Suddenly America seems back in the days of the Monkey Trial when a young teacher, John Thomas Scopes, was convicted for teaching the theory of evolution and suggesting that humans were descended from apes. That was in Tennessee in 1925.
Now, in 1999, the Kansas board of education has caused uproar by pressurising its schools not to teach Darwinism. While the board has not banned teaching the theory, it will not be included in the tests which evaluate students' performance. In other words teachers and students have no incentive to spend time on evolutionary theory.
The oft-quoted journalist H. L. Mencken, who covered the Monkey Trial, is now being quoted again for what he had to say about the fate of Mr Scopes. His conviction "serves notice on the country that Neanderthal Man is organising in these forlorn backwaters of the land", Mencken wrote in disgust. Today many are denouncing Kansas as a latter-day "forlorn backwater". It has been an amazing week here, with the TV chat shows demanding whether their guests are "Darwinists" or "creationists", and only adding to the confusion by failing to define the terms properly. Parts of Darwin's conclusions are no longer accepted as valid by modern biologists, and so-called creationists are often choosy about which parts of the Bible they interpret literally.
Nobody will be convicted in Kansas for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest. In fact the US Supreme Court in 1968 ruled that the ban by Tennessee and other states on teaching evolution was contrary to free speech under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court also ruled in 1987 against laws in Arkansas and Louisiana making schools which teach evolution also teach the Book of Genesis version of the creation of the world in six days.
The Kansas move is a way of getting around these court rulings and is the latest round in a battle going on for over 100 years in America. This is between those who propound evolutionary theory and the "creationists", usually called fundamentalists, who hold that a literal reading of the Book of Genesis account of divine creation of individual species is more accurate.
This month, creationists on the Kansas board succeeded in deleting most of the two pages on evolution from the science guidelines for schools in the state. Liberals were outraged, and a New York Times editorial condemned what it called: "Wilful ignorance on evolution." The presidents and chancellors of Kansas's six public universities had tried to prevent the move in a letter to the education board saying the new standards "will set Kansas back a century and give hard-to-find science teachers no choice but to pursue other career fields or assignments outside of Kansas."
George Bush Jnr and Elizabeth Dole, both seeking the Republican presidential nomination, ran for cover as they were pressed for their views on the controversy. It may seem strange outside America but supporting Darwin can lose you votes in the Deep South and the Bible Belt.
Respected science writer Stephen Jay Gould, who is also professor of geology at Harvard, says this week in a Time essay on the controversy that apart from the US "no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political clout, against evolution - a subject taught as fundamental, and without dispute, in all other countries that share our major socio-cultural traditions." But American conservatives have been fighting back against their bad press and pointing out that there are Darwinists who can be as fanatic as fundamentalists about how life evolved and as reluctant to admit conflicting evidence.
Evolution, should not be called a "fact", argue the conservatives. It is still only a scientific "theory" and so can be disproved some day by new evidence. Critics who urge evolutionists to ask hard questions about their evidence, point out that school textbooks still cite examples of evolution that have been discredited, such as the survival of a variant of moths because their dark colour helped them escape predators. Evolutionists also cite the survival of finches with longer beaks than normal after a drought in the Galapagos islands. But they ignore the reversion to normal beak size after a later flood.
Other commentators point out that it is possible to be both a creationist and an evolutionist if one reads Genesis as a metaphor for how the world began rather than a literal account. A former dean of the school of philosophy in the Catholic University of America, Jude Dougherty, is quoted as saying: "I don't think anyone who is at least minimally scientifically literate doubts that the theory of evolution is correct. But there is no doubt that we can believe God created an evolutionary universe either." The Catholic Church's attitude to how our bodies evolved is open but it insists that each human soul is directly created by God. But when did we stop being apes and become human or homo sapiens? Don't go to Kansas to find out.