Evolution at the Polls

In other election news, all eight of the Dover PA board of education members up for reelection (including some of the most vocal proponents of putting intelligent design into the science curriculum) were voted out in yesterday's election.

However, in a victory for the other side of the evolution debate, the Kansas School Board just passed new requirements mandating that evolution be called into question and the tenets of Intelligent Design be taught:

Meanwhile in Kansas, the Board of Education has voted to make the teaching of the principles of intelligent design mandatory.

Science teachers will now be required to instruct their students that evolutionary theory is not proven, and will have to add that life is in fact so complex, it could not have arisen without the involvement of some external agent, or higher power.

Board chairman Steve Abrams told Reuters: "This is a great day for education."
The new standards approved by the Board of Education mean several specific challenges must be leveled at Darwinian theory.

These include statements to the effect that the fossil record is inconsistent with evolutionary theory; that there is a lack of physical evidence to explain our genetic code, and that evolutionary explanations are "not based on direct observations...and often reflect inferences from circumstantial evidence", the BBC reports.

It seems to me that if the scientific evidence for ID is actually all that strong, it would become accepted and taught in science curriculums soon enough as it is. One never sees advocates of string theory or 'the big crunch' advocating that school boards mandate the teaching of their theories in schools. But then, few if any people have any religious/philosophical investment in whether or not those theories are true.