Utah biology teachers don't have to talk about human origins, but they can if they want to — and many do. But some teachers, says Jordan High biology teacher Bauer, "avoid the leap that we have a common ancestor." Bauer herself shies away from the topic, because human evolution "is when people really bristle. That's when kids immediately forget everything else they've learned."

Professor Duane Jeffery, a professor of biology at Brigham Young University, estimates that "probably 90 percent of people who are LDS think the church is against evolution. But they don't get upset about it being taught in public schools." The reason, he says, is the church seminary system, which provides junior high and high school students with a class period of religious instruction during school hours.

"Most parents feel their religion is being take care of in seminary," Jeffery says.

Conservative gadfly Gayle Ruzicka, president of the Utah Eagle Forum, sees it this way: "Utah's children, for the most part are taught by their parents that evolution is not correct science. The parents feel more control because they know they're teaching their children the truth at home."

That truth, she says, is that "you are a child of God," a phrase that Mormons learn from the time they can talk, she says. "It's a year or two of learning about evolution vs. a lifetime of hearing that you are a child of God. Evolution just doesn't win out."

According to Randy Hall, assistant superintendent of the LDS Church Educational System, seminary teachers are told to refer to church statements included in what is known as the "BYU packet," a collection of four official statements on evolution made between 1909 and 1992. The statements are somewhat vague but do include sentences such as "Man is the child of God, formed in the divine image and endowed with divine attributes," and "Adam is the primal parent of our race." The packet does not include more clearly anti-evolution — and oft-quoted — unofficial statements such as those made by Elder Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve in 1988.

"We ask our teachers not to go beyond those (official) statements," Hall says, "because then it gets into private interpretation, and that could as easily be misunderstood as understood."

Seminary teachers, on the other hand, may be interpreting the statements more narrowly. As one seminary teacher told the Deseret Morning News, "the position we're told to take is the one the church takes: that man does not come from lower forms of life."

That's the message Woods Cross High School sophomore Isaac Wood has taken away from his seminary class this year. Wood also takes 10th-grade biology, where he has learned about evolution. "That's just what Darwin thought," he has concluded, "and that's great. but it's not what I believe. I'll study it if I have to to get a good grade." But human evolution, he says, is "bogus."