It's not often that a local education board attracts TV cameras, let alone an audience. But when the Kansas Board of Education met on Wednesday there were eight cameras and a room full of people. Come the decision, 7-3, and a round of applause swept the room. Kansas schooling could hold its head up again.
Two years ago this board had voted to remove the theory of evolution from the school curriculum and examinations. This week after a controversy that caused the state international embarrassment and resulted in the ousting in an election of several creationists from the board, it voted again to ensure that children would learn that life evolved from a few scraps of genetic material.
Students will also once again be taught about such threats to the literal interpretation of the Bible as the Big Bang theory and plate tectonics.
Redemption came, quite fortuitously, the same week as two scientific teams revealed their analysis of a first reading of the whole human genome, described by many scientists as "the Book of Life".
At the press conference in Washington to announce their findings Dr Francis Collins, head of the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, suggested a more nuanced and mutually unthreatening relationship of scientific discovery to faith than that manifested in Kansas in the last couple of years.
He said he had been humbled and awed to read the genome, "written in the language of God".
On National Public Radio next day, he spoke of how an ability to describe with enormous precision the process and components of the evolution of human life did not at all threaten the idea that such complexity and order must be the reflection of design and hence of a god.
That dialogue between science and religion has come a long way from the days of the celebrated Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925 when Clarence Darrow clashed with the South's darling, William Jennings Bryan. Or the time when the good legislators of one southern state passed a bill deeming pi to be 3 instead of 3.14, to simplify calculations.
But in Kansas this week we were not, according to one view, debating religion v science at all.
Mr Steve Abrams, a member of both the current and last board who voted for the ban, insisted: "Every time religion is brought up, it is brought up by someone on the opposition. Not one time have I talked about the fact that religion is an integral part of this. I'm saying that what we ought to be following is what good science is."
Mr Abrams, who argues that evolution is just one of several theories and should not be given primacy, unsuccessfully proposed an amendment calling for the teaching of the theory of "intelligent design" that asserts simply that man and the universe are the products of God. That was grand for religion class, said a fellow board member, Janet Waugh. "We have no problem with Christianity or any other religion being taught, but it cannot be taught in science class."
And in deference to the religious convictions of students and the zealots of the creationist movement the board's guidelines make clear to teachers that "understand does not mandate belief. While students may be required to understand some concepts that researchers use to conduct research they may accept or reject the concepts presented." Teachers are required "not to ridicule, belittle or embarrass a student for expressing alternative views."
But the row is unlikely to end here. "I'm really gratified that this chapter is over," said John Staver, a Kansas State University professor and co-chairman of the 27-member committee of science educators who wrote the new guideline. But, he said, "the book is not closed".
And John Calvert of Lake Quivira, a managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, said after the vote that he was disappointed but not surprised. The group plans to take its case to school boards across the country, Mr Calvert said.
It seems that the spirit of Bryan, the demagogic, Bible-thumping scourge of evolutionism, is still on the stomp. Seventy-six years ago, in his final dispatch from the trial H.L. Mencken wrote:
"Darrow has lost this case. It was lost long before he came to Dayton. But it seems to me that he has nevertheless performed a great public service by fighting it to a finish and in a perfectly serious way.
"Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organising in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law.
"There are other states that had better look to their arsenals before the Hun is at their gates."
Too true, brother, too true. The Hun's still around.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
