US evolution court battle opens
Eleven parents in the US have gone to court to protect the teaching of evolution at their local schools.
The Dover Area School Board in the state of Pennsylvania requires science teachers to tell pupils that evolution is merely one, unproven theory. Teachers have to state that Intelligent Design - whose adherents believe life on earth was created by an intelligent being - is a possible alternative.
President Bush has come out on the side of religious activists who are campaigning for public schools to retreat from Darwinism and teach something called "intelligent design" or ID.
In a nutshell, the ID activists maintain that many forms of life are too complex to have been the result of any random - indeed mindless - natural selection. A highly intelligent supernatural force must have designed, say, the human eye or the neurology of the brain.
Yet, as Charles Darwin demonstrated in his book Origin of Species in 1859, we weren't designed by any hidden hand in a single brilliant moment, but have all evolved from lower orders - ape to man - over hundreds of millions of years.
Bush hasn't completely abandoned Darwinism. He said that ID should be taught alongside evolution "because part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought".
That may sound harmless enough - free speech and all that - but coming from a president already known for his disdain for scientific research, notably on global warming and stem cells, it has further dismayed the scientific community and many others.
The Dover Area School Board in the state of Pennsylvania requires science teachers to tell pupils that evolution is merely one, unproven theory. Teachers have to state that Intelligent Design - whose adherents believe life on earth was created by an intelligent being - is a possible alternative.
President Bush has come out on the side of religious activists who are campaigning for public schools to retreat from Darwinism and teach something called "intelligent design" or ID.
In a nutshell, the ID activists maintain that many forms of life are too complex to have been the result of any random - indeed mindless - natural selection. A highly intelligent supernatural force must have designed, say, the human eye or the neurology of the brain.
Yet, as Charles Darwin demonstrated in his book Origin of Species in 1859, we weren't designed by any hidden hand in a single brilliant moment, but have all evolved from lower orders - ape to man - over hundreds of millions of years.
Bush hasn't completely abandoned Darwinism. He said that ID should be taught alongside evolution "because part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought".
That may sound harmless enough - free speech and all that - but coming from a president already known for his disdain for scientific research, notably on global warming and stem cells, it has further dismayed the scientific community and many others.
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