The Ohio state school board stuck up for science last week, voting to adopt new science standards that explicitly require the teaching of evolutionary theory in the state's public schools. The old science standards made no mention of evolution. The new ones do not prevent schools from teaching "intelligent design" (ID), a concept favored by creationists; however, students will not be tested on it.
Ohio has been closely watched on the evolution front since early this year as new science standards wended their way through the approval process. It's been a tense time, with creationists of various stripes (represented by the group Science Excellence for All Ohioans) trying to get the standards committee of the education board to delete Darwinian terms or at least present the concepts as controversial. Defenders of evolution (represented by the group Ohio Citizens for Science) lobbied to keep the standards confined to science.
The school board's decision "makes me proud to be an Ohioan," says philosophy professor Patricia Princehouse of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She says the board adopted a last-minute change that scientists had been pressing for: They changed the term "evolution theory" to "evolutionary theory." And they threw a small bone to the other side by adding the assertion that students should "understand how scientists today continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." ID backers, who argue that teachers should "teach the controversy," expressed satisfaction with this addition.
Just before the board voted, Case Western and the University of Cincinnati published the results of a scientists' poll that belied the creationist argument that there are scientific arguments for ID. Of the 500 respondents--including some from fundamentalist colleges--93% said they were not aware of any evidence that challenges the principles of evolution.
