From The Washington Post, 8/6/06:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/05/AR2006080500718.html?nav=rss_opinion

Nothing Wrong With Kansas

State voters move science education out of the Victorian era.

Sunday, August 6, 2006; Page B06


FOR THE SECOND time in less than a year, voters have turned out
office policymakers who insisted on teaching kids bad science.

Last year, the people of Dover, Pa., got rid of a group of school
board members who injected the theory of "intelligent design" into
high school biology.

Last week, Republican primary voters in Kansas ousted the conservative
majority on the state Board of Education, which had adopted science
standards embracing intelligent design and casting doubt on Darwinian
evolution.

Moderate Republicans replaced two conservatives -- giving those
supporting science at least a 6-to-4 majority, even if the other
conservatives hold on in the general election.

The vote, which should lead to changes to those embarrassing
standards, is an encouraging sign that even in conservative
jurisdictions, most people want kids to be taught biology, not
religion.

The Kansas board has been fighting over evolution since 1999, when it
moved to eliminate references to Darwinian theory from statewide
standards.

After anti-evolutionists lost their majority, the board restored
evolution's place.

But the conservatives regained the majority in 2004 and moved to
promote intelligent design -- a challenge to Darwinian theory based
not on biblical inerrancy or overt creationism but on purportedly
scientific flaws in the theory.

Its proponents claim that they merely intend to make sure that
schoolchildren get a full sense of the scientific controversy over
evolution.

The trouble with this liberal-seeming pose is that there is no
scientific controversy over whether evolution happens or over its
essential mechanisms.

Intelligent design is a defensible theological position -- the belief
that life is so complex and perfect that a creator must lie somewhere
behind it.

But being untestable in its positing of a supernatural explanation for
natural phenomena, it is no more scientific than the belief that
Athena was born from Zeus's head.

Teaching it as science does a grave disservice to students who wish to
understand natural phenomena that only evolution truly explains.

How do bacteria become drug-resistant?

Why do birds, bees and bats all have wings?

Intelligent design can lead only to unintelligent students, or at
least badly educated ones.

In the seesawing of Kansas politics on this issue, it is too early to
declare victory.

It is, however, encouraging that voters seem to be insisting, at least
for now, that when students study biology, they learn the real thing.

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"The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science
collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke
miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into
the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to
abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all
fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon
distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to
characterize the ideas of their opponents."

Stephen Jay Gould

Harry