Kansas Board May Restore Teaching of Evolution

A newly elected Kansas Board of Education took a step Tuesday toward restoring evolution to state science curricula, more than a year after causing an uproar over how biology and faith should be taught in the classroom.

After more than two hours of debate, the board decided it would give final approval to the new standards at its Feb. 13-14 meeting. No vote was taken, but enough members signaled their support for the revised standards to guarantee their adoption next month.

The new science standards would replace those adopted in August 1999 that omitted references to many evolutionary concepts.

The discussion was dominated by board member Steve Abrams, one of the three remaining supporters of the current standards.

“It still comes across that this is dogma, that this is the only way it is,” Abrams said of the new version.

Others raised concerns about censoring opposing views on science.

“Why not teach everything that we know?” asked board member John Bacon.

John Staver, chairman of the committee that wrote the current standards, said the scientific community can’t test the supernatural or the existence of God.

“In my personal life, when I encounter that, I leave my science background and I go to church,” Staver said.

Evolution, a theory developed by Charles Darwin and others, holds that the Earth is billions of years old and that all life, including humans, evolved from simple forms through a process of natural selection. Some religious fundamentalists and others object to the teaching of evolution, saying it contradicts the biblical account of creation.

“You will be legislating naturalism into the public school curriculum,” said Jody Sjogren of the Intelligent Design Network, which says evidence shows that a higher power created the universe. “We need to stop making evolution a religion.”

But Jack Krebs of Kansas Citizens for Science said the revisions would help improve the state’s tarnished image with scientists by restoring mainstream standards on the history of the universe.

The standards deleted references to “macroevolution”--the process of change from one species to another--but included references to “microevolution,” or changes within species.