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The devolving of evolution
The University of Kansas contemplates a creationist future.

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By Chris Colin

Aug. 25, 1999 | The Kansas Board of Education's decision two weeks ago to delete evolution from the state's science testing standards came to the University of Kansas like a bump in the night: foreboding but not yet materialized.

As the site of legitimate biological research and future home to any number of students ignorant of evolutionary theory, the university was suddenly faced with a question: What will this mean for the future?

The decision recalls the Scopes "Monkey trial," in which Tennessee schoolteacher John T. Scopes was convicted for teaching human evolution. The trial, which became a media extravaganza, pitted two of the country's most famous lawyers -- fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan and progressive Clarence Darrow -- against one another in an ideological battle over biblical and scientific truths. In that case, biblical truths won out and Scopes was ordered to pay a $100 fine.

But that was 1925, and memory of the case now plays as a humbling bit of American drama -- emblematized by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's 1955 play "Inherit the Wind," which took substantial liberties with the facts. Despite the massive success of the play -- and the 1960 movie version -- it had little effect on the Tennessee law, which continued to forbid teaching the notion that human beings were subject to the same evolutionary process as other life forms -- that is, that we might be "related" to apes -- for another decade.

Despite this relatively recent legal history and the rising tide of Christian fundamentalism, the Kansas school board decision still came as a surprise to many at the University of Kansas. After 150 years of biology built upon Charles Darwin's basic theory, how could such a ruling pass today? In a shrewd skirting of the Supreme Court's 1987 ruling that states couldn't force schools to teach creationism, the board's 6-4 vote managed to cast a mark against godless evolutionists without officially forbidding evolutionary theory. By discontinuing the testing of evolution theory in state assessment exams, the board successfully deprioritized it, letting the ghost of creationism in through high school's back door. (Sadly, the absence of a subject from standardized tests can be enough to dislodge it from a syllabus.)

Many expect the University of Kansas, along with other Kansas institutions, to suffer the fallout. But unlike corporations, which might choose to refrain from establishing national headquarters in the Sunflower State, KU has no choice. As at most public universities, a majority of KU's students come directly from the public schools of its home state.

"This isn't going to help our [future] students," says Ed Wiley, a KU professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and senior curator at KU's Natural History Museum.

Julie Wood, editor of the Daily Kansan, describes her campus as, above all, embarrassed. "This is a foundation of science and we're saying it's optional?" she asks, predicting consequences for the university. "They have a hard time getting good professors here anyway, so prospective teachers might be leery of teaching in a state where some high schools won't even mention evolution."

"It's know-nothingism," says Timothy Miller, chairman of the school's religious studies department. Miller reports that every member of his department opposes the school board's ruling. "It's a direct affront to education ... and there's a sense of great humiliation here."

Next page | The real cost: Not science but poetry