Kansas Educators Debate Evolution

Hearings Focus On Whether Students Should Be Taught Criticism

TOPEKA, Kansas, May 6, 2005

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Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute, uses a slide and quote from Charles Darwin in his testimony supporting intelligent design. (AP)

(AP) Eighty years after Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was put on trial in one U.S. state, Kansas education officials began four days of trial-like hearings to consider changes to how Kansas students are tested on the origins of life.

Science groups are boycotting the hearings, held by a Board of Education subcommittee, because they view them as being rigged against evolution. The board could revise its science standards in June to include both the theory of evolution and criticism of it.

Many scientists fear that the board will follow recommendations from advocates of "intelligent design" in adopting standards critical of evolution. Conservatives hold a majority on the 10-member board.

Evolution says that changes in species can lead to new species, and that different species, including man and apes, have common ancestors. Intelligent design advocates contend the universe is so complex it must have been created by some higher power.

In 1999, the board deleted most references to evolution in the science standards. Later, current standards were adopted to include evolution as a key education concept.

Last year, the board asked a committee of educators to recommend changes to the standards and received two competing proposals, one of which would include criticism of evolution.

The board has sought to avoid comparisons of its hearings with the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in which teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a law against teaching evolution. But the hearings resemble a trial, with attorneys managing each side's case.

Witnesses were questioned by Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray, who was arguing against teaching theories other than evolution.

He asked witness Bill Harris, an advocate of intelligent design, "Where in the standards does it say teachers and students cannot discuss criticism of evolution?"

"It doesn't say that. I think it's implicit," said Harris, a professor of medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Instead of testifying at the first hearing, representatives of national and state science groups held the first of a planned series of news conferences at the Statehouse. On display Thursday night was a wheel barrow and two crates full of copies of scientific journals — to suggest evolution is well-documented.

"The only way we can make our point is to stop playing their game," said Harry McDonald, president of Kansas Citizens for Science.

Intelligent design advocates pointed to the boycott as evidence that evolution's supporters are afraid to debate.

The state board's standards determine what is on statewide tests, but local school boards decide what is actually taught and which textbooks are used.

Similar battles have been waged in the past few years in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

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Critics of evolution are supplying students with prepared questions on such topics as:

The origins of life. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life's building blocks may have formed on Earth - when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?

Darwin's tree of life. Why don't textbooks discuss the "Cambrian explosion," in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor - thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?

Vertebrate embryos. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for common ancestry - even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?

The archaeopteryx. Why do textbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds - even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?

Peppered moths. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection - when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don't normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?

Darwin's finches. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galapagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection - even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?

Mutant fruit flies. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution - even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?

Human origins. Why are artists' drawings of apelike humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident - when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?

Evolution as a fact. Why are students told that Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific fact - even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?

Source: Discovery Institute