The Kansas school board is preparing to change the rules on teaching evolution that have put it at odds with other states and nations.
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TOPEKA: The Kansas school board, long resistant to teaching evolution, is preparing to switch to science guidelines that embrace Charles Darwin's mainstream theories.
The new board, with a majority of Democrats and moderate Republicans, began debate today on what would be the fifth set of science standards for public schools in eight years.
The existing state standards suggest that widely accepted evolutionary concepts - a common origin for all life on Earth and the idea that changes in a species' genes can eventually cause new species to arise, for example - are challenged by new evidence.
Those rules, adopted by the school board in 2005, were backed by supporters of 'intelligent design', a theory which holds that life is so complex that it must have been created by a higher intelligence of some sort.
The new alternative set of guidelines, drafted by scientists and educators, would treat evolution as well-supported by research. It would also rewrite the standards' definition of science to limit it to the search for natural explanations for what is observed in the universe.
According to officials, the State Board of Education's swing back isn't likely to settle the issue, given many Kansans' religious objections and other misgivings about evolution.
"I don't think this issue is going to go away. I think it's going to be around forever," said board Chairman Bill Wagnon, a Topeka Democrat who supports evolution-friendly standards.
Last year, legal disputes or political, legislative or school debates over how evolution should be taught cropped up in at least seven other U.S. states. But none of those wranglings has garnered the attention that Kansas has since a conservative-led state board deleted most references to evolution in 1999.
"There's this, I think, political agenda to just ensure that evolution is the driving, underlying notion that has to be accepted in Kansas science standards in order for Kansas to keep its head up in the world, which is just bizarre," said board member Ken Willard, a Republican who supported the 2005 standards.
The Kansas debate over evolution has broadened into a debate about the state's treatment of the history of science. On the board's agenda is deleting a passage about abuses of science.
The wording of the passage mentions the Nazis, forced sterilisation and the decades-long Tuskegee syphilis study, in which public health officials falsely told poor, black men with the disease that they were being treated for it.
Critics claim the board is trying to sanitise the sometimes ugly history of science, while scientists argue the passage was inserted by supporters of intelligent design during the last revision and unfairly targets abuses perceived as linked to evolution.
The statewide education standards are used to develop standardised tests that measure how well students learn science, but decisions about the exact curriculum remain with the 296 local school boards.
