As a result, after the November elections the new board will have a majority committed to overturning the antievolution policies currently in place.

The Kansas Board of Education's decision in a 6-4 vote last year did not formally ban the teaching of evolution, although it left the option of what to teach in the hands of local school boards by removing evolution from state tests that evaluate students' performance. But by effectively removing from school curriculum the teaching of evolution as the sole explanation for the origin of species, the board gave freer rein to promoting antiscientific doctrines of creationism in the public schools. The board also removed from the curriculum the big bang theory of the origin of the universe, which guides modern astronomy and physics.

Creationism is the myth--repackaged in the framework of "scientific" teaching--that a supernatural being created humans and other species. Evolution, based on scientific investigation of fossils, anatomy, and genetic evidence, shows how species come into being and evolve over long periods of time through a process of natural selection.

The campaign against the teaching of evolution in the schools has heated up in recent years. It is one front in the "culture war" spearheaded by rightist forces, which scapegoat sections of the population, foster irrational ideas, and mobilize emotional energy around the "decadence" of society in order to promote reactionary "solutions" to the social crisis caused by the capitalist system. Promoting obscurantism is used to undermine hard-won democratic rights such as the separation of church and state and to attack the scientific materialist understanding of the world that working people need to be able to change it.

Antievolution forces have sought to make inroads in a number of other states besides Kansas. Last October state officials in Kentucky eliminated the word "evolution" from the school curriculum. In Alabama and Oklahoma, authorities ordered that textbooks carry a disclaimer about the certainty of evolution.

Officials in New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and other states considered, but defeated, proposals by opponents of evolution. Last fall the New Mexico government barred creationism in the schools and endorsed the teaching of evolution in the science curriculum.

The rightist advocates of creationism in the schools have been emboldened by the reactionary policies of Democratic and Republican politicians, such as attacks on a woman's right to abortion, efforts to search youth with metal detectors and cops in the schools, attempts to censor freedom of speech, and other assaults on the rights of working people.

Thomas DeLay, a prominent Republican congressman, argued last year that the shootings in high schools in Colorado and Georgia were linked to the "culture of abortion and the teaching of evolution."

Major capitalist politicians have bent to the rightist assault on science. "A year ago, when the Kansas school board removed evolution from the state's science standards, the nation's leading politicians barely responded," reported the Washington Post in an August 4 editorial. "John McCain and Elizabeth Dole declared that such judgments were a matter for the states; George W. Bush announced he was positively in favor of teaching creationism alongside evolution.... Al Gore, in other contexts a vigorous advocate of science education, initially refused to criticize Kansas and then did so reluctantly."  
 
Latest round in assault on science
Until the late 1960s, several states forbade the teaching of evolution at all. In a 1925 trial in Tennessee, John Scopes, a young high school biology teacher, was convicted of violating that state's law against teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. While his conviction was later overturned on a technicality, the trial had a big impact on the nation's public school system. Throughout the 1930s references to "Darwin" or "evolution" were not to be found in most biology textbooks.

In 1968 the Supreme Court ruled that banning the teaching of evolution is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds--a victory resulting from the democratic gains of the civil rights movement.

In a second offensive in the late 1970s, the governments of Arkansas and Louisiana required that if evolution was taught, "equal time" must be granted to teaching the creation story, dubbed "creation science." Those pushing this antiscientific approach falsely argued that state and local school boards should play down the importance of evolution by presenting it, along with creationism, as unproven explanations. A Supreme Court ruling in 1987 rejected those laws.

The latest tactic, used in Kansas, is to simply delete, but not formally ban, evolution from school tests and allow instruction in the biblical "alternative" as a choice for local school boards.

Ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan, who has long railed against the teaching of evolution in the schools, has sometimes couched his reactionary position as a question to be decided "democratically" on the local level. Asked in a "Meet the Press" television interview last October whether creationism or evolution should be taught in the schools, he replied, "That should be decided at the local level by the school itself. I would prefer that children have voluntarily the right to be taught the Bible in public school or the Torah or anything as long as it's voluntary.... Let it be decided there by majority rule".

Forcing creationism into the curriculum on an equal footing with evolution makes a mockery out of scientific education. As Stephen Jay Gould, a leading defender of Darwinian evolution, put it, teaching biology without evolution is "like teaching English but making grammar optional."

The materialist explanation of the evolution of biological species was first outlined by Charles Darwin in 1859 in a book entitled "On the Origin of Species." At the time Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founding leaders of the modern communist workers movement, hailed Darwin's discovery. In a letter to Engels, Marx wrote, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our view" of the development of human history.

Engels, too, noted the revolutionary character of Darwin's study, which views nature in both materialist and dialectical, dynamic terms. He pointed out that Darwin opened the way for a new view of nature where "all rigidity was dissolved, all fixity dissipated...the whole of nature [was] shown as moving in eternal flux."

The battle today over the teaching of evolution is one expression of how, in times of mounting social crisis, the capitalist rulers seek to blunt rising class consciousness by promoting religious and other antiscientific notions. These false ideas fetishize existing class relations and obfuscate an understanding of the development of human society and the modern class struggle.

Today, the attack on Darwinian evolution is moving from the fringes on the right wing into the pages of established bourgeois magazines through some of its "supporters," who give evolution a teleological explanation--that is, the idea this process has an ultimate goal.  
 

Attack on evolution by 'supporters'

Robert Wright, for example, has published a book entitled Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which argues that there is a purpose and directionality to the evolution of life. An article based on two chapters of his book appeared in the December 13 issue of The New Yorker magazine, entitled "The accidental creationist: Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution."

In his attack on Gould's materialist viewpoint, Wright argues that the evolution of advanced life was likely from the start. "The fates of particular species may depend on the luck of the draw," he writes. "But the properties they embody were in the cards--at least in the sense that the deck was stacked heavily in their favor."

Such unscientific arguments, like other forms of mystification, are ultimately aimed at convincing working people that we are the objects, not the subjects, of history; that there must be a plan, a creator, to whose goals we should submit rather than through our actions being capable of taking control of our destiny. The fight for a scientific understanding of the world is vital for workers and farmers to have the tools necessary to transform it through a social revolution.