Evolution, 'design' are still hot topics

There's no legal or scientific room for teaching Intelligent Design in public schools, National Center for Science Education executive director Eugenie Scott told a science teachers convention in Salt Lake City Thursday.

But evolution challenges are not going away, she said. Intelligent Design was debated on two Utah college campuses last week. And a Utah senator says while he won't carry another origins of life bill, something else could be in the works.

"Yes, it's coming, but it's not coming this year ... something that will address this opinion about Darwinism, that defines how life started," Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said Thursday. He would not reveal specifics.

The National Science Teachers Association's Western Area Conference is at the Salt Palace Convention Center through Saturday. Discussions will range from how Pluto's "demotion" as a planet might affect instruction to today's panel discussion on parent and student issues with evolution.

Scott outlined court rulings leading to today's evolution debate, beginning with a court-upheld ban on evolution lessons in the 1920s-era Scopes trial. The U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s overturned that ban as religion-based.

By 1980, 20 states required schools give evolution and creation science equal instructional time. An Arkansas judge struck that down, saying you can't start with a conclusion and refuse to change it regardless of the data gathered and call it science.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the premise in 1987, but the ruling opened the door to today's debate, Scott said. It said teachers can present alternative ideas to evolution regarding the origins of life. Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent also said people have a right to present in schools whatever scientific evidence there may be against evolution.

Scott says there isn't any. "Common ancestry is the only game in town."

But proponents of Intelligent Design, or the idea that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, disagree. Biological philosopher Paul Nelson of the Discovery Institute, in a Utah Valley State College panel discussion last week, said that while not yet a scientific theory, Intelligent Design may gain legitimacy in the scientific community to explain origins of Earth and its inhabitants.

Scott said the concept is the same old idea, different name, noting a Dover, Pa., judge said it couldn't be taught in public schools last year.

Intelligent Design was never part of Utah legislation. Rather, Buttars' bill directed the State Board of Education to stress Darwin's theory of evolution is not empirically proven.