KEN BINGMAN (High School Biology Teacher): Our prediction here is ...
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: For 42 years, Ken Bingman has been covering a lot of biology's basics with high schoolers in this suburban Kansas district. Among the current assignments to his students: a paper on the Kansas Board of Education hearings. Bingman says those hearings have very little to do with biology, but everything to do with how biology will soon be taught in Kansas.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I believe that intelligent design theory is a scientifically valid understanding of origins.
DE SAM LAZARO: For months, the board of education has debated how -- and what -- high school students should be taught about the origin and development of life. The debate deeply troubles Bingman.
Mr. BINGMAN: These hearings are not about science. Science is alive and well around the world. This is about religion, and it's about their strict fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible.DE SAM LAZARO: Today, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted by the overwhelming majority of biologists. It holds that life evolved naturally over billions of years by random mutation and the survival of the best adapted -- the fittest.
But today many conservative Christians say the theory of evolution is an affront to the Bible's account, the so-called "young earth belief" that God created the earth and all life as it is now in six days about 6,000 years ago. Many critics of evolution, like Kathy Martin of the Kansas Board of Education, say it ignores God's intention.
KATHY MARTIN (Kansas Board of Education): We're here for a reason. We weren't just evolved out of nothing.
DE SAM LAZARO: With Martin's election to the Kansas board last November, critics of evolution gained majority control. They insist the evolution debate now goes well beyond religion. One ally was Stephen Meyer, a scholar with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.
The Discovery Institute is leading the challenge to the way science is taught in this country. It favors teaching evolution as a scientific theory that is open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that should not be questioned.
Dr. STEPHEN MEYER (Discovery Institute): The public is starting to catch on that there's more to this debate than the stereotyped view of the enlightened scientist versus the backwoods Bible thumper.DE SAM LAZARO: Meyer has a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University. He says evolution -- he calls it "neo-Darwinism" -- leaves many unanswered questions. He favors an alternative explanation called "intelligent design" or "ID."
DISCOVERY INSTITUTE VIDEO: And in the scientific community, growing numbers of scholars are expressing doubts about Darwin's theory.
DE SAM LAZARO: Intelligent design proponents argue that at the level of life's building blocks, the DNA and RNA -- illustrated in this Discovery Institute video -- there's simply no way such elaborate "systems" could develop through random mutations and natural selection.DISCOVERY INSTITUTE VIDEO: Consider the difficulty of generating just two lines of Shakespeare's play "Hamlet" by dropping Scrabble letters onto a tabletop. Then consider that the specific genetic instructions required to build the proteins in even the simplest one-celled organism would fill hundreds of pages of printed text.
DE SAM LAZARO: They say such complexity has to have been designed, which means there had to be a designer.
Dr. MEYER: Many advocates of the theory of intelligent design happen to think that intelligence was likely to be God. They think that the evidence has theistic implications. But it is logically possible that it could be something else.
DE SAM LAZARO: However, most scientists say intelligent design is not science. Nor, they say, is scientific theory just opinion. They say science has to be understandable in natural terms, predictable and testable.
Mr. BINGMAN: Our major assumptions are that the natural world is, one, understandable; two, is testable; and three, is predictable. And you cannot test intelligent design. That's religion. That's taking us out of the realm of natural sciences, and it's just dumb.DE SAM LAZARO: Eugenie Scott heads the National Center for Science Education, a California-based group that's fighting efforts to change the science curriculum.
Dr. EUGENIE SCOTT (Executive Director, National Center for Science Education): Well, the intelligence is God, so let's be grown-ups and just use the "G" word here. So what intelligent design says is that if something is really, really complicated, and we can't explain it, God did it. And once you allow yourself to say, "God did it," then you stop looking for a natural explanation. That's a science stopper.
Dr. SCOTT: We cannot test for the influence of a supernatural creator. If we ever invent a theometer, then we can, but until then we have to just stick with our natural cause. And this may be tossed on its ear in Kansas.
Ms. MARTIN: You don't think so? Have you talked to the new pope?
Prof. KEITH MILLER (Department of Geology, Kansas State University): Unfortunately, what I think has happened essentially is some of those fears and concerns have been scapegoated onto the scientific community.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I think it's kind of good that people are actually conflicting over this because this -- eventually we're going to figure out how this is, and we're going to get closer and closer to the real facts. And by having this conflict here, we're going to figure out what is going on and how really we came to be.
