School boards challenge textbooks with evolution, big bang theories

Insight on the News, Feb 3, 1997 by Larry Witham

In America's perennial creation-evolution debate, this school year has been the year of the textbook. "I think the textbook issue is heating up again," says Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education in El Cerrito, Calif., the nation's main anticreationist watchdog group. "We've had more calls about textbook problems this year than any other topic."

To avoid disputes about evolution, publishers omit chapters in books shipped to certain states. Some schools glue together offending pages or adhere "educational-aid" labels to texts pointing out that evolution is only the current theory, not a philosophy of life or the final truth.

One institution, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, is considering using an insert -- or what critics call a "disclaimer" -- to try to settle a dispute over a biology text. Last October, Bob and Vicky Carr, parents of a Fairfax County ninth-grader, wrote a letter to the school board complaining that the book listed creation science along with astrology under the entry "pseudo-science." "What we can't accept is the implication that our religious faith is just a lot of `pseudoscience,'" they said. The publisher, the Biological Science Curriculum Study, long has been a provider of textbooks with a strong evolution theme.

The Alabama State Board of Education inaugurated the insert approach in 1996. A 260-word insert, attached to a biology text's inside cover, states that all claims about life's origins are "theory, not fact." It adds: "There are many unanswered questions about the origin of life which are not mentioned in your textbook"' and then lists four.

"Inserts point out that there's a distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, between the philosophy of Darwinism and the science of evolution," says John Wiester, head of of the science-education commission of the American Scientific Affiliation in Ipswich, Mass., a group formed in 1941 by evangelical scientists. The commission tries to guide publishers and educators toward science teaching that does not encroach on religious belief. "There's not a high-school biology textbook on the market that makes these distinctions," Wiester says.

For "young-earth" Christians, who support "creation science," the main distinction is their belief that the universe was formed in six days 10,000 years ago. In Marshall County, Ky., the schools glued together pages in an earth-science text that explained the big bang theory, which holds that the universe originated 15 billion years ago and the Earth, 4.8 billion years ago. Young-earth creationists in Cobb County, Ga. (House Speaker Newt Gingrich's district), prompted McMillan-McGraw Hill to print a new version of its Changing Earth textbook to exclude a chapter on the Earth's age.