Kansas evolution hearings
The Kansas evolution hearings were a series of hearings held in Topeka, Kansas, United States from May 5 to 12, 2005 by the Kansas State Board of Education and its State Board Science Hearing Committee to change how evolution and the origin of life would be taught in the state's public high school science classes. The hearings were arranged by the Board of Education with the intent of introducing intelligent design into science classes via the Teach the Controversy method.
The hearings raised the issues of creation and evolution in public education and were attended by all the major participants in the intelligent design movement but were ultimately boycotted by the scientific community over concern of lending credibility to the claim, made by proponents of intelligent design, that evolution is the subject of wide dispute within the scientific and science education communities.
The Discovery Institute, hub of the intelligent design movement, played a central role in starting the hearings by promoting its Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan which the Kansas State Board of Education eventually adopted over objections of the State Board Science Hearing Committee, and campaigning on behalf of conservative Republican candidates for the Board.
Local science advocacy group Kansas Citizens for Science organized a boycott of the hearings by mainstream scientists, who accused it of being a kangaroo court and argued that their participation would lend an undeserved air of legitimacy to the hearings.
Kansas Board of Education member Kathy Martin declared at the beginning of the hearings, "Evolution has been proven false. ID is science-based and strong in facts." At their conclusion she proclaimed that evolution is "an unproven, often disproven" theory. "ID has theological implications. ID is not strictly Christian, but it is theistic," asserted Martin.
The scientific community rejects teaching intelligent design as science; a leading example being the United States National Academy of Sciences, which issued a policy statement saying "Creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science."
On February 13, 2007, the Board voted 6 to 4 to reject the amended science standards enacted in 2005.
Background
The hearings were one of a number of Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns that sought to establish new science education standards consistent with conservative Christian beliefs, both in the state and nationwide, and reverse what they saw as a domination in science education by actual science, specifically the scientific theory of evolution, which they viewed as atheistic, in direct conflict to their religious beliefs.Kansas Board of Education elections in 2004 gave religious conservatives a 6–4 majority. In 2005, prompted by the Kansas Intelligent Design Network and the Discovery Institute, the board sought new high school science standards. The revisions did not eliminate evolution from instruction, but presented it as a theory greatly challenged and disputed, in line with the Discovery Institute's Teach the Controversy campaign. The new standards presented intelligent design as an alternative to evolution through the institute's Critical Analysis of Evolution. Board member Connie Morris sent a taxpayer-funded newsletter to constituents calling evolution an "age-old fairy tale" that was defended with "anti-God contempt and arrogance." Describing herself as a Christian who believes in a literal interpretation of Genesis, Morris wrote that evolution was "biologically, genetically, mathematically, chemically, metaphysically etc. wildly and utterly impossible."
The Intelligent Design Network originally proposed over 20 pages of revisions to the science standards. Their proposals were rejected by the science standards committee appointed by the Board of Education, and were also rejected by 12 independent scientists who reviewed the proposed revisions.
Each side was invited to provide witnesses to testify before the board for intelligent design or evolution, with the taxpayers of Kansas covering the travel expenses. The scientific community refused to participate en masse. The pro-intelligent design group, the Intelligent Design Network, invited 22 witnesses. Among these were a number of non-scientists, and a number of scientists with no professional experience in biology.
New science standards
On November 8, 2005, the Kansas Board of Education approved the following changes to its science standards:- Add to the mission statement a goal that science education should seek to help students make "informed" decisions.
- Provide a definition of science that is not strictly limited to natural explanations. We also emphasize that the Science Curriculum Standards do not include Intelligent Design, the scientific disagreement with the claim of many evolutionary biologists that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion. While the testimony presented at the science hearings included many advocates of Intelligent Design, these standards neither mandate nor prohibit teaching about this scientific disagreement.
- Allow intelligent design to be presented as an alternative explanation to evolution as presented in mainstream biology textbooks, without endorsing it.
- State that evolution is a theory and not a fact.
- Require informing students of purported scientific controversies regarding evolution.
Opposition to new standards
Logically derived from confirmable evidence, evolution is understood to be the result of an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection. As the foundation of modern biology, its indispensable role has been further strengthened by the capacity to study DNA. In contrast, intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent.
The Discovery Institute has consistently insisted that its Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan is not another attempt to open the door of public high school science classrooms for intelligent design, and hence supernatural explanations. Discovery Institute spokesman Casey Luskin in February 2006 coined the term "false fear syndrome" of those who said it was, and said:
This is simply another instance of Darwinists attempting to oppose critical analysis of evolution by pretending that it is equivalent to teaching intelligent design. This is a political tactic based upon misinformation, misrepresentation, emotions, and false fears.
In response, Nick Matzke says that it has proved that Critical Analysis of Evolution is a means of teaching all the intelligent design arguments without using the intelligent design label.
The Kansas science standards as proposed by the Discovery Institute and adopted by the state were said to be "ID in disguise" by an assistant of a Discovery Institute Fellow, confirming the criticisms of opponents to the standards. In discussing Discovery Institute radio commercials supporting their campaign airing in Kansas on the blog of William A. Dembski, Dembski's research assistant and co-moderator of the site, Joel Borofsky, said:
To the statement that the Kansas science standards had nothing to do with intelligent design but were only about teaching evolution in a "balanced" way, Borofsky responded:
It really is ID in disguise. The entire purpose behind all of this is to shift it into schools... at least that is the hope/fear among some science teachers in the area. The problem is, if you are not going to be dogmatic in Darwinism that means you inevitably have to point out a fault or at least an alternative to Darwinism. So far, the only plausible theory is ID. If one is to challenge Darwin, then one must use ID. To challenge Darwin is to challenge natural selection/spontaneous first cause... which is what the Kansas board is attempting to do. When you do that, you have to invoke the idea of ID.
In response to the reception to his comments, Dembski's research assistant issued a clarification, stating that he was only voicing his personal opinion, not that of others in the movement, and that he is Dembski's "assistant on theological work, not necessarily the ID movement."
The Discovery Institute continues to deny allegations that its true agenda is religious, and downplays the religious source of much of its funding. In an interview of Stephen C. Meyer when ABC News asked about the Discovery Institute's many evangelical Christian donors the institute's public relations representative stopped the interview saying "I don't think we want to go down that path."
Both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Teachers Association spoke out against the new science standards; in addition to separate statements from each opposing the standards, the two groups issued a joint statement that the new Kansas standards are improved, but as currently written, they overemphasize controversy in the theory of evolution and distort the definition of science. The National Academy of Sciences and National Science Teachers Association offered to work with the board to resolve these issues so the state standards could use text from the National Research Council's National Science Education Standards and National Science Teachers Association's Pathways to Science Standards, though they ultimately declined to grant use of the text due to Kansas State Board of Education members insisting on language "emphasizing controversy in the theory of evolution" and "distorting the definition of science."
The position of the scientific community is that there is no controversy to teach, that evolution is widely accepted within the scientific community as a valid, well-supported theory and that such disagreements that do exist are about the details of evolution's mechanisms, not the validity of evolution itself.
For example, the National Association of Biology Teachers in a statement endorsing evolution as noncontroversial quoted Theodosius Dobzhansky "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" and went on to state that the quote "accurately reflects the central, unifying role of evolution in biology. The theory of evolution provides a framework that explains both the history of life and the ongoing adaptation of organisms to environmental challenges and changes." They emphasized that "Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process" and that "The selection of topics covered in a biology curriculum should accurately reflect the principles of biological science. Teaching biology in an effective and scientifically honest manner requires that evolution be taught in a standards-based instructional framework with effective classroom discussions and laboratory experiences."