The draft was applauded by right-wing forces that are promoting creationism in its latest repackaged form—dubbed “intelligent design.”

The new Kansas school standards avoid explicitly advocating the teaching of “intelligent design.” Its proponents instead promote criticism of evolution in the name of giving students a “balanced view.” In 1999, rightist forces won a vote in the Kansas board to delete most references to evolution from its state science standards. The decision was reversed two years later, however.

The ongoing battle over the teaching of evolution in the public schools was recently highlighted by well-publicized comments made by President George Bush. In response to a question at an August 2 White House interview, he said he favored making “intelligent design” part of the curriculum alongside evolution.

“Both sides ought to be properly taught,” the president stated, “so people can understand what the debate is about.” White House officials said “Bush’s comments were in keeping with positions dating to his Texas governorship,” the Washington Post reported.

Around the country, proponents of “intelligent design” have been campaigning to get that doctrine adopted by school boards, with only limited success. The issue is being fought out in school districts in some 20 states.

Last October the school district in the Pennsylvania town of Dover became the first in the country to mandate the teaching of “intelligent design” to biology students. This order is being challenged in federal court, with a hearing scheduled for September.

In Georgia, the Cobb County school system in 2002 adopted a policy of placing disclaimer stickers about evolution on textbooks saying, “Evolution is a theory, not a fact.” A judge last January overruled this move as unconstitutional.  
 
Battle over teaching science
To avoid the appearance of trying to introduce religious views into the public schools, right-wing forces are now promoting the teaching of “intelligent design,” a more secular-sounding label for creationism. They claim that life is so intricate and complex that only a powerful “guiding force”—a “designer”—could have created it. The creationist myth, which has also been packaged as “creation science,” contends that a supernatural being produced humans and other species as told in the Bible.

Evolution is based on scientific investigation of the fossil record, anatomy, and genetic evidence. First outlined by Charles Darwin in 1859 in the book On the Origin of Species, it explains how species of animals and plants come into being and evolve over long periods of time through a process of natural selection. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, contemporaries of Darwin, hailed his study for examining nature in materialist and dialectical—not static—terms.

Today, one of the leading promoters of introducing “intelligent design” in public schools is the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, which says it has support not only from biblical creationists but also from numerous scientists who are skeptical of evolution. On its website the institute contends, “Intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”

The Discovery Institute disingenuously describes its efforts as a civil liberties campaign for “free speech on evolution.” Its actual goal, however, was spelled out by an outfit it initiated in 1996, the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, which said it “wants to liberate science from ‘atheistic naturalism,’ ” a 2002 article from Natural History magazine reported.

The recent moves against teaching evolution has been part of a decades-long ideological campaign, with rightist forces suffering a number of setbacks in their goal of imposing the teaching of creationism in public schools.

This campaign is one front in the efforts by rightists to foster irrational ideas, to whip up an emotional frenzy around the “decadence” of society in order to promote reactionary “solutions” to the social crisis caused by capitalism in decline.

Promoting such 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.

In a famous 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. Although the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, most biology textbooks throughout the 1930s eliminated references to “Darwin” or “evolution.”

In 1968 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Arkansas statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Two decades later, in 1987, the high court struck down the Louisiana “Creation Act,” ruling that teaching “creation science” in public schools is unconstitutional.  
 
 
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