Revised Texts Inadequate on Evolution, Scientists Say

Scientists who have monitored the revision of school science textbooks say their coverage of evolution is still “insignificant and wholly inadequate,” and they plan to protest the expected approval of the books next week in Sacramento.

“We’re very disappointed. We had such high hopes for this process,” Thomas Jukes, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of biophysics said Friday.

Kevin Padian, a Berkeley professor of paleontology, said the science books “had a lot of garbage in them before, and they still have a lot of garbage.

“I think it is fair to say that some of them are better now, but many of them still aren’t worth the taxpayers’ money.”

Two months ago, in an unprecedented move that gained national attention, the state Board of Education rejected all the pending elementary and junior high science texts, saying they failed to cover important, if controversial, topics like evolution and human reproduction.

As the nation’s largest buyer of textbooks, California’s stand was seen as a significant victory for science over fundamentalism.

Since the September vote, the publishers have submitted revisions. Most added a few sentences or paragraphs, and a few added entire chapters. And on Monday, a state curriculum panel recommended that the state board approve the revised books.

Next week, the full board has scheduled a public hearing and a final vote on the books, with publishers saying they need a final action this month if they are to deliver the new books to schools by September.

Under California education law, elementary and junior high schools get state money to purchase texts, but school officials can only buy books that have gained official approval of the state Board of Education.

Until the last few days, approval of the revised books had been considered a formality, since the science curriculum panel, made up mostly of teachers and school administrators, had endorsed the revisions submitted by the publishers.

However, a group of 20 science professors from Berkeley, San Jose State University and San Diego State University say they will testify against the books next Thursday.

Superintendent Reading

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, who led the move to reject the books in September, said Friday that he has taken all 13 books home to read over the weekend.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Honig said. “There have been some substantial changes: more coverage of evolution, more examples, just more content in general. But they (scientists) want to go after the deeper question of the quality of coverage, and that may take a longer time.”

The scientific critics say the books still tiptoe around topics that might offend fundamentalists in states like Texas, or the creationists in California.

Padian of Berkeley said the books include sentences such as “many scientists believe” that the Earth was created billions of years ago, or that “most scientists believe” dinosaurs roamed the Earth millions of years ago.

Bones Are Evidence

“What is that supposed to mean? If dinosaurs are just a ‘belief’ that some of us have, what are those bones in the museum?” he said. “These matters are factual as gravity or relativity, but they are treated differently because they impinge on the beliefs of the fundamentalists.”

William Bennetta, a science writer and research associate with the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, examined all the revised books in Sacramento and has written a scathing 19-page letter to state officials.

Though a few books were improved, Bennetta said, the revised books in general are “just as equivocal, as misleading and as deliberately phony as the original text was.”

The state review panel had no biologists on it, he added, and the changes they approved are, in several cases, “incoherent, incompetent and generally inane.”

The state board hasn’t heard yet from the advocates of the biblical story of creation. In September, Kelly Seagraves and other creationists affiliated with the Creation Science Research Center in San Diego urged the board to treat evolution as a matter of theory, rather than as a matter of fact.

They cite a state board policy that opposes “dogmatism” on controversial subjects. State education officials say they expect creationists to testify at next week’s hearing that the books go too far in presenting evolution.