Seattle think tank played role

Last November, a debate was waged in Austin about the adoption of a biology textbook that would be appropriate enough for Texas classrooms. The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) voted unanimously to adopt the new biology books for purchase this year under certain conditions.

The issue that faced Texas education was the accuracy of information included in biology textbooks, and whether they conformed to Texas state law. The law requires that they have no factual errors and requires “students to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

A similar federal law, the Santorum Amendment, passed in 2001.

Last year, the Texas Board of Education invited members of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based intelligent design think tank, to review and analyze biology textbooks that were up for adoption. The members advocated removing factual errors regarding evolution from textbooks and including both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution. But, the members of the Discovery Institute left out alternative theories such as intelligent design and creationism.

“In November, the board of education voted unanimously to adopt all the biology textbooks, but on the condition that the factual errors regarding evolution be addressed and corrected,” said Rob Crowther, director of communications for the Discovery Institute.

The institute, arguably the most prominent opponent of macroevolutionary theory, has raised a number of instances in which Texas biology textbooks appear to be inaccurate or misleading. Founded in 1990, the institute is a national policy and research organization that is non-profit, non-partisan, and secular.

Various groups, including the Texas Education Agency (TEA), the Discovery Institute, the Mel Gablers/Educational Research Analysts organization, the Texans for Better Science Education (TBSE), Texas A&M University, and numerous others in the months before the vote, identified these errors and testified at two public hearings.

Because Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks, second only to California, it sets the standards in what the rest of the nation will put in classrooms. A single textbook developed by publishers, who pay special attention to Texas because of the millions of dollars spent in this development, will impact school districts across the nation.

The biggest debates in the biology textbooks have been the inclusion of the theories of evolution as fact and the alternate theories of creationism and intelligent design. Before the decision to adopt the new text, biology textbooks contained known factual errors such as Haeckel’s faked embryo drawings, the myth about human gill slits, the discredited Miller-Urey experiment, and overstatements about peppered moths’ color adaptations.

Discovery Institute’s President Bruce Chapman said, “We now hope that fake facts like human embryos with ‘gill slits,’ the flat earth myth, and overstatements about peppered moth research will be things of the past as well.”

Intelligent design theory is an effort acknowledged by biologists to detect whether the “design” in nature is the product of an intelligent cause, not simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations as naturalism purports.

Specifically Christian in intent, creationism is focused on the Genesis account, often including a “young earth” view of creation 6,000-10,000 years ago. Unlike creationism, though, intelligent design takes no official stand on who the Designer is. An increasing number of biologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers of science at schools, colleges, and universities around the world have adopted the effort to detect design in nature. g

Publishers are still making changes to the text Texas adopted and are correcting the factual mistakes that were addressed in Austin last November. Many of the groups represented in last November’s meeting are in support of including both strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory in conformity with Texas law.

They also support the right of all teachers to teach with academic freedom and without censorship or intimidation from any pressure groups.

A poll taken of Texans by Zogby International last year showed only 16 percent thought the state Board of Education should approve biology textbooks that teach only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it, while 75 percent thought the board should approve biology textbooks that teach Darwin’s theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it, and 9 percent were unsure.

The constituencies in Texas are largely conservative and religious, so there is an overlapping result in the ideals and outlook of most evolution skeptics.

The Dallas Morning News editorial board published an article last year that stated, “Activists on the other side, including more scientists, say that there are no serious error