledbetter s right lung, and pronounced the
cause of death to be a stab wound in the lower back, with the blade
penetrating the lower lobe of the right lung.
Trouble was, it turned out that the stab wound was inflicted by a big shard
from a glass-topped coffee table, which Billy Ray had shattered when he
collapsed onto it. I had the dubious plea sure of getting involved when I did
an experiment at the Body Farm that showed it would have been impossible for a
knife blade even if there had been a knife wound, which there wasn t to
puncture the back on the left side, cross the spine, and then veer ninety
degrees into the right lung. The real cause of the lung hemorrhage, it turned
out, was a bar fight a couple of weeks before Billy Ray s death, when he got
severely boot-stomped, breaking multiple ribs and puncturing the lung with a
sharp piece of bone. My testimony had served the dual purpose of clearing
Billy Ray s friend of an unjustified murder charge which pleased me and of
spotlighting Dr. Hamilton s incompetence which displeased me on two counts:
first, that he was incompetent, and second, that I was now part of the effort
to strip a longtime colleague of his license to practice medicine.
Hamilton had confronted me furiously after the trial, so I was prepared for
the worst when I entered the hearing room. He stood up and stepped toward me;
I braced for an assault, verbal or even physical. Instead, he stretched out
his right hand. Startled, I took it and shook. No hard feelings, Bill, he
said with a smile and a squeeze of my hand.
Surprised at his change of tone, all I could come up with was, I hope not,
Garland.
Up at the front of the room, which was just a large conference room in one of
the state office buildings in downtown Knoxville, a panel of three
physicians members of the Board of Medical Examiners sat behind a long table.
To one side, a stenographer perched at a much smaller table, her fingers
poised over the odd little machine she used to transcribe words. I was
fascinated by the technology. Her machine, a stenograph, looked more like an
old-fashioned adding machine than a computer or typewriter; as she typed,
though, she would often press two or three keys at once, like playing a chord
on a piano. I had once asked a court reporter to explain and demonstrate the
technique to me. I m transcribing sounds, not words, she d said, and she had
me speak a few words at a time. She showed me what combinations of keys she
used to transcribe the various sounds I had uttered sometimes a chord
represented a syllable; sometimes an entire word; in one case, even an entire
phrase. It beat the hell out of anything I d ever seen: as if she d had to
master a new language and a musical instrument all at the same time. Ever
since, I d had great admiration for court reporters abilities.
Dr. Brockton, are you ready? The state s lawyer brought my mind back to the
business at hand. He had already briefed me on the charge against Hamilton:
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