On the way back from Oklahoma City, we pulled off I-35 at Olathe, Kan.

Monday, August 30, 1999

On the way back from Oklahoma City, we pulled off I-35 at Olathe, Kan., for lunch in a Waffle House.

I routinely take advantages of such situations to search local newspapers, looking for what is going on there that I would not find in the national news. A lead article in the Kansas City Star reported that very day the Kansas Board of Education would vote on modifying high school graduation standards to eliminate the requirement on evolution.

That they succeeded in becoming international news before we reached Des Moines.

The Kansas Board of Education unwisely removed evolution from the graduation standards, when they should have worked to have evolution taught as a consensus theory but with some humility and greater forthrightness about the extent of supporting scientific evidence.

I think they threw the baby of scientific and educational necessity out with the dirty water of science smugness and educational carelessness.

Much of the news reporting of the event is sensational and grossly inaccurate, especially in headlines and leads. Only macroevolution (between species) was deleted and that only from the standards and not the curriculum. I have no doubt evolution will continue to be taught, some with a vengeance (which would be counter-productive to the Board’s intent).

The theory of evolution must be taught, continually up-dating as it continually develops, and students need to understand that it is the single unifying concept upon which most current scientific work is based.

The vast majority of working scientists accept the theory, and many consciously use it as a presupposition to their current work. A person ignorant of evolution is uneducated, and an educated person will understand why scientists subscribe to it. Those who will need to use evolutionary processes in scientific work need to know how to conduct these processes.

Even those who are philosophically opposed to the assumptions of evolution and cannot bring themselves to acknowledge any validity in it need to have an honest understanding of the theory to know what is going on in the scientific world and why it is happening.

Religious schools, whose theology repudiates evolution, must teach evolution for the same reasons, as well as being able to do their polemic work intelligently. If they need added motivation, I remind that you’ll never defeat an enemy you don’t know well.

The theory of evolution has dominated science for so long that most colleges and universities uncritically presume upon its wide acceptance and simply lay it down as a given without the healthy skepticism professional science exercises in other matters.

I wonder how well today’s science students understand the history and philosophy of science. How seriously do they take the fact that whatever evolution there actually is has never been observed or verified by replication and never can be? Although some scientific developments have come about deductively, have they forgotten that only inductive observation can lead to certainty?

The theory that is currently being practiced in labs and taught in universities and colleges is substantially different from Darwin’s amazing speculations, but not a few high school science teachers have fallen behind in the literature of their own discipline and are teaching theories or aspects their own professors no longer hold.

Some seem to lack a sensitivity to nuances in the evidence and take the easy way out by painting evolution with broad brushes.

One of the greatest failings in universities and colleges-and some high schools-is to presume evolution necessarily precludes God and religion and present it as an atheistic philosophy. Worse, some ridicule students as naïve who acknowledge belief in the Genesis account of creation and exercise religious faith. Of course, some preachers set their young people up for embarrassment by brain-washing them with a distorted theology of the Genesis account and challenge them to evangelize their science teachers with it.

If scientists and science teachers truly wish the average person to respect the theory of evolution for what it is, they need to exercise similar respect for belief in the Genesis account. That account, transmitted as it was in a pre-scientific age, was not intended to be a scientific description of How, but a theological or ontological exposition of the Who and Why of creation.

When science teachers present the evidence for evolution – which there is and which they must – they must be honest and professional enough to admit where evidence is weak and where it is entirely lacking.

The Kansas Board of Education might never have micromanaged science education if evolution had been taught honestly with humility and caution. I want to see the theory of evolution back in the Kansas standards, but I also want to see it taught appropriately in the classrooms.

Wallace Alcorn’s column appears Mondays