TOPEKA, Kansas, (Reuters):
EIGHTY YEARS after a famed courtroom battle in Tennessee pitted religious beliefs about the origins of life against the theories of British scientist Charles Darwin, Kansas is holding its own hearings on what school children should be taught about how life on earth began.
A six-day courtroom-style debate opened on Thursday in Kansas over what children should be taught in schools about the origin of life was it natural evolution or did God create the world?
The hearings, complete with opposing attorneys and a long list of witnesses, were arranged amid efforts by some Christian groups in Kansas and nationally to reverse the domination of
evolutionary theory in the nation's schools.
Many prominent United States scientific groups have denounced the debate as founded on fallacy and have promised to boycott the hearings, which opponents say are part of a larger nationwide effort by religious interests to gain control over government.
challenge the validity
Pedro Irigonegaray is a lawyer defending evolution in the debate. His opponent will be attorney John Calvert, managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, a Kansas organisation that argues the Earth was created through intentional design rather than random organism evolution.
The group is one of many that have been formed over the past several years to challenge the validity of evolutionary concepts and seek to open the schoolroom to ideas that humans and other living creatures are too intricately designed to have come about randomly.
"We're not against evolution," said Calvert. "But there is a lot of evidence that suggests that life is the product of intelligence. I think it is inappropriate for the state to prejudge the question whether we are the product of design or just an occurrence."
William Harris, a medical researcher and co-founder of a Kansas group called the Intelligent Design Network, posed the core question about life's beginnings before
mapping out why he and other Christians want changes in school curriculum.
"They are offering an answer that may be in conflict with religious views," Harris said in opening the debate. "Part of our overall goal is to remove the bias against religion that is currently in schools. This is a scientific controversy that has powerful religious implications."
debates nationwide
Debates over evolution are currently being waged in more than a dozen states, including Texas where one bill would allow for creationism to be taught alongside evolution.
Kansas has been grappling with the issue for years, garnering worldwide attention in 1999 when the state school board voted to downplay evolution in science classes.
Subsequent elections altered the membership of the school board and led to renewed backing for evolution instruction in 2001. But elections last year gave religious conservatives a 6-4 majority and the board is now finalising new science standards, which will guide teachers about how and what to teach students.
The hearings organised by a committee of the Kansas Board of Education were taking place 80 years after the so-called 'Monkey Trial' of John Scopes, a Tennessee biology teacher who was found guilty of illegally teaching evolution.
There is renewed debate over evolution in more than a dozen U.S. states and a resurgence across the nation in the influence of religious conservatives, who played an important part in the re-election of Republican President George W. Bush last year.
Irigonegaray said he planned
to call no witnesses, though he did cross-examine witnesses, sometimes combatively.
Harris acknowledged under questioning that there were many people who saw no incompatibility between religious beliefs that God created life and evolutionary teachings about how life evolved through natural processes.
Outside the hearing room,
outraged scientists challenged the validity of the hearings. "This is a showcase trial," said Jack Krebs, vice-president for Kansas Citizens for Science. "They have hijacked science and education."
Ken Schmitz, a University of Missouri/Kansas City chemistry professor attending the hearing said he worried that the attack on evolution could confuse students and endanger their ability to excel in science.
"They are not going to understand this," said Schmitz.
The current proposal pushed by conservatives would not eliminate evolution entirely from instruction, nor would it require creationism to be taught, but it would encourage teachers to discuss various viewpoints and eliminate core evolution claims as part of the required curriculum.
Some evolution detractors say that the belief that humans, animals and organisms evolved over long spans of time is inconsistent with biblical teachings that life was created by God. The Bible's Old Testament says that God
created life on Earth including
the first humans, Adam and Eve, in six days.
The theory of evolution came to prominence in 1859 when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and it was the subject of a 1925 trial in Tennessee in which teacher John Thomas Scopes was accused of violating a ban against teaching evolution.
