A debate over evolution education in Texas could shape science classes in the southern United States for years to come.

The Texas Board of Education will vote Thursday and Friday on amendments to the state's proposed science curriculum. The amendments convey doubt about evolution that, according to scientists, simply does not exist.

"They haven't mentioned creationism or the age of the Earth," said Steve Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, a nonprofit science education and policy watchdog. "It's not openly creationist, but it's anti-science. It demeans and devalues science."

The most recent prominent science-curriculum battle took place last year in Florida, where a statewide campaign engineered by intelligent-design supporters fell short of obtaining science curricula that called for classroom evolution education to be balanced with "alternatives."

Members of the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design think tank, helped draft critiques of evolution in Texas as well as Florida. According to Schafersman, the seven Texas Board of Education members who've supported the amendments are Young Earth creationists.

Because teaching creationism as fact in public schools is illegal, supporters have resorted to language about "alternatives" and "strengths and weaknesses" into science curricula. There's little danger of students learning that the Earth is 4,000 years old, or that a supernatural entity carefully arranged dinosaur fossils to look natural. But students might not learn that science is a process of testing hypotheses and accumulating evidence to produce theories, like that of evolution. And when a few outlying critiques are presented as valid alternatives to scientific consensus, critical thinking suffers.

The consequences of the Board of Education's decision won't be limited to Texas, said Schafersman, but will affect students in other southern states.

"Texas schoolbooks are used throughout the south," he said. "If we win, this will be the standard."

The amendments involve the Texas Essential

Knowledge and Skills guidelines, which determine what the state's public school students must learn. A committee of science-education experts wrote the science section, and removed previous language referring to evolution's "strengths and weaknesses" — a de facto* *code phrase for so-called creation science.

The draft guidelines passed by an 8-7 vote in January, but Board chairman Donald McLeroy, a Young Earth creationist, unilaterally added amendments that, though avoiding mention of "strengths and weaknesses," fail to pass scientific muster.

One amendment requires biology teachers to "analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of common ancestry to explain the sudden appearance, stasis and sequential nature of groups in the fossil record.” That all complex organisms are descended from a common ancestor is commonly accepted by evolutionary biologists.

Other amendments to planetary-science guidelines "introduce unwarranted uncertainty to long-settled scientific issues," wrote Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and 23 leading members of Texas' science community in a letter delivered to McLeroy on Tuesday.

"These amendments serve only to undermine sound science education in Texas," they wrote.

Some observers of the Board of Education controversy have worried that Texas' position as the nation's second-largest purchaser of textbooks would result in changes to nationally used texts. That was historically the case, said Schafersman, but publishers now produce region-specific books. However, the demands of Texas schools still affect books used throughout the south.

The board's vote will conclude Friday, and the resulting curriculum will be enforced for the next 10 years.

Right now, said Schafersnan, when a schoolbook "is stamped 'Texas edition' on the front, that means it's been censored to keep the students ignorant." But if the board votes as it did in January, that will no longer be the case.

Image: Flickr/Kevin Dooley

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