OCTOBER 2005

Eleven parents in the US state of Pennsylvania are taking their local school board to court in an attempt to protect the teaching of evolution.

The Dover Area School Board requires teachers to say evolution is a just a theory and is still being tested.

Teachers have to announce that Intelligent Design is an alternative explanation for the origin of life.

The parents and scientists argue that ID is a form of religious belief, which has no place in the science curriculum.

'Not a theory'

For well over 100 years, biology has accepted Charles Darwin's idea of evolution through variability and natural selection - survival of the fittest as it is better known.

The underlying mechanisms of evolution are totally natural - there is no role for a higher being.

And every new breakthrough - even the tremendous discovery of the genetic code - has fitted easily into the Darwinian framework.

So when the school board in Pennsylvania chose to instruct its teachers to say that Darwin's theory is "not a fact", and that there are "gaps in the theory".

The head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science says that the alternative put forward by the board, Intelligent Design, "is not even a theory".

'Vital' case

Intelligent Design, which argues that key moments in the history of life were guided by a higher power, is being promoted in schools across 20 states in the US.

The case of the Dover School board is seen as vital by scientific organisations in restricting its spread.

They say that this is the biggest case in 18 years - taking the fight back to a court decision that "creation science" - ID's precursor - was in fact religion and therefore unconstitutional in the secular US education system.

They hope to prove the same of intelligent design, and they are prepared to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, if they have to.

IN 1999:

Kansas rejects theory of evolution



Opponents of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution have scored a victory in the United States after the board of education in Kansas voted to drop evolution as a subject in the science curriculum.

The State School Board approved by six votes to four a new curriculum that eliminates the teaching of evolution.

It offered a compromise instead, endorsing the theory of micro-evolution - which explains changes within a species - but rejecting evolution as a way of explaining the origin of species.

The decision is being seen as a victory for the supporters of creationism who believe the world came into being more or less as described in the Bible and who refuse to accept Darwin's teaching as scientific fact.

'Bunch of hicks'

Evolutionists gave a hostile reaction to the decision, saying that it would diminish the credibility of the Kansas curriculum.

The heads of all six state universities had earlier written to the board chairwoman, saying the proposal would set Kansas back a century.

Charlie Pierce, who has taught biology at Hutchinson High School for 18 years, said before the vote: "We're going back to the 1880s. It does make us look to the people in the rest of the country that we're a bunch of hicks."

But creationists argue that the theory of evolution is not proven and that to tell students that it is a science is a deception.

Evolution off the timetable

Kansas is one of a handful of states - including Arizona, Alabama, Illinois, New Mexico, Texas and Nebraska - where school boards have attempted in recent years to take evolution out of state science curricula or reduce the emphasis on evolutionary concepts.

The debate began soon after Darwin produced his theory of natural selection and evolution famous in

the 19th Century.

It culminated in the US in the so-called Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925 in which biology teacher John T Scopes went on trial for breaking a state law banning the teaching of evolution.

He was convicted and fined $100, but the verdict was later reversed on a technicality. The law was not repealed until 1967.