Editorial: Evolution controversy

Thursday, Dec. 6, 2007 | 7:11 a.m.

The Texas official in charge of science curriculum for the state's students was forced to resign last month after supervisors accused her of failing to "remain neutral" on the topic of evolution.

Christine Comer, who taught science for 27 years before being hired nine years ago as the Texas Education Agency's director of science instruction, was reprimanded because she had forwarded an e-mail regarding an upcoming speech by a visiting professor to an online community message board.

The state of Texas is poised next year to review - and possibly revise - the science curriculum requirements for public school students. Such a review happens every 10 years, and the previous one was in 1998, The New York Times reported Monday.

The message Comer forwarded came from the National Center for Science Education to announce a Nov. 3 speech in Austin by Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor and author.

Forrest served as a pro-evolution expert witness in a 2005 Pennsylvania court case that ruled against teaching the concept of intelligent design - which holds that life was created by a higher authority - as an alternative to evolution in science classes in the public schools in Dover, Pa.

Comer told the Times that teaching evolution "is not just a good idea; it's the law."

True, and it doesn't make sense that a state education department would punish one of its officials for advocating that classroom curriculum be based on scientific methods.

But the notion of teachers in public schools teaching students about intelligent design - a euphemistic term used to make teachings based on creationism sound like science - has never made sense.

In February, two years after the Pennsylvania court's decision, the Kansas Board of Education repealed changes to its science curriculum guidelines to remove standards that called for teaching intelligent design as an evolution alternative.

As we said back in 2005 and again earlier this year, there is an appropriate place for religion-based instruction on the origin of life - but a publicly funded science class isn't it.