Utah's non-war over evolution

In Dover, Pa., the school board voted in January that biology students must learn about alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution, a decision that is now being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This winter a federal judge ruled that the school board in Cobb County, Ga., must remove stickers — "evolution is a theory, not a fact" — that the board had previously ordered placed on all high school biology textbooks. The school board is now appealing that order. Kansas, whose state school board had ordered evolution removed from the curriculum in 1999 then reinstated it in 2001, is now revisiting the issue, with an anti-evolution majority now on the school board. In state legislatures like Montana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, bills were introduced this year that would mandate that teachers include "alternative theories" to evolution, or would allow teachers to challenge evolutionary theory in the classroom. Some of the bills failed to get out of committee, some are still in play.

Darwin's theory was first articulated in "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." There is scientific evidence, wrote Darwin, that the variety and complexity of life on Earth are the result of two processes acting in concert — random mutation and natural selection. Although most random mutations are harmful to an organisms's chances of survival and reproduction, there is occasionally a random mutation that is helpful; natural selection is the process of harmful mutations dying out and helpful mutations being passed on to future generations, eventually producing new species. Humans, too, according to Darwin, evolved in this way, and can thus trace their ancestry all the way back to primitive life forms.

Utah's "science standards" require that public school biology students "understand that biological diversity is a result of evolutionary processes." Students, for example, must be able to "cite evidence that supports biological evolution over time (e.g., geologic and fossil records, chemical mechanisms, DNA structural similarities, homologous and vestigial structures)" and "identify the role of mutation and recombination in evolution."

The standards do not mention human evolution in particular, an omission that earned Utah a B rating in a 2000 survey of state science standards conducted for the Fordham Foundation.