Creationism in Kansas

Kansas high school students take a statewide exam based on a set of standards approved by the Kansas State Board of Education. In 1998 the board asked a committee of scientists and science teachers to revise the standards. The committee based their work on standards that had been created by the National Research Council in 1995, and along the way they consulted the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other major science organizations. In May 1999, the committee presented the board with their proposed standards, based on the latest consensus among scientists on everything from astronomy to ecology. Among other things, the standards would have called for students to understand the fundamentals of evolution–how lineages adapt to their environment and how biologists use evolutionary theory to explain the nature of life’s diversity.

But when the committee presented its standards, something peculiar happened. One of the board members came forward with a different set of standards, which, it was later discovered, had been written by a creationist organization based in Missouri. The writing team refused to accept them but agreed to try to address the concerns of the conservative members of the board in their own standards. The board demanded that the standards include a statement about tolerating different points of view, which the writing team inserted. The board demanded that the writing team define microevolution and macroevolution, so the writing team explained how generation‑by‑generation changes (microevolution) produce large‑scale patterns and processes that fit under the label of macroevolution, such as the origin of new body plans and changing extinction rates. But the board then tried to get the writing team to drop any further discussion of macroevolution, which the writing team refused to do.

When the board met in August, the writing committee decided to take a stand: they demanded that the board vote to either accept or reject their standards. But the board abruptly switched the committee’s standards with yet another version of its own. At first glance, these new standards looked like the ones the writing committee had presented, but a closer look revealed that most references to evolution had been deleted. In the few passages that survived, the standards now declared that natural selection should be taught as a process that “does not add new information to the existing genetic code.” The state exams would not test students on evolution, or even on continental drift, the age of Earth, or the Big Bang. The board approved the new standards by a vote of 6 to 4.

By deleting original passages and adding false statements, the board would have made science classes perfectly amenable to strict creationists. Consider how students would be taught that “natural selection does not add new information to the existing genetic code.” In fact mutations such as gene duplications, combined with natural selection, create new kinds of genetic information all the time. By inserting this falsehood into the standards, the board was supporting the “microevolution yes, macroevolution no” claims of creationism.

The geology requirements also fell in line with creationism. The board dropped the requirement that students understand continental drift, the foundation of all modern studies of our planet. Instead, they suggested that students learn that “at least some stratified rocks may have been laid down quickly, such as Mount Etna in Italy or Mount St. Helens in Washington State.” Here they raised a specious argument favored by Flood Geology creationists to try to explain how geological formations could have formed in a few thousand years.

In making the classroom safe for creationism, the state board was destroying the committee’s attempts to teach students the fundamental nature of science. A theory was no longer “a well‑substantiated explanation” but merely “an explanation”–in other words, a guess. Science was no longer “the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us” but one of seeking “logical explanations.” With that wording, the board implied that scientists could discover supernatural forces.

Journalists quickly got wind of the board’s decision, and the state board of education was suddenly yanked out of obscurity. Governor Bill Graves announced he was disgusted by the board’s actions, and the presidents and chancellors of every Kansas state university condemned the vote. The board members who had voted in favor of the creationist standards suddenly found themselves besieged by the national press and claimed that they had acted only in the interests of good science. But in the process they ended up revealing more of their ignorance. “Where is the evidence for that canine‑looking creature that somehow has turned into a porpoise‑looking creature, or that cow that has somehow turned into a whale?” board of education chairwoman Linda Holloway asked a reporter for NBC, apparently unaware of the fossil record of whales with legs.

A grassroots opposition to the denatured standards sprang up in Kansas. It gathered strength in the months that followed, and in the next round of school board elections in 2000 the creationist‑leaning bloc suffered heavy losses. Two members (including Holloway) were defeated by moderate Republicans in the primary, and a third member resigned and was replaced with another moderate Republican. In February 2001 the board finally approved the original standards, with the teaching of evolution intact.

Creationists may have lost this round in Kansas, but they continue their political fight throughout the United States. In May 2000, Intelligent Design proponents were welcomed to Capitol Hill by conservative congressmen to describe their ideas. The Oklahoma legislature has passed a law declaring that biology textbooks must inform students that the universe was created by God. In Alabama, textbooks are pasted with warnings that evolution is a controversial theory, not a fact. In the spring of 2001 a bill was introduced in Louisiana preventing the state government from distributing false information such as radiometric dating.

These sorts of laws are not the only way to stop teachers from teaching evolution–intimidation works as well. In order to avoid controversy and stand‑offs with some parents, high school biology teachers often shy away from Darwin. “I talk to teachers at science‑teacher conferences and they tell me that their principal has told them just to skip evolution this year because it’s an election year, says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. “There is a new school board coming on and they don’t want any problems. That is crazy. I mean, that is just not the way to run a coherent curriculum.”

Paying the Price

The result of these conflicts is not a new generation of creationists, but a generation of students who don’t understand evolution. This is a bad state of affairs, and not simply because the theory of evolution stands as one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the past 200 years. Many careers that students might want to pursue actually depend on a solid understanding of evolution.

To search for oil and minerals, for example, you have to understand the history of life on Earth. For 4 billion years, species have evolved, given rise to new species, and become extinct. Their fossils can act as markers for rocks that were formed while they were alive. If geologists find some distinctive fossil plankton in a formation of rock that’s rich in oil, they know they may find oil somewhere else if they can find that same plankton again.

Evolution is even more important to biotechnology, because when researchers tinker with life itself, they have to deal with the fact that it evolves. The resistance that bacteria have to many antibiotics didn’t just happen: it unfolded according to the principles of natural selection, as the bacteria with the best genes for fighting the drugs prospered. Without understanding evolution, a researcher has little hope of figuring out how to create new drugs and determine how they should be administered.

The same goes for vaccines. As microbes evolve, they become isolated into genetically distinct populations, which create new branches on the evolutionary tree. A vaccine may work against one strain of a disease like AIDS, but fail against more common ones because they’re only distantly related. The evolutionary tree also tells scientists where diseases come from (in the case of AIDS, most likely chimps). That in turn can guide them to possible cures.

Evolution on its grandest scale can be just as crucial to business. Some of the biggest efforts in biotechnology these days are going into genome sequencing–decoding the complete sequence of our genetic code, as well as that of other life‑forms such as bacteria, protozoa, insects, and worms. The money’s going in because big profits may come out. Scientists are studying the genes of fruit flies because humans have very similar genes. Experiments on the flies may someday lead to medical miracles such as extending the human life span. But scientists will first need to learn how that similarity evolved. Medicine, in other words, has its roots in the Cambrian explosion.

The same kinds of applications may also come from understanding how different species have fused together over time. Take malaria. This disease, which kills around 2 million people every year, defies the best efforts of modern medicine. Recently scientists have discovered that the parasite that causes malaria carries genes that come from algae. Perhaps a billion years ago, the ancestor of this parasite engulfed a species of algae. Instead of digesting it, it turned the algae into a symbiotic partner, and today some of the algae’s genes remain. This discovery may reveal a way to attack malaria. If the parasite has some algae‑like qualities, the poisons that are known to kill plants might be able to kill it as well. Without an evolutionary framework, scientists would probably never have thought to try to destroy malaria with weed killers.

Biotechnology will keep speeding ahead, and it will keep relying on evolution as its central organizing principle. And it won’t wait for people who don’t understand how life evolves because someone else decided they didn’t need to.