In the case of the flycatcher, however, the hot male birds were so busy getting their groove on, they ignored their little ones. The busted birds, on the other hand, were better fathers, creating sons who later had no problem getting the ladies to lay a few eggs.

The idea that females choose mates by getting an eyeful of how they look in their genes is being increasingly challenged. “Instead of choosing mates who will increase the genetic quality of their offspring, females make choices that will increase their number of offspring,” Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden told Begley.

If you think that’s interesting, check out these other tidbits from the animal kingdom: Female crickets are, um, sexual go-getters, mating with any male who asks in an attempt to increase the genetic diversity and chance of survival of her baby crickets. Female red deer sneak off with the wimpy stags while the males with the biggest antlers blow all their energy fighting each other for sexual supremacy. And it doesn’t matter how little plumage a male red-winged blackbird has; he has as much chance of getting lucky as his pretty boy brethren.

“Each kind of male has its own way of going about its life. Each works out fine,” stresses Roughgarden. So what does this tell us? Well, for starters, women are not always won over by all the male genetic bling out there. Maybe it explains why human females are so fond of the sweet guys with the soft bodies and bald spots, who make us laugh, and take good care of their little flycatchers. Now, that’s sexy!

You see, Ruse is a philosopher of science and, to use his phrase, an “ardent evolutionist.” He stops a crucial degree or two short of declaring himself an atheist, but he firmly believes in Darwin’s theory that evolution (now established as fact) by natural selection (still under discussion, although widely accepted) is the driving force behind the diversity of life on this planet. He thinks that creationists, both of the old-fashioned “young earth” variety and the newfangled intelligent-design model — which President Bush said earlier this week should be taught in schools — are spewing dangerous claptrap and are in league, consciously or not, with a sinister right-wing political agenda.

Ruse has devoted much of his career, first at the University of Guelph in Ontario and more recently at Florida State, to battling the creationist agenda in science and philosophy, in the classroom and the political arena. At the same time, he has become increasingly fascinated with the indistinct borderlands between science and religion. He has leapt to the defense of scientists who profess religious faith, in the face of derision from prominent atheistic Darwinians like Richard Dawkins. He has supported Christians and other believers who argue that religious faith and evolutionary science do not necessarily contradict one another, and who have resisted the rising tide of fundamentalism.

In Ruse’s 2000 book “Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?” he answered the question forcefully in the affirmative, while making clear he wasn’t personally a believer. On the other hand, in his 2003 book “Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?” Ruse answered that question more or less in the negative, politely describing creationism and intelligent design (often simply called I.D.) as intellectual dead ends — while reasserting that he thought evolutionary thinking could be compatible with theistic religion.

Yet, even in the context of these moderate and nuanced positions and this steadfast rejection of absolutism, Ruse’s new book, “The Evolution-Creation Struggle,” comes as something of a surprise. On one level, the book is a fairly standard intellectual history of how the 18th century Enlightenment led to a crisis of faith in the Western world, which led in turn to two responses: a turn toward fundamentalist, evangelical religion on one hand, and a turn toward increasingly non-theistic reason and science on the other. The two forces have effectively been in combat ever since, which carries us up to science textbooks, school prayer, abortion and homosexuality, sacrilegious TV sitcoms, the last two presidential elections and the rest of today’s “culture wars.”

Above and beyond that, Ruse makes a heretical argument in “The Evolution-Creation Struggle” that will not endear him to members of his own team. Creationism and evolutionism, he says, are siblings, born of the same historical crisis, and they provide distorted reflections of each other. “The two sides share a common set of questions and, in important respects, common solutions,” he writes. More explosively, he thinks both are essentially theological in character; they are “rival religious responses to a crisis of faith — rival stories of origins, rival judgments about the meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies — pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind.”

Ruse is drawing a crucial distinction between evolutionary science, narrowly considered — which need not have any religious or spiritual consequences — and evolutionism, the secular, atheistic religion he says often accompanies and enfolds Darwinism. Leading evolutionists like Dawkins, Ruse believes, have failed to draw clear distinctions between the two, and have led many to believe that Darwinian science is fatally allied to an arrogant atheism and a hostile caricature of religious belief. In essence, Ruse believes that fundamentalist evolutionists like Dawkins and W.D. Hamilton hold similar beliefs to fundamentalist creationists — both sides would agree that Darwinism is a “dark theology” that removes ultimate meaning and purpose from the universe and augurs the death of God.

You might say that, in this new book, Ruse is calling for a Reformation within the church of evolutionism. He himself honors the truth claims of science and is “a hell of a lot closer” to atheism than to religious belief. But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness, Ruse suggests, evolutionism is in fact a secular religion, a church without Christ. And if that’s what it is, what is it doing in biology class? The current Supreme Court, trending ever rightward on questions of religion in public life, may wish to address this question sooner rather than later.

In the end, there can be no doubt that Michael Ruse is saying these dangerous things because he wants evolutionary science, and even evolutionism, once cured of its excesses, to carry the day. In the main, his argument is pragmatic: Amid America’s long-running cultural and religious war, he seeks to identify common philosophical ground where believers and atheists can coexist without sacrificing the integrity of science. If he thinks evolutionists should learn to respect the creationists’ faith and develop a deeper understanding of their arguments, that’s largely because, as evangelists already know, you have to speak the language before you can convert the heathen. I gleaned all this in two long and cheerful phone conversations with Ruse, the first while he was on vacation in Canada, and the second from his home in Tallahassee, Fla.

Not everybody in the evolutionist camp is going to be happy with this book, are they?

No, they’re not. There’s a review coming out in Science this week that is — well, it’s not violently hostile — but it’s a little less than overwhelmingly pleased. My feeling is that, having committed myself so openly to Darwinism, and having spent 30 years fighting creationists — if anybody’s got the moral authority to do what I’ve done, well, here I am.

You raise this argument that creationism and evolutionism are essentially two competing religions. That’s exactly what creationists say, or at least the sharper ones: “We have two competing belief systems. All we ask is to have our case considered.” One could look at this and say, “Wow, Ruse is saying the creationists are right.”

I am saying that. I think they are right. I want to qualify that immediately by saying that the creationists play fast and loose. Like a lot of us, creationists slide from one position to another according to the kind of argument they want to make. A major theme of the intelligent design people is that theirs is in fact a scientific position, and I think that’s a double whammy.

Inasmuch as the creationists want to say openly that both sides are making religious commitments, I have to agree with them on that. I don’t think that modern evolutionary theory is necessarily religious. Evolutionary theory was religious, and there’s still a large odor of that over and above the professional science. The quasi-religious stuff is still what gets out into the public domain, whether it’s Richard Dawkins or Edward O. Wilson or popularizers like Robert Wright. Certainly Stephen Jay Gould. Whether you call it religious or philosophical, I would say these people are presenting a weltanschauung.

You don’t come right out and say this, but some of the things that the secular religion of evolutionism has proposed are more than a little troubling. W.D. Hamilton’s stuff about how we should permit infanticide in order to keep sick and disabled people out of the gene pool is pretty hard to stomach.

Oh, it makes my hair stand on end.

I felt like I needed to rush off to the nearest Baptist church and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. Anything to get away from that guy!

One almost does feel like one needs to douse myself with holy water. I do say, somewhat cryptically, that the religion of evolutionism may be more troublesome than it’s worth. But one of the things I’m trying to do, at least until the conclusion, is to pull back from moral evaluations.

One of the things that may alarm people in both camps is your idea that evolutionism and creationism are actually brother and sister.

The basic theme of the book is that the Enlightenment brought on a crisis. This is not my personal view — it’s a very standard position in the history of religion. In many respects, the Enlightenment was more troublesome than the Reformation, because for the first time people were faced with the possibility that, well, it’s all not true.

This led to twin reactions. On the one hand, the rise of evangelical faith. It’s not coincidental that Methodism really takes off in the 18th century. And on the other hand, you’ve got the rise of reason and progress. In France, the rise of the philosophes. But it was just as much a British and American phenomenon. That’s where we’re off and running, and from that point it’s a question of how these two positions unfurl.

This is a sibling relationship, because they both come from the same parent. So often what they are doing is defining themselves against each other. Hamilton makes my hair stand on end — but what is Hamilton talking about? He’s talking about the family. What is Phillip Johnson talking about? [Ruse quotes Johnson, the founder of the I.D. movement, discussing family morality in a Christian-oriented "rational society."] He too is talking about the family. What I find fascinating is the extent to which one finds that the two sides are talking at each other. This is not a question of one side talking about putting a man on the moon and the other side talking about homosexuality. These two sides are talking about the same issues.

Well, and the rhetoric of both sides is subject to slippage, as you’ve said. The evolutionists reject creation science by saying it’s not science — but they’re just resorting to a dictionary definition of science that, in effect, they wrote. As you say in the book, it’s a bit too slick.

What I find particularly troublesome is the extent to which evolutionists and Darwinians say, oh no, we’re doing science, and if you do this you have to be an agnostic at minimum, and preferably an atheist. I want to say, “Hang on, if the position implies this, then aren’t you taking what I would want to argue is a religious stand — namely, there ain’t no God?” My position is that there isn’t a necessary connection between Darwinism and atheism.

One of your central ideas is that there’s a slippery philosophical slope that leads from evolution to evolutionism, from scientific naturalism to atheism.

There’s no question that there’s a slope. Whether it’s a slope that, once one gets on it, one finds oneself inevitably carried down it, I think that’s another matter. Because you become an evolutionist, it does not necessarily follow that you become an atheist. I stand on that very strongly. There are many good studies showing that the secularists of the 19th and 20th centuries became secularists because of David Hume or Tom Paine — or because they were felt up by the local vicar and said, “I’m never going there again!” Then they find evolution, and this gives them a satisfactory alternative.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that once you start on this slope, unless there are reasons otherwise, a lot of people find it’s easier to go downhill than to stay put. A lot of people, having taken God out of their lives six days a week, suddenly say, “Well, on the seventh day I’d rather put my feet up!”

Another point of agreement between the two sides. Creationists will tell you that science and evolution are atheistic, and that evolution leads inescapably to the end of God. That’s why they’re against it.

Yeah, the fundamentalists on both sides would want to argue precisely that. Although I’m not a believer myself, I just don’t think it necessarily follows. On the other hand, Christians and others need to spend a lot more time articulating a position that one can be a Christian and a scientist at the same time and bolster traditional readings of both. We’ve all become so polarized — so shit-scared of the situation — that I don’t think we’re doing what we should.

You’re protective of Simon Conway Morris, who’s a pretty lonely example: a prominent evolutionary biologist and a Christian believer. You don’t feel that he’s required to perform a set of difficult intellectual gymnastics?

I don’t think so, really. If I were to spend another two or three years on this book, I would have done a much bigger survey, to get some notion of how many active evolutionists are practicing Christians, or at least sympathetic. At one level Conway Morris is a lovely example for somebody like me — he’s a well-respected evolutionist and a very committed Christian. So you’re damn right I’m protective! To a certain extent he’s, not an oddball, but an exception. I go on to people like Holmes Rolston, who explicitly want to reject or modify Darwinism [in the interest of belief]. I don’t see that Conway Morris wants to do that.

Some of the attempts to wage peace between evolutionary biology and religion are a little problematic. Stephen Jay Gould’s famous quote about science and religion being “non-overlapping magisteria” sounds nice. But doesn’t he really mean: “Our magisterium is the truth, and yours is superstitious crap”?

Oh, he does. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I like a lot of Gould’s writing even when I don’t agree with him. He starts out saying, “Twin magisteria, we can both go our own ways.” But by the time he starts talking about religion, virtually all the things religious people hold dear go out the window. Now, you may think they should. But don’t give me any codswallop about twin magisteria then. If you say, “Well, I’m going to let religion have what it wants. But by the way, no Resurrection, no Incarnation, none of this nonsense about life after death.” If I were a religious person, I’d have to say thanks but no thanks.

There’s a creationist argument you address briefly that I find interesting: the idea that the Bible — and the entire Christian faith — starts to come unglued if you don’t read Genesis literally. You’ve got no Adam and Eve, no Eden, no Flood. You can’t say there was no death and suffering before the Fall if the Fall was mythical and we had zillions of years of dinosaurs and insects. When Jesus refers to Noah and Moses, he’s just recycling myth; it all becomes an interesting parable to be read however you like. What happens to the divinity of Christ, or the Resurrection, or any of it? They have a point, don’t they?

They do and they don’t. Fundamentalists themselves don’t read the Bible literally. Jesus has a whole pile of stuff about turning the other cheek — Quakers read that part literally, but George Bush doesn’t. What about when Jesus says, “Leave your father and your mother and your wife and follow me”? A sophisticated biblical scholar is going to say that Jesus was living in an apocalyptic age. Jesus thought that the end was coming. This does not deny that Jesus was God, but the point is that Jesus was man at the same time. Being man means being limited, and Jesus shows his humanity in the fact that he was limited.

We all interpret the Bible. By the time we get to Revelation — every fundamentalist spends time deciding, is the Antichrist the pope, or is it Saddam Hussein? Is the Whore of Babylon the Catholic Church? They’re all in this business. Do they actually mean that she’s a female who gets shagged on a regular basis who lives in Babylon? No, they don’t. You cannot read the Bible literally, or at least nobody ever does.

As you note, the Catholic Church has done an uneasy dance with evolution over the years. Intellectuals have embraced it, popes have mostly avoided it. John Paul II came awfully close to endorsing it a few years ago, and now Benedict XVI seems to be backing away or hedging his bets.

Look, the previous pope had been a professor at the University of Krakow. Who was the most famous professor at Krakow, before John Paul II? None other than Nicolas Copernicus. There’s a huge paper trail on this; the pope was extremely proud of Polish culture in general and Copernicus in particular. He had a very strong vested interest in forward-looking science. So the fact that John Paul II was friendly toward evolution came as no surprise to me. He was adamant that when it came to human souls, that required a miracle. But he went to his grave without a worry that those things were compatible.

I think the new chap does not have the same sympathy toward science. Whether this is bound up with the social context, especially in America, I don’t know. I’m putting together a hypothesis here. The current pope is much more sensitive to the American divide; he sees this battle being waged and he sees that conservative Catholics have aligned themselves with conservative evangelicals over the abortion issue and homosexuality. To what extent he believes that by endorsing an I.D. position, he’s coming to their aid, I don’t know. But it’s a reasonable hypothesis.

So what has become of the Augustinian tradition within Christianity, which would be perfectly happy to accept evolution, geology, the Big Bang, the laws of physics, whatever science has got? You know, God works in mysterious ways, the Bible is a human document subject to interpretation, and so on. Is that gone?

In the great Catholic universities of the world — and I’d include Notre Dame and Fordham in the United States — most of the theologians would be fairly comfortable with a position like that. I’ve never seen Cardinal Avery Dulles [the leading American Catholic theologian] write on that, but he’s very sympathetic to John Henry Newman [who rejected fundamentalism and saw little or no conflict between evolution and the church's teachings]. You may see some Thomists as well as Augustinians, you may see some wrestling with the question of natural theology, but most of them would feel fairly comfortable about evolution. But in America at the moment, with this bastardized right-wing evangelical Catholicism, I don’t see a hell of a lot of deep thinking going on.

Creationists will describe evolution as a “dark theology,” a view of life as a meaningless process driven by death and extinction. To what extent do evolutionists themselves agree with that?

There are those who think just that. It’s not just Dawkins. The idea that life is driven basically by chance and necessity is a fairly popular refrain. Not all of them come across that way. Someone like Edward O. Wilson, who has no more theological belief than Dawkins, nevertheless sets out to present a very optimistic, humanist position. It’s like Christians: You know, Calvinists present one hell of a dark picture. On the other hand, you have a few drinks with Martin Luther and you go home pissed as a newt and with a lot of funny, dirty stories.

You do your best, considering you don’t agree with creationism at all, to argue that it has a coherent intellectual history, that it possesses some integrity. Is that fair?

That’s a good way of putting it. Do I think that? “Coherent intellectual integrity”? At some level, if you’re very careful about how you use those words. I think it’s certainly got a deeper and more consistent philosophy or metaphysics than simply just ad-hoc making it up as you go along. Whether I think it’s a good position or not, I think it’s a deeply rooted premillennial view of life.

That distinction, between premillennial and postmillennial thinking, is very important in your book. Can you break that down a little?

It’s a question of how you read Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. It says there’s going to be a millennium, a thousand-year period, and then the Last Judgment will happen. From way back when, there have been three readings of this. The Augustinian position is to say, “I don’t want to get into any of this speculation.” You’re eschewing eschatology. You’re not too worried about the question of where we’re going, you deal with where we are now. Generally that has been the Catholic position.

You’ve got two other positions. One is premillennial, which says Jesus is going to come before the millennium. This was tarted up in the 19th century by people who argued we were going to have the Rapture and all that; that’s where you find the roots of today’s fundamentalism. The premillennialist believes that Jesus is coming in the not too distant future, and he’s going to make a heavy-duty judgment between those who are saved and those who are not. We should focus on personal purity and evangelical work, bringing in as many souls as possible. You do not get involved in grand plans for the future. Apart from the fact that these are probably seductions of the Antichrist, they’re pointless.

The more liberal interpretation is the postmillennialist position: We don’t want to get into this whole business of a thousand years, a thousand days, whatever it is. Yes, Jesus is coming — we’re Christians. But that’s not the point. What we’ve got to do is, as in William Blake’s poem, we’ve got to build Jerusalem “among these dark Satanic mills.” Does that mean that Blake thought, and the British Labor Party thinks, that you’ve got to build a model of Jerusalem near Huddersfield or something? Of course not. What they mean is, we’ve got to strive to make a better world now.

What I’ve found is that your evolutionists, whether secular or spiritual, are to a person postmillennialist. From Holmes Rolston to Conway Morris to Ed Wilson — nobody could be more of a postmillennialist than Ed. He says, “No, I’m not into that,” but what he means is that he’s not into the whole Jesus Christ thing. But I also know that he grew up in an Alabama Baptist family, where eschatology and end things are absolutely vital. What one must do throughout life is say, not “What am I doing here and now?” but “What does this presage for the future?”

That brings us back to where we came in. These two sides distort each other like bendy mirrors at the fairground. They’re both worried about the future. The question is, what should we do to prepare for the future? This is the whole thesis of my book: Evolutionism and creationism really are siblings.

So what’s the most compelling aspect of the creationist case? If they take their best shot at you, what is it?

Look, I want to make it absolutely clear that I want to understand creationism, not endorse it. It’s important for us evolutionists to understand what is motivating creationists. Why do people hold these prima facie lunatic views? Which I think they are. I’m a university professor; my job is to influence people. I’m certainly not going to influence any of my students if I just go in there and laugh at them for being Genesis freaks. I might get somewhere if I can talk to them a little bit about eschatology. I’m not going to convince everybody, but I might get one or two of them to think, “Oh, there’s more to it than I thought.”

But you’ve already put your finger on it: The most interesting thing that the creationists are doing is pointing, as Matthew says, at the beams in the eyes of the evolutionists. Meaning that we all too often get into evolutionism and link up our evolutionary positions with social prescriptions and with atheism.

I’m all in favor of social prescriptions, and I’m not knocking anybody for being an atheist. I call myself a skeptic, but that’s a hell of a lot closer to atheism than it is to Christianity. But I want to see what grounds you have for saying that, and whether or not your positions follow from one another. If they do, maybe you should ask yourself, “Am I not being a hypocrite in teaching evolutionary biology in American schools?” Given the fact that it’s clearly illegal. You’re not allowed to teach religion in biology class.

I can’t understand why I can’t get through people’s thick skulls on this one. If in fact Darwinian evolutionary theory implies atheism, then you ought not to be teaching it in schools! It’s not good enough to say, “Well, I’m a National Socialist. But the fact that that meant a lot of Jews were hauled off to Auschwitz, that’s not my worry!” It bloody is! If your theory leads to 6 million Jews being made into soap, not only is there something deeply troubling about your theory, but you’ve got a moral obligation to face up to its implications. If this theory leads to atheism, then it’s got religious implications.

Are the creationists genuine in their belief?

I really, truly think so. I think sometimes they have worries about how it all fits together. I know the philosopher Paul Nelson, who has said that theologically he’s drawn very strongly to a young-earth creationism. Scientifically, he realizes there’s a lot to be said for a much older earth. Paul is genuinely puzzled. In the end he votes for theology over science because, you know, that’s his paradigm. That’s not to say they don’t have motivations. Phillip Johnson, after a brilliant beginning to his legal career, had become best known as the author of textbooks. It’s pretty clear that he has found it very satisfying to lead a movement like this, just at a personal level.

I see the sacrifices they make. William Dembski [the mathematician and philosopher who is among the I.D. movement's intellectual stars] is a very bright guy who should have been able to get a very good job, and he’s reduced to going off to some theological tinpot college in Tennessee or something [actually, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.]. Paul Nelson hasn’t got a regular job. They’re making sacrifices for their faith. While I think their position is terrible, I don’t see them as evil people. I don’t see them as Hitlers. They’re caught up in an appalling, idiosyncratic American religion. So they’re not the first.

How closely allied is creationism to right-wing politics? When we read that 45 to 50 percent of the public claims to believe in a literal reading of Genesis, we assume we also know who those people voted for. Is that fair?

Well, look at the 2004 survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which I refer to in my conclusion. They have dug more deeply than I’m able to do. There’s no question that red state equals George W. Bush equals not just anti-evolutionism, but opposition to homosexual marriage, opposition to abortion, strong support for capital punishment and strong sympathy for going into Iraq. I see the evolution-creation dispute as a litmus test for a much broader divide in American society.

Is that why you think creationism is dangerous? Or is that a kind of category confusion?

It’s a two-level answer. I think creationism is dangerous because I don’t think you should teach young people bad ideas. I’m a post-Enlightenment person. Inasmuch as I see creationism as a litmus test, I don’t think creationism as such is dangerous. I think premillennialism is dangerous, because this inclines you to simplistic and dangerous positions. You hear echoes of this when George Bush talks about the “evildoers.” I think the decision to go to war in Iraq was bound up with many different issues; Cheney just did it for the oil. But I do see it as allied to premillennial thinking, and that’s even before you get to the Israel issue. Why are evangelical Christians so gung-ho in favor of Israel? Well, it’s not because they like Jews. It’s because of their eschatological reading of the Book of Revelation. I do think these things are very dangerous.

Well, there’s also the capacity of Americans to hold essentially contradictory sets of beliefs. On one hand, we’re good Christians who believe in Genesis. On the other hand, we want our kids to have a modern scientific education. I don’t know how widespread that is, but I suspect it’s out there.

That’s quite right. There are always 5 percent who do believe in evolution but also think humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Science is part of our culture as much as Genesis. You can’t turn everyone into an evolutionist, but I’m not certain that the level of opposition is as black as people think. Americans, given your exceptionalism and your feeling that you are God’s chosen race, have more of a capacity for self-delusion than other people. With the possible exception of upper-class English people.

“This country wasn’t founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution,” Buckingham, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears a red, white and blue crucifix pin on his lapel, said at the meeting. “This country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such.”

Casey Brown and her husband, fellow board member Jeff Brown, were stunned. “I was picturing the headlines,” Jeff said months later.

“And we got them,” Casey added.

Indeed, by the end of 2004, journalists from across the country and from overseas had come to Dover to report on the latest outbreak of America’s perennial war over evolution. By then, Buckingham had succeeded in making Dover the first school district in the country to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” — an updated version of creationism couched in modern biological terms. In doing so, he ushered in a legal challenge from outraged parents and the ACLU that could turn into a 21st century version of the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial.”

The Dover case is part of a renewed revolt against evolutionary science that’s been gathering force in America for the past four years, a symptom of the same renascent fundamentalism that helped propel George Bush to victory. Since 2001, the National Center for Science Education, a group formed to defend the teaching of evolution, has tallied battles over evolution in 43 states, noting they’re growing more frequent.

After 1987, when the Supreme Court declared the teaching of creationism in public school unconstitutional in Edwards vs. Aguillard, the doctrine seemed to be shut out of public schools once and for all. In the last few years, though, intelligent design has given evolution’s opponents new hope. Now, emboldened by their growing political power, religious conservatives are once again storming the barricades of science education.

The same month Bush was reelected, the rural Grantsburg, Wis., school district revised its curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism and intelligent design. After a community outcry — including a letter of protest from 200 Wisconsin clergy — the district revised the policy but continued to mandate that students be taught “the scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory,” a common creationist tactic that fosters the illusion that evolution is a controversial theory among scientists.

Other anti-evolution initiatives have affected entire states. In the November election, creationists took over the Kansas Board of Education. The last time the board had a majority, in 1999, it voted to erase any mention of evolution from the state curriculum. Kansas became a laughingstock and the anti-evolutionists were defeated in the next Republican primary, leading to the policy’s reversal. Now, newly victorious, the anti-evolutionists plan to introduce the teaching of intelligent design next year.

Similarly, this past December, the New York Times reported that Missouri legislators plan to introduce a bill that would require state biology textbooks to include at least one chapter dealing with “alternative theories to evolution.” Speaking to the Times, state Rep. Cynthia Davis seemed to compare opponents of intelligent design to al-Qaida. “It’s like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn’t want to go,” she said. “I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don’t want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we’re going to take it back.”

Right-wingers in Congress, on talk radio and on cable TV, are stoking the anti-evolution rebellion, insisting that academic freedom means the freedom to teach creationism. Having shown their strength in the election, cultural conservatives aren’t in the mood to compromise. America is a democracy and they have the numbers. They see no reason why the principles of science shouldn’t be up for popular vote.

On Dec. 14, the ACLU announced that it was representing 11 Dover parents in a lawsuit against the town. The school board’s intelligent-design policy, their complaint said, had violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, “which prohibits the teaching or presentation of religious ideas in public school science classes.”

That day, a few of the parents joined their attorneys for a press conference in the rotunda of Pennsylvania’s capitol in Harrisburg. Reporters and cameramen crowded around the microphone as a succession of lawyers, liberal clergymen and scientists spoke. The Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, came from D.C. for the event. “We’ve been battling this from Hawaii to California to New Hampshire to Cobb County,” he said, referring to the suburban Atlanta school district that had recently put warning stickers on its biology textbooks calling evolution “a theory, not a fact.”

As the cameras rolled, a few protesters tried to edge their way into the frame. A man named Carl Jarboe, in a purple sport coat and a fur hat, stood near the parents holding a fluorescent green sign saying, “ACLU Censors Truth.” His wife, wearing a kerchief on her head and small round glasses, held a similar sign saying “Evolution: Unscientific and Untrue. Why Does the ACLU Oppose Schools Giving All the Evidence?”

The parents ignored them. Most were hesitant in front of all the cameras. They weren’t culture warriors and they didn’t speak in ideological terms. Instead, they talked about what Buckingham and the other creationists were doing to their school and their community.

“We don’t believe that intelligent design is science, and we have faith in ourselves as parents that we can do a good job teaching our children about religion,” Christy Rehm, a 31-year-old mother of four, said after the conference. “We have faith in our pastor, we have faith in our community that our children are going to be raised to be decent people. So we don’t feel that it’s the school board’s job to make that decision for our children.”

Jarboe, who introduced himself as a former assistant professor of chemistry at Messiah College, a nearby Christian school, was convinced that the parents were being used by the ACLU to further its sinister agenda. Like a great many members of the Christian right, he sees the ACLU as a subversive, possibly demonic institution. Quoting James Kennedy, an influential Fort Lauderdale televangelist, he called the ACLU the “American Communist United League.” “I maintain it’s a communist front,” he said.

He then pressed a flier into my hand from a two-day creation seminar he’d attended at the Faith Baptist Church in Lebanon, Pa. It was run by Dr. Kent Hovind, a young-Earth creationist who argues that, as the flier said, “it has been proven that man lived at the same time as dinosaurs.” To underline this point, Hovind runs Dinosaur Adventure Land, a theme park in Pensacola, Fla., with rides and exhibits about the not-so-long-ago days when humans and dinosaurs roamed the planet together.

A few feet from Jarboe stood Robert Eckhardt, a professor of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Penn State. Eckhardt had spoken at the press conference about the central role of evolution in biology. “The idea that intelligent design is a powerful upwelling of controversy within the scientific community is absolute nonsense,” he said. Jarboe was unfazed by Eckhardt’s expertise; he called him a “screaming leftist unbiblical liberal.”

A wry man with a lined face, tweed jacket and owlish glasses, Eckhardt, like most other experts in his field, has been dealing with creationists throughout his career and finds it tiresome to try to reason with them. He divided his opponents into several categories. “There are people who just feel that the world is changing very rapidly around them. Their children are coming home from school with ideas that are taught to them in biology class, the parents find this to be challenging and upsetting, and by God they’re going to do something about it,” he said. “They don’t understand the world and they’re trying to get the world to slow down and accommodate their thinking.”

The second group, he said, are people “who are formerly associated with the creationist movement, who purposely misrepresent issues of science when in fact they are issues of religion.” He didn’t want to name names but it seemed he was speaking of the fellows at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, headquarters of the intelligent-design movement. The third, he said, rolling his eyes a tiny bit toward Jarboe, who was listening to our conversation, “are people who are mentally unbalanced and who are so threatened by this that they perceive things going on around them that never happened.”

As Eckhardt spoke, Jim Grove, the pastor of Heritage Baptist Church, a small congregation near Dover, stepped forward to challenge him to a debate. Eckhardt refused with a derisive laugh, saying, “I value my time.” Grove interpreted this as a sign of evolution’s weakness. “If he has facts, what about a forum to present them in public?” he asked. “It would be a perfect opportunity. If he has the facts.”

Of Eckhardt’s three categories of anti-evolutionists, the second — the proponents of intelligent design — are currently the most influential. They’ve created the terms that now dominate the debate from the halls of Congress to local school boards like Dover. They’re the reason that, after a decade when the consensus on evolution in education seemed secure, Darwin’s enemies are on the move.

Although Buckingham first argued for teaching creationism in Dover biology classes, he soon started using the phrase “intelligent design” instead. The change in language was significant because intelligent design was created in part to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling that made it illegal for public schools to teach creationism. Masquerading as a science, it aims to convince the public that evolution is a theory under fire within the scientific community and doesn’t deserve its preeminent place in the biology curriculum.

At Dover’s June 14 school board meeting, Buckingham said he wanted the board to consider the intelligent-design textbook, “Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origin.” According to Nick Matzke, a spokesman for the National Center for Science Education, the original version of “Of Pandas and People,” published in 1989, contained one of the first uses of the phrase “intelligent design.” Later, in the 1990s, the intelligent-design cause was taken up by the Center for Science and Culture.

Yet “Of Pandas and People” was never meant to be scientific. It was a strategic response to the Supreme Court’s 1987 ruling in Edwards vs. Aguillard, which overturned a Louisiana law mandating that “creation science” be taught alongside evolution. Because the court ruled that “creation science” is a religious doctrine, savvy opponents of evolution sought to recast the central tenets of creationism in a way that hid their religious inspiration. Thus intelligent design was born.

Percival Davis, one of the coauthors of “Of Pandas and People,” also co-wrote the old-school creationist text, “A Case for Creation.” An online ad for “Pandas” on the Web site of the creationist group Answers in Genesis describes the text as a “superbly written” book for public schools that “has no Biblical content, yet contains creationists’ interpretations and refutations for evidences [sic] usually found in standard textbooks supporting evolution!”

The core idea in “Pandas” — and in the intelligent-design movement generally — is that of “irreducible complexity,” the theory that the structure of proteins and amino acids in cells — the building blocks of life — is so complex that only a supernatural force could have choreographed it. “Because of the high level of improbability that cells could be generated by the random mixing of chemicals, some scientists believe that the first cells were created from the design of some outside, intelligent force,” the book says.

Indeed, some “scientists” do believe this — the ones who work at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Outside the precincts of the religious right, though, the scientific consensus about evolution is very close to unanimous. For decades, biologists at the world’s major universities, and in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, have proven that cellular processes have indeed evolved in sync with Darwin’s theories. In November 2004, National Geographic ran a cover story asking, “Was Darwin Wrong?” Its subhead provided the answer: “No. The Evidence for Evolution Is Overwhelming.”

“Evolution by natural selection, the central concept of the life’s work of Charles Darwin, is a theory,” wrote award-winning science author David Quammen in National Geographic. “It’s a theory about the origin of adaptation, complexity, and diversity among Earth’s living creatures. If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it’s ‘just’ a theory. In the same sense, relativity as described by Albert Einstein is ‘just’ a theory. The notion that Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, offered by Copernicus in 1543, is a theory … Each of these theories is an explanation that has been confirmed to such a degree, by observation and experiment, that knowledgeable experts accept it as fact.”

A statuesque woman with a strawberry blond bob and crisply proper diction, Casey Brown isn’t a scientist, but she prides herself on being well read, and after 10 years on the school board, she knows what a good biology textbook looks like. When she saw “Of Pandas and People,” she was appalled. “It’s poor science and worse theology,” she said.

Brown said that by the school board’s August meeting, Buckingham had given up on the idea of using “Pandas” as the main text, but he insisted that the board buy it as a supplement. Otherwise, he said, he wouldn’t approve the purchase of “Biology.”

One of Buckingham’s supporters on the board was out sick that night, and without her, the vote deadlocked, 4-4. Finally, worried that the school would have to start the year without textbooks, one member switched her vote and “Biology” was approved. The town’s little drama seemed to be at an end.

In fact, it was just beginning.

Shortly after the motion to have the school board buy “Of Pandas and People” was defeated, the Dover School District received an anonymous donation of 50 copies of the book, and Buckingham and his allies set about figuring out how to integrate them into the curriculum.

On Oct. 18, the board voted on a resolution written by Buckingham and his supporters on the board. It said, “Students will be made aware of gaps/problems in Darwin’s theory and of other theories of evolution including, but not limited to, intelligent design. Note: Origins of Life is not taught.” The “Pandas” books were to be kept in the science classroom, and teachers were instructed to read a statement referring students to them.

Casey and Jeff Brown argued against it. “We kept maintaining this is going to get us into legal trouble,” Casey said. “It was a clear violation.” As an alternative, she proposed offering a comparative world religions elective, which would teach the creation myths of various faiths.

But Buckingham was determined. “Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross,” he said at the meeting. “Can’t someone take a stand for him?”

Jeff Brown spoke up in response, saying it was the wrong time and the wrong place for a religious debate. Buckingham called him a coward and said it was a good thing that he wasn’t fighting the revolutionary war “because we would still have a queen.”

Finally, they voted. The mandate to teach intelligent design passed 6-3. Casey and Jeff Brown quit the board in protest. The other dissenter, Noel Wenrich, turned to Buckingham and said, “We lost two good people because of you.”

“And Mr. Buckingham said, with profanity, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’” Casey recalled. “And he called Mr. Wenrich every name in the book.”

Buckingham may have started the Dover crusade himself, but the Center for Science and Culture laid the groundwork years before. The group provides the “scientific” and philosophical arguments to bolster the opponents of evolution in local political struggles.

CSC operates out of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that’s funded in part by savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson. As Max Blumenthal reported in a 2004 Salon article, Ahmanson spent 20 years on the board of R.J. Rushdoony’s Chalcedon Foundation, a theocratic outfit that advocates the replacement of American civil law with biblical law.

The Center for Science and Culture also aims, in a far more elliptical way, to put God at the center of civic life. Originally called the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, CSC usually purports to be motivated by science, not religion. At times, though, it’s refreshingly candid about its true goal — a grandiose scheme to undermine the secular legacy of the Enlightenment and rebuild society on religious foundations. As it said in a 1999 fundraising proposal that was later leaked online, “Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.”

The proposal was titled “The Wedge Strategy.” It began: “The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built … Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science. Debunking the traditional conceptions of both God and man, thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment. This materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.”

As “The Wedge Strategy” suggests, many CSC fellows are troubled more by the philosophical consequences of evolutionary theory than by the fact that it contradicts a literal reading of the Bible’s book of Genesis. Most of them — though not all — are too scientifically sophisticated to hew to a young-Earth creationist line like Hovind’s. In mainstream forums, they eschew sectarian religious language. As seekers of mainstream credibility, they don’t want to be associated with the medieval persecutors of Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, they try to present themselves as heirs to those very visionaries, insisting that dogmatic secularists desperate to deny God are thwarting their open-minded quest for truth.

Most CSC fellows even accept that evolution occurs within individual species. What they dispute is the idea that random mutation and natural selection led to the evolution of higher species from lower ones — of man from apelike ancestors. Such a process seems to them incompatible with the belief that man was created in the image of God and that God takes a special interest in him.

Several CSC fellows come with impressive credentials from prestigious universities, and they know how to argue in mainstream forums. Philip Johnson, one of the fathers of the movement, is a law professor at UC-Berkeley. Jonathan Wells, author of the influential intelligent-design book, “Icons of Evolution,” has a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from Berkeley and another in religious studies from Yale. A member of the Unification Church whose education was bankrolled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, he’s written that he sought his degrees specifically to fight the teaching of evolution. As he put it in an article on the Moonie Web site True Parents, “Father’s words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father [Sun Myung Moon] chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

Armed with advanced degrees, CSC fellows have secured invitations to testify before state boards of education. They’ve published opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers and are regularly consulted for “balance” in stories about evolution controversies.

They’ve also found important allies within the Republican Party, especially Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. Santorum tried to attach an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act that would encourage the teaching of intelligent design. It said, “[W]here topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society.” The statement was eventually adopted as part of a Conference Report on the law, which means it has advisory power only.

The language sounds innocuous, but Santorum’s intent was clear. In 2002, Ohio debated adding intelligent design to its statewide science standards. In a Washington Times Op-Ed supporting the change, Santorum quoted his amendment and then wrote, “If the Education Board of Ohio does not include intelligent design in the new teaching standards, many students will be denied a first-rate science education. Many will be left behind.”

Santorum has also come out in favor of Dover’s policy. The school board, in turn, distributed copies of one of Santorum’s pro-intelligent design Op-Eds along with the agenda at its Jan. 3 meeting.

Oddly enough, although Santorum is supporting the Dover school board’s policy, the Center for Science and Culture isn’t. On Dec. 14, CSC put out a statement calling Dover’s policy “misguided” and saying it should be “withdrawn and rewritten.” The statement quoted CSC’s associate director John West as saying that discussion of intelligent design shouldn’t be prohibited but it also shouldn’t be required. “What should be required is full disclosure of the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory,” said West, “which is the approach supported by the overwhelming majority of the public.”

This, of course, is a departure from the position laid out in “The Wedge Strategy,” which specifically calls for the integration of intelligent design into school curriculum.

Why the change? Matzke, from the National Center for Science Education, is convinced that the CSC wanted to wait for a better test case and a friendly Supreme Court, which they’ll get if Bush is able to nominate a few new justices. The Dover policy, Matzke said, probably won’t survive a court challenge right now, and if it’s overturned, the precedent will be a setback for the missionaries of intelligent design.

“Their current strategy is not to have an intelligent-design policy passed,” Matzke said. “They just want a policy that says students should analyze the strengths and weakness of evolution.” CSC did not return calls for comment.

It’s not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God.

So it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans — 65 percent, according to the poll cited above — favor teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools. Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it’s not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

In fact, some historians date the start of our culture wars to 1925, the year of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tenn.

At the time, the battle over evolution had been raging throughout the country. It came to a head when 24-year-old teacher John Scopes challenged Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in the state’s public schools and universities. His persecution set the stage for a legendary courtroom showdown that pit celebrated Chicago defense attorney Clarence Darrow against Williams Jennings Bryan, the crusading populist, fundamentalist and three-time presidential candidate.

Bryan, the nation’s leading anti-evolutionist, made his case in populist terms. In his 1993 book “The Creationists,” historian Ronald Numbers wrote, “Throughout his political career, Bryan had placed his faith in the common people, and he resented the attempt of a few thousand elitist scientists ‘to establish an oligarchy over the forty million American Christians’ to dictate what should be taught in the schools.”

Bryan and his fellow Scopes prosecutors won their trial, but the national mockery that followed it did much to alienate conservative Christians from secular society, setting the stage for the culture wars of later decades. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes trial, “Summer for the Gods,” Edward Larson wrote about the birth of the right-wing religious counterculture in the wake of the Pyrrhic victory in Tennessee:

“Indeed, fundamentalism became a byword in American culture as a result of the Scopes trial, and fundamentalists responded by withdrawing. They did not abandon their faith, however, but set about constructing a separate subculture with independent religious, educational and social institutions.”

Eventually, of course, the religious right emerged from its subculture to renew its attack on secularism. Today, cultural conservatives are mustering almost exactly the same arguments that Bryan made in Dayton 80 years ago.

This past December, Republican strategist Jack Burkman appeared on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” to back creationism in terms of populist democracy. “Why should the state and the federal government have a monopoly on defining what constitutes science?” he asked. “I see no problem with presenting a creationist view in the schools, given that 70 percent of Americans want that. The law should reflect democratic desires. It should reflect public desires.”

Of course, public desires don’t determine the physical facts of the world. “The best argument that the creationists have got is that it’s only fair to teach both sides,” Matzke said. “The problem with that argument is that science is not a democracy and a lot of times there aren’t two correct sides. There are people who believe that the sun goes around the earth. They’re called geocentrists. That doesn’t mean we should teach that.”

In Dover, though, people tend to interpret positions like Matzke’s as elitism. Much of the public seems to desire schools that teach creationism, although many balk at the cost of a lawsuit. For defenders of Darwin, the most troubling thing isn’t that the Dover school board is dominated by extremists — it’s that the board is, in a local context, fairly mainstream. Supporters of evolution are the ones who stand out. Resentment of the ACLU runs high even among some who opposed the school board’s intelligent-design policy. Most opposition to the policy comes from worry over the cost of the lawsuit.

Most people in Dover say that the town is split fairly evenly over the school board’s intelligent-design policy. The division isn’t one of principle, though. People know that the ACLU’s lawsuit is going to be expensive and are worried that defending the policy in court will drain the school budget and force a tax increase.

“I would say that people who are against what the school board is doing in principle are a minority, a great minority,” former school board member Noel Wenrich told me. “However, when it comes to spending money on it, it’s a whole other issue. When you ask people, Do you support the board’s decision on this? they say yes.” Ask them if they’re willing to pay more taxes to finance a court case, though, and they’ll give you a resounding no, he said. “It’s a money issue.”

The school board doesn’t need to worry about most of its legal fees, however. It’s being represented pro bono by the Thomas More Law Center, a right-wing Catholic firm that describes itself as “the sword and shield for people of faith.” Wenrich told me that Thomas More lawyers had been advising Buckingham for months.

Despite the law firm’s help, though, the lawsuit will likely be financially devastating to the district, the second poorest in the county. Dover would have to pay for lost wages of people called to testify, and it would have to provide outside counsel for some witnesses, like the Browns, who don’t want Thomas More representing them. Jeff Brown guessed that depositions alone would cost the district $30,000. Then, if Dover loses, federal civil rights law would make it liable for the ACLU’s legal fees. “It won’t be cheap,” said Witold Walczak, the ACLU’s Pennsylvania legal director.

“It will kill us,” said Casey Brown. In fact, Dover is already broke. The board had just been forced to cut its library budget almost in half, from $68,000 to $38,000, and to eliminate all field trips.

Wenrich himself, a 36-year-old Army veteran and father of two, doesn’t believe in evolution. But he felt honor-bound to put his duty to the school above his personal politics. “If it were my money, I’d have no problem,” he said. “I’d go out and fight it. But to use the public’s money that’s supposed to be educating our kids is absolutely irresponsible. They’re already looking at putting off buying textbooks, not buying library books, not updating computer equipment. When we’re looking at those budget cuts, it’s irresponsible to go out and pick a fight with the Supreme Court.”

If Wenrich is angry with Buckingham, though, he’s even angrier at the outside forces that are challenging the school district. “It is going full circle now from the religious community ruling what can be thought — that’s what they tried to do in the Middle Ages,” he said. “We’ve come down to the scientific community trying to tell us what we can think. Basically what the scientific community currently is doing is saying, ‘You’ll have no god before mine. Mine happens to be Darwin.’ Any other thought will not be tolerated.”

Evolution’s allies might win the battle for Dover’s biology classes, but they’re losing America.

Once the structure and function of an organ are elucidated, bioengineers can develop replacement parts. Artificial heart-valve implantation is practically routine. Next-generation pacemakers will come with built-in diagnostics and telemetry to provide your hospital’s computer with a constant stream of data on the condition of both your heart and the pacemaker itself. Some designs even include global positioning systems for emergencies. Several tissue-engineering companies produce commercial synthetic-skin products for grafting onto burns. Some use a mixture of biological and synthetic polymers, while others offer the genuine article, natural tissue grown from cells. As these technologies emerge, humans will metamorphose: The first stage of our metamorphosis will, in fact, be the physical fusion of human beings with both the biological and nonbiological systems we are engineering.

But rather than the end, this quasi-cyborg, or “Homo technicus,” is just the beginning. While bioethicists wring their hands about the morality of human cloning, and politicians battle about where we may or may not get our stem cells, nanotechnology is moving toward the elimination of the cell as the fundamental unit of life. Yet outside the laboratory, how many people are paying attention?

As a concept, bioengineering, like information technology, has entered our collective consciousness through the usual channels of the media. In practice, bioengineering enters our lives through advanced medical procedures and imaging technologies: the total hip replacement or the MRI.

Bioengineering, currently an embryonic technology, will grow to include genetic engineering but will use both living and nonliving materials for the devices it builds. Nanotechnology, the ability to design and assemble materials one atom at a time (aka “nanofabrication”) is, by definition, the ultimate form of engineering for life-forms or devices operating in our physical world. Currently we are in the process of using these technologies to build the end of evolution.

The bioengineering mega-trend is crucial to the future of humanity because bioengineering via nanofabrication will erase the border between living and nonliving materials. Maybe not this century, but most likely in the next. The result will be the emergence of a totally new type of being. Homo sapiens is on a path toward speciation into Homo technicus. But Homo technicus will have no evolutionary relationship to biological life. Just the opposite. The ascendancy of Homo technicus will mark the end of that particular 4-billion-year experiment.

The current popular fixation on clones, or science fiction’s obsession with cyborgs, does not provide useful paradigms for the new forms of sentience that will ultimately emerge from nanotechnology. Both clones and cyborgs are too anthropomorphic. Ultimately, the future will not be about mixing humanity and technology but about sentient chemistry. Just as the revolution in quantum physics laid the foundation for the creation of weapons capable of vaporizing the planet, so the nanotechnology revolution is laying the foundation for the end of evolution and of life in any form we can imagine.

Given this obvious outcome, one of the most amazing developments is what has failed to develop. There appears to be virtually no cohesive attempt to address the ethical challenges of bioengineering, challenges that are prima facie far beyond those posed by molecular biology. The scientific, and therefore ethical, boundaries of biotechnology are the cell and its biomolecular components. Bioengineering, on the other hand, knows no such limitations.

As the skein of technology continues to feed into the fabric of life, the yarn is undergoing molecular substitution. The natural fibers will be replaced as needed. The entire periodic table of elements is available and there is no reason for discrimination. Bioethicists are disastrously underestimating the trajectory of this technology. Issues of infinitely greater technical and ethical complexity than cloning are already on the table. Bioengineering is about to jump to warp speed while human psychology and consciousness plug along on impulse power. The slope may appear slippery now, but we are still human beings trying to keep our footing amid a tangle of DNA and stem cells.

That is about to change. But bioethicists seem unaware of the concept of sentient chemistry through nanotechnology. One possibility is that they do not have the technical training to properly evaluate the rate at which nanotechnology will supersede even the most advanced frontiers of biotechnology. Quantum leaps, so to speak, are in the cards. While no one doubts that we must deal with the unprecedented ethical and social implications of cloning, we must simultaneously create an expanded vocabulary that allows us to move beyond the biological and come to grips with a more realistic assessment of where our technology is taking us, and of who “us” will be. Terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “cloning” will soon be anachronisms. A vast technological entity has been created. It is almost already beyond comprehension. And we are just getting started.

This is not science fiction. This is happening in a laboratory near you.

Even with the limited tools available now, devices that function as part of the body are rapidly emerging. The vascular stent provides an excellent example with which to illustrate the present state and future prospects of bioengineering.

We all know arteries become clogged; debris accumulates on the inside of the blood vessel and flow is reduced. Untreated, the constriction can ultimately block the flow of blood to part of your body. If the blockage is in a coronary artery, a blood vessel that feeds the heart muscle itself, it is deadly.

The early bioengineering solution was to pry the constriction open with a procedure called a balloon angioplasty. The limitations of this approach are obvious. When you force something open, especially something with the limited flexibility of a hardened vessel wall, there are problems. Frequently, the vessel would relapse to its constricted state. So an improved engineering concept was developed. Open the constriction and simultaneously implant a structure to hold it open: the stent.

A coronary or vascular stent is a small slotted metal cylinder mounted on a balloon catheter, a long flexible tube capped by an expandable tip. When your pipe gets clogged, this catheter is inserted into your artery and snaked along until the balloon portion is at the site of the constriction. Then the balloon is inflated and deflated a number of times while, simultaneously, the metal stent expands and is pressed into the inner wall of the artery. The standard stent looks something like a tubular wire fence with flat, fat wires. It expands along with the balloon but then retains its larger diameter when the catheter is removed.

A stent is basically a plumbing device for the repair of a collapsed piece of pipe. It is also representative of the state of the art in applied bioengineering available on the market today. And, like computer displays and cellphones, stents have already undergone several product generations. Early stage enhancements were designed mainly to improve delivery and placement accuracy, or to eliminate potential catastrophes such as structural collapse or the formation of blood clots. A major bioengineering challenge has been to develop materials with sufficient tensile strength to hold the vessel open but malleable enough to be placed in the vessel with a minimum of damage to surrounding tissue.

Tissue damage as a result of stent placement calls for improved design specs. Not coincidentally, these new designs place us on the road to Homo technicus. Recently the FDA approved a “drug eluting” stent. This stent is metal with a plastic coating impregnated with a specific pharmaceutical. So it is a true hybrid: part device, part drug. The first compound incorporated into a drug-eluting stent was selected to reduce the regrowth of tissue into the region of the opened vessel, a process called restenosis. When wire is driven into the tissue of the vessel wall some cells are ruptured and others are mashed. The result is inflammation and wound healing. If too much tissue is produced, it re-clogs the vessel. From a bioengineering standpoint having the stent release a drug to inhibit restenosis is an excellent device modification.

Future drug-eluting stents will contain multiple active ingredients. The elution process will be refined so that the timing and amount of active ingredient that enters the tissue, the “elution profile,” will be controlled with greater precision. Design specs will continue to be upgraded via the sequential timed release of a complex mixture of natural and synthetic chemicals to control the response of the wounded tissue. Further enhancement will involve attaching small protein molecules directly onto the stent surface to signal adjacent cells. Bioengineers call this molecular decoration.

Molecular decoration camouflages a nonbiological material in order to mimic a biological material. This type of strategy has been designated biomimetics. A protein-decorated, drug-eluting stent is one of the first true hybrid biomaterials: part biological, part synthetic. One small step for Homo technicus. Drug-eluting stents and their progeny will speak the language of the cell well enough to stimulate production of smooth endothelial cells on the inner surface of the stent, in effect growing a brand-new vessel surface. In later designs the stent itself will biodegrade after stimulating the growth of complete replacement vasculature. In this final design, we will have engineered tissue that will be in better shape than the rest of the vessel. In the process of therapeutic life-saving we will have generated a rejuvenated biosystem component.

This brings us to what I call the First Law of Biomimetics:

With respect to bioengineering there is no border between life-saving and life-enhancing technology.

The First Law of Biomimetics will drive Homo sapiens to the point of speciation. Practically speaking, bioengineers will adopt the tools of nanofabrication to fix our damaged parts and will then offer us enhanced parts. If we simply follow this road to its logical end we reach a point when the organism has so many modifications it just doesn’t qualify as Homo sapiens anymore. A new species will emerge that differs both in psychology (software) and chemistry (hardware). The name Homo technicus does not imply any biological relationship but a fusion at the molecular and atomic level. For Homo technicus the difference between DNA and silicon will be no more significant than the difference between protein and DNA is to Homo sapiens. After all, our own bodies contain a wide range of structural materials, from the ceramic in bone to the organic polymer collagen in skin.

How will the First Law of Biomimetics drive Homo sapiens to speciation? The answer is that we will demand it. Many of the changes that technology offers are subject to interpretation, but few object to an increase in the quality and length of human life. When baby boomers say that their children can reasonably expect to live to be 85, we are talking about productive and active years, not the ways in which their deaths will be prolonged.

In our generation we expect, not hope, that biotechnology will bring an end to age-associated cognitive problems such as Alzheimer’s and senile dementia. Within a generation or two we expect, not hope, that we will have hip and knee implants that function as well as or better than the worn-out originals. And, of course, we expect a cure for cancer. Or, more correctly, cures for cancers. Cancer is the ultimate “bad boy” of molecular biology because it comprises a multiplicity of diseases resulting from inappropriate gene expression — the wrong permutation of the genetic code acting out at the wrong time in the wrong place. That is why a Normandy Beach frontal assault on cancer will not work. Like terrorist cells, cancer cells have multiple manifestos, multiple strategies, and an array of weapons at their disposal. Nevertheless we expect, not hope, that a complete understanding of the human genome and cellular function will enable us to deal with each particular cancer on its own terms.

Our increase in life expectancy is, of course, multivariate in nature; it is the result of enhanced medical care, improved nutrition (from advanced agricultural and food-manufacturing technologies), and the general techno-sheltering we receive from the wear and tear of direct interaction with the environment. But the greatest strides are expected to emerge from biotechnology and bioengineering. While bioethics per se thrives on slippery slopes shaded by the sinister foliage of death or dysfunctional biology, I am not aware of significant societal objection to medical advances that unambiguously enhance life. Say you need a heart transplant. Just to make the argument clean, we will assume the heart was grown in culture using your skin cells via tissue engineering. No embryonic stem cells need apply. Your surgeon comes in smiling and says, “Look, not only will this transplant save your life, but the new heart will also pump more efficiently and last longer than your original.” Who among us would object?

We expect these advances and we will not be disappointed. Staying with the stent as our example, a dozen product generations down the road will see targeted stem cells injected into the bloodstream that will hunt down damaged vasculature, attach to the target site, and replace or repair the damage through tissue regeneration. This will be minimally invasive. “Minimally invasive” is what bioengineers want because that is what you and I want. Who among us would not prefer a virtual colonoscopy? But in the end our real desire is for a colon, lung or liver that has no possibility of developing diseases or disorders, and we will get it. The ultimate therapy is never having to need therapy. Bioengineers are looking for zero failure rates and this, in turn, means engineered tissues that are not limited to the design evolved by random variation followed by natural selection.

The term “biomimetics” is currently in vogue among bioengineers. I have written the why as its First Law. The how of biomimetics is how we design materials that go into the body. For now we strive to create biomaterials that mimic the original biological components. Such biomimetic materials have superior biocompatibility because the body does not recognize them as foreign. This desire for mimicry has its historic roots in the search for nonliving materials that can be implanted to achieve a desired medical outcome with a minimum of inflammation and immune rejection.

One story is that polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) came into use as a biomaterial because, during World War II, flight surgeons noticed that, when this material was blown into bomber gunners, little or no inflammation ensued. But the days of PMMA ocular implants, stainless steel screws, and titanium rods are ending. The current frontier in biomaterials involves bioreactive biomimetic systems. The drug-eluting stent is just the beginning. We are looking for implanted materials that interact with the living components of the body to create cell growth, wound healing, or any number of other desirable therapeutic outcomes. But just “looking” won’t cut it. Real biomimetics means knowledge-based nanofabrication of molecular composites built from whatever molecules serve the purpose best, be they proteins, DNA, silica or titanium.

As I stated at the outset, ultimately there will be no distinction between living and nonliving materials. The official beginning of the end of Homo sapiens will correspond to the completion of the lexicon of molecular cell biology, the point at which we gain the ability to speak the physiochemical dialect of the cell with fluency. This work goes on in thousands of laboratories every day. We may stand on the shoulders of giants, but we climbed up there on the backs of countless working scientists and engineers.

When I show my students a summary diagram of an essential metabolic pathway — say, respiration or photosynthesis — I remind them that behind that cartoon are literally tens of thousands of person-years of hard labor. Respiration is the metabolic pathway by which cellular energy is extracted via the molecular “burning,” or oxidation, of sugar to water and carbon dioxide. Every morning for 20 years, this research started with dozens of technicians around the world going to slaughterhouses for fresh beef hearts, pig hearts, and similar energy-rich organs. These organs would be hauled back to the lab in ice buckets and ground up in giant kitchen blenders. To keep the enzymes from degrading, the technicians worked in walk-in coolers, bundled in jackets and gloves. One could conservatively estimate that a thousand person-years went into simply generating bovine heart-muscle milkshakes, usually by 9 a.m. Then the actual experiment of the day could begin.

Likewise, completion of the molecular cell biology lexicon will come as the culmination of billions of experiments that integrate and lay bare the complete blueprint of biology. This number may sound extreme, but robotic combinatorial microchemistry can knock off millions of reactions a day. Parallel efforts are occurring in fields such as materials science, chemical engineering and polymer chemistry. Driven by enormous market forces in medicine, information technology and defense, we are rapidly gaining an ability to manufacture devices with molecular and even atomic precision.

Once we fully understand cellular function at the molecular level, and can fabricate replacement parts from the entire palette of materials, why would “we” choose to remain simply carbon-based? When the lexicon is complete and fabrication tools are available, there will truly be no difference between a dental implant and a mental implant. Clearly the definition of a life-form will have to be modified as modes and even the need for reproduction or replication change or disappear. Homo technicus will emerge: the fusion of biology and high technology.

A future ancestor of Homo technicus may be seen in current efforts to grow electrochemical junctions between neurons and silicon semiconductors. In bioengineer-speak this would be called the nanofabrication of a bioelectrochemical-semiconductor hybrid sensor system. Periodically, news stories in the popular media remind us of this work. These reports are invariably upbeat, with science-fiction-like pictures of neuronal fingers snaking out to make contact with silicon wafers on a petri plate, often in surreal computer-enhanced color … just like the Hubble telescope images of the stars. The optimistic take-home message is that bioengineers are working hard to develop artificial vision. Someday, we are told, a miniature silicon chip interfaced to the optic nerve will substitute for a nonfunctional retina. This chip will replace the damaged rods and cones of blind and visually impaired humans.

Rods and cones, after all, are just micro-machines (cells) made up of nano-components (biomolecules). These biomolecules transduce photons of light into electrical currents. These currents stimulate adjacent neurons in the optic nerve bundle. There is no reason why such electrical stimulation could not be provided by an appropriately fabricated light-transducing semiconductor material.

These updates in the popular press generally stay well below the bioethics radar. We are left with the distinct impression that this is a noble project, one that will naturally come to an end when sight is restored to the vision-impaired. But, in fact, the end is nowhere in sight. When we have this technology, why not use it to enhance our visual capabilities? What about infrared, ultraviolet and even X-ray vision? Will we voluntarily forgo an entire visual universe? And so it will go until Homo sapiens spawns Homo technicus.

Earlier, I suggested that bioethicists may not have the training to understand what is about to happen. This assessment will probably not endear me to the bioethics community, but it is useful to remember that biology is, or rather was, considered a “soft” science. Biology was what one studied if one aspired to a career in science but didn’t want to take calculus and physics. Or, of course, if one wanted to go to medical school. The biology of the 21st century has many names, bioengineering, biotechnology and industrial biology among them, but the bottom line is that biology has become a “hard” science and is getting harder all the time. So hard, in fact, that it will soon have titanium components.

A recognition of the ethical implications of bioengineering should have followed logically from the ethical questions raised by genetic engineering. But somewhere in our human hearts we apparently need to believe that, even in a cyborg, there will be a border where biology starts and technology ends — a plug, a slot, an interface. That, unfortunately, is a fantasy. Silicon and carbon are perfectly happy to bond on the molecular level. DNA has no mandate from any deity that gives it an eternal role as the information storage system of sentience. Homo technicus will be different at the atomic level. We are not only going through the looking glass; we are merging with it.

Homo technicus will, in turn, spawn Materio sapiens, a life-form that can only be understood on the basis of what it will not be. Materio sapiens will not be limited by the chemistry of carbon. Materio sapiens must come into being because the laws of physics and chemistry are all on its side. The chemistry of biological life is incredibly limited. After 4 billion years, biological systems have learned to use only a few dozen chemical reactions out of millions available just to the chemistry of carbon (aka organic chemistry). Approximately half the reactions carried out in your body proceed by the mere addition or removal of water or some minor variation involving water’s component atoms, hydrogen and oxygen. When one begins to build “living” systems with other elements, the number of possible reactions and structures reach the trillions. Materio sapiens will emerge by the law of mass action. Carbon-based life will be inexorably diluted out by superior chemistry and physics.

Because it will be life by design rather than by random variation followed by natural selection, the emergence of Homo technicus will end Darwinian evolution. When the current driving force for natural selection is gone, when the 4-billion-year experiment is over, what will replace it? Technology-based life, really technology-based sentience, will divest itself of the two major characteristics of biology-based life. The first and most obvious defining quality of biological systems is the limited spectrum of chemical materials from which they are derived. A second, and perhaps more profound difference, is that engineering proceeds through design rather than by chance. Variability will become a tool rather than the rule.

The former concept is embodied in what I have called the First Law of Biomimetics. A reasonable formulation of the Second Law of Biomimetics might be: Nanofabrication will replace natural selection. Variability will exist only in forms such as combinatorial chemistry, where billions of compounds are synthesized randomly but then auditioned for a highly specific function.

Given this obvious trajectory, bioengineering should be right up on the radar screen with biological cloning. A bioethics debate with Homo technicus is not feasible, so bioethicists must engage long before the transition begins. Yet, except for the usual fearful warnings that “we” are turning into cyborgs, little sophisticated discussion of the ethical implications of bioengineering can be found. If we do not engage, the forces of technology will prevail by default. The crankshaft, so to speak, of the 4-billion-year engine that has driven evolution is about to snap. We will cut our tether to Darwinism and give way to uncharacterized beings moving through uncharted regions. For navigation in such regions the current bioethics debate provides no compass. Issues of human cloning won’t mean much when humans are no longer the dominant species, or perhaps even extant.

With great Sturm und Drang, current futurists are busy shifting antiquated paradigms. If you are thinking like a human, you are not thinking far enough outside the box. In fact, if you think there is a box to think outside of, you have missed the point. Humans make boxes. And while the world of Homo technicus may still involve competition to extract limited resources from a hostile environment, it is almost impossible to envision an entity as advanced as Materio sapiens running low on battery power.

If we avoid projecting our evolutionary baggage onto Materio sapiens, we have irrevocably pulled the plug on our version of the meaning of life. In Darwin’s world, the goal of all this random variation followed by natural selection was to improve our ability to compete. After competition, the successfully selected display the ultimate manifestation of evolutionary fitness, reproduction. We of Darwinian fitness see our genetic material take another step down the corridors of time. Homo technicus will inhabit a different domain. Random variation followed by natural selection will not be the name of the game, and the corridors will not be made of time. Inflicting our world on Homo technicus would be egregious egoism. More to the point, projecting our ethics would be futile.

Yet the contemporary bioethics debate appears incapable of the parallel processing necessary to address even the most rudimentary and obvious consequences of the nanotechnology revolution for humanity. While we argue endlessly about where cells may or may not come from, while we debate the morality of dispensing DNA with altered base sequences, sentient silicates are waiting just down the road. Medusa is preparing to turn us into stone … or at least silicon, plastic and titanium. We have invited her in, so it is only polite, not to mention politic, to begin to discuss where she will sleep. Except she never sleeps and, of course, she is not a she.

Homo technicus is in the house and, while undoubtedly sentient, Homo technicus will be nothing like the anthropomorphic cyborg. With physical chemistry as the lingua franca, the frontiers and borders currently guarded by our bioethicists will fade away and, once gone, will not be remembered. Homo technicus will not be technically enhanced but fully integrated with the technology on a molecular/atomic level. Homo technicus won’t be anything like us. Homo technicus won’t see like us, breed like us, feed like us, or need like us. Homo technicus will have no more in common with Homo sapiens than Homo sapiens has with the bacterium Escherichia coli; in fact, much, much less. Homo technicus will evolve, if evolution is even the concept, into Materio sapiens. After that, all bets are off.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

“Darwin himself would not have supported censorship of scientific weaknesses,” said Republican board member Terri Leo.

But a former United Methodist minister chided members of the board that such “ignorance and misinformation are the works of Satan.” In other words, in this minister’s view, God is firmly on the side of teaching scientific fact to students.

The president of Texas Citizens for Science appealed to no less an authority than the eyes of Texas as he cautioned the board: “If you plan to modify biology textbooks by requiring the authors and publishers to remove or change scientifically accurate material about evolution, please remember that the eyes of Texas are upon you, and you cannot get away with it.”

And one teacher went so far as to warn the members of the board that they could have blood on their hands — her blood — if they watered down the teaching of evolution in the state: “I would like you to think, am I furthering medical research? Or am I contributing to Kelly Wagner’s death?” testified Kelly Wagner, who said she suffers from heart disease.

The half-day hearing, on July 9, was the first of two occasions for public comment on the biology textbooks currently under consideration by the state’s board. Texas is the second-largest market for textbooks in the country, with an annual budget of $570 million, which gives it considerable influence in what gets taught in the rest of the United States.

By law, the Texas board of education cannot ban a textbook simply because it objects to its content. But it can ding a book for factual inaccuracy or for inadequately representing the strengths and weaknesses of a theory. So, this year, critics of evolution are charging the state with censorship and accusing biology teachers and scientists of being dogmatic in their adherence to Darwin.

“The true censors are the Darwinian activists who want to keep textbooks from including any discussion of the scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory,” said John West, the associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at a Seattle think tank called the Discovery Institute, in a press release.

But advocates of teaching evolution in school say that the accusation that they are hiding “weaknesses” is just clever hogwash. They aren’t trying to block criticisms of evolution, they say, as long as those are based in the scientific method. But they are alarmed at the increasing subtlety with which religiously based views are masquerading as real science.

“The creationists are getting more and more sophisticated in their message and their tactics,” says Samantha Smoot, executive director of the Texas Freedom Network. “They’ve stopped demanding that evolution not be taught, or that creationism be taught on an even par with evolution. Now they’re demanding something that sounds more subtle and more reasonable but that is equally dangerous, which is that the so-called strengths and weaknesses of the theory of evolution be taught. It’s 2003, and we’re defending the theory of evolution?”

Too savvy to let themselves be labeled creationists in 2003, these critics of Darwin attempt to seize the scientific high ground by presenting themselves as the proponents of open debate in the face of scientific dogmatism. As one advocacy site, Texans for Better Science Education, puts it: “Open minds teach both sides.”

Textbook publishers demonstrated as recently as last year that they’re not immune to pressures to pander to one of their biggest markets. In 2002, in an effort to appease Texas, references to the Ice Age as occurring “millions of years ago” in a history textbook were changed to read “in the distant past” so it wouldn’t conflict with literal interpretations of the Bible. In 2001, the board rejected an environmental science book as “anti-free enterprise” and “anti-Christian” for its coverage of global warming.

One of the biggest players in the Texas controversy is the Discovery Institute, which propagates doubts about the theory of evolution through its publications and network of fellows. At the July 9 hearing, two representatives from the institute testified and the organization submitted a 41-page “preliminary analysis” of the coverage of evolution in 11 textbooks being considered by the board. By the Discovery Institute’s grading scale, no textbook received a grade higher than a C-minus.

The Discovery Institute describes itself generically as “a national, non-profit, non-partisan policy and research organization,” but its critics, such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State report that it’s received more than a million dollars in funding just from one fundamentalist Christian couple in Orange County, California.

While the institute explicitly denies that it is a creationist organization, the think tank and its fellows are one of the loudest national mouthpieces for the theory of “intelligent design,” which argues that natural selection cannot adequately account for the “apparent design” found in nature.

“The plan is straightforward: use intelligent design as a wedge to undermine evolution with scientific-sounding arguments and thereby advance a conservative religious-political agenda,” writes Steve Benen in an article published on the Web site for Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“None of the stuff that they come up with would ever survive peer review, even in an undergraduate journal,” says Sahotra Sarkar, a biologist and professor of philosophy and science at the University of Texas, who plans to testify at the Sept. 10 hearing before the Texas state board of education. He dismisses intelligent design as a “vague bunch of nonsense.”

“Nobody in the scientific community takes them seriously,” says Sarkar, because the theory is not based on scientific experiments that can be replicated in a lab.

But some members of the Texas state board of education are taking the Discovery Institute quite seriously, as is evident from the questions they asked members of the public testifying on July 9, which parroted arguments made and promoted by the institute’s fellows, such as Darwin critic Jonathan Wells.

One 10th-grade Texas biology teacher isn’t buying it: “Intelligent design is creationism dressed up in a lab coat,” testified Amanda Walker, who taught in Texas schools for three years but will be leaving teaching this year to go back to graduate school. In fact, the Discovery Institute was so harshly criticized by some of the scientists and teachers testifying at the July 9 hearing that when one of its representatives, Ray Bohlin, a zoologist who has lived in Texas for 28 years, took the floor to defend its position before the board, he joked that he should have worn a “devil suit” to the hearing.

Bohlin countered criticism that Discovery Institute work is not peer reviewed by pointing out that Darwin himself did not publish in peer-reviewed journals. “Oftentimes new ideas are not welcomed in the scientific peer-reviewed literature because it is not according to the current paradigm,” he said.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m against alternate theories,” says Walker. “You should question evolution. You should question all scientific theories. That’s the nature of science — to question the status quo. But a religious theory that doesn’t have the data yet, hasn’t gone through the scientific process yet, it doesn’t belong in a beginning science class. How can you teach what scientific theory is when you’re representing a theory that isn’t a theory?”

After another round of public testimony on Sept. 10, the Texas state board of education will vote on the biology textbooks on Nov. 7. But at least one publisher, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, has already responded to the first round of public testimony.

The original text in “Holt Biology, Texas” ran as follows:

“Use the media center or Internet resources to learn about the conditions on Earth that scientists think existed before life formed. Identify which compounds Miller and Urey formed in their experiment. Prepare a report describing which of the compounds on early Earth would have contributed to the types of compounds Miller and Urey made.”

The new version reads:

“Use the media center or Internet resources to study hypotheses for the origin of life that are alternatives to the hypotheses proposed by Oparin and Lerman. Analyze, review, and critique either Oparin’s hypothesis or Lerman’s hypothesis as presented in your textbook along with one alternative hypothesis that you discover in your research.”

The change, says critics, is designed to increase opportunities to insert creationist views into the science curricula. As Smoot of the Texas Freedom Network points out, students who turn to the Net for answers will find plenty of “alternate” hypotheses.

“We typed ‘origin of life’ into Google and got back a dozen creationist sites,” Smoot says.