Child learns about evolution at a Darwin exhibition in the US (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

It was a mixed bag of victory and defeat for science on Friday when the Texas Board of Education voted on their state science standards. In a move that pleased the scientific community, the board voted to not include proposed changes that would call for the teaching of the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories – code words for allowing creationist views into the classroom.

However, additional amendments that were voted through provide loopholes for creationist teaching. “It’s as if they slammed the door shut with strengths and weaknesses, then ran around the house opening windows to let it in a bunch of other ways,” says Dan Quinn, who was on site at the hearings. Quinn is communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a community watchdog organisation.

One amendment calls for students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning the complexity of the cell,” phrasing that rings of intelligent design arguments.


Another amendment requires students to “analyze and evaluate scientific explanations concerning any data on sudden appearance and stasis and the sequential groups in the fossil record.” These issues are commonly held up by creationists as arguments against evolution, even though the scientific community disagrees.

Anti-evolutionist Don McLeroy, a dentist and chair of the Texas State Board of Education, testified at Friday’s hearing: “I disagree with these experts. Someone has got to stand up to experts.”

Age of the universe

An amendment to the environmental sciences standards requires students to “analyze and evaluate different views on the existence of global warming”, despite overwhelming consensus within the scientific community that global warming exists.

An amendment to the Earth and space sciences curriculum requires the teaching of different theories of the origin, age and history of the universe. The board voted to remove from the standards the statement that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old.

“The goal here was to make science more tentative and vague so that teachers have room to tell students, ‘This is only one explanation and the scientists are not even sure about it themselves’ – which is, of course, utter nonsense,” says Quinn.

School textbooks are required to comply with a state’s science standards, so all changes to the science standards translate into changes to textbooks. In two years, the board will meet to review the state’s textbooks, so creationists have been eager to slip in changes to the standards ahead of time.

Influential state

Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the US, a market publishers can’t afford to lose. So they will likely have to water down the science in their books and add in creationist pseudo-science to appease the school board. “If the publishers don’t come back with arguments against natural selection and common descent, the board is going to vote to reject those textbooks,” Quinn says.

What’s more, while the “strengths and weaknesses” language was rather vague, the new amendments provide publishers with a very specific roadmap for what they have to include in their textbooks. “It will be much harder for publishers to fudge,” says Quinn.

Creating a Texas-only edition of a biology textbook would be expensive, which means other states would probably end up having to use the same scientifically inaccurate textbooks. “Many publishers are in dire economic straits these days, so the added expense of making a special edition for one state is not something they would be eager to take on,” says Steven Newton of the National Center for Science Education. “I think it’s likely this would affect other states.”

“We’re going to be watching and we will make sure that if the textbooks include junk science, that people know about it,” Quinn says. “If other states reject these books, publishers might stop publishing for Texas because it’s so expensive.”

Discovery ties

If that happens, other publishers more friendly to intelligent design (ID) might fill the breach. The Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based headquarters of the ID movement, for example, has already published its own biology textbook entitled Explore Evolution: The arguments for and against Neo-Darwinism.

The book does not explicitly mention ID, but presents its standard arguments, arguments that are precisely in line with those adopted in the new standards. That may be no coincidence: one of the co-authors of the book, Ralph Seelke, was chosen by McLeroy to serve as an expert curriculum reviewer for the Texas board. So too was Stephen Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. The Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin also testified at the board meeting, saying, “We urge you to make students aware of these scientific debates.”

“The Discovery Institute is in this up to their eyeballs,” says Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and an expert on the history of creationism. “They are heavily invested in what happens in Texas.” In fact, McLeroy has been working with Discovery Institute fellow Walter Bradley, a Texan, since at least 2003 to promote changes to the biology textbooks.

Academic freedom

Texas creationists had already crafted a back-up plan in case Friday’s school board vote didn’t go their way.

Republican House Representative Wayne Christian has drafted a piece of legislation (House Bill 4224) that proposes to add the “strengths and weaknesses” language back into the standards.

What’s more, if passed, the bill would protect students from being “penalized in any way because he or she subscribes to a particular position on scientific theories” and allow teachers to help students to “understand, analyze, review and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their strengths and weaknesses using scientific evidence and information.”

The bill is the latest in a series of “academic freedom bills” that have been proposed throughout several states in the US. Most have failed – in Oklahoma, New Mexico and Iowa they were quickly killed off, while in Missouri, Alabama and Florida such bills are still pending.

Last year, Louisiana became the first state to sign an academic freedom bill into law. If the same thing happens in Texas, it could be extremely detrimental to science education in that state and beyond.

‘Subjective’ science

“It would essentially override the school board’s vote to insert the ‘strengths and weaknesses’ language back into the standards,” says Newton. “Telling a student that they can’t be penalized grade-wise because they subscribe to a specific opinion on science – that will be a big problem. It opens science up to being a relative thing.”

“And you can imagine a teacher thinking, ‘I’ll have a potential lawsuit from this student if I grade them down, so I’m not even going to touch on controversial topics like evolution, the age of the Earth, the formation of the solar system, etc.,'” Newton told New Scientist. “Everyone still has in their minds that figure of a million dollars that the Dover school district had to pay out [in legal fees after an intelligent design trial], and that’s a powerful thing.”

The academic freedom legislation is the brainchild of the Discovery Institute and the promoters of the film Expelled, a pro-intelligent design “documentary” in which former Nixon speech writer Ben Stein argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution led to the Holocaust.

‘Pushing the legal envelope’

Experts suspect that strategically, the Discovery Institute actually wants teachers to be prosecuted in a Dover-style court case, and that they are using the proposed Texas academic freedom bill to lure teachers into a legal trap by encouraging them to bring religious ideas into the classroom.

“Teaching creationism or ID has been repeatedly found to be unconstitutional,” Forrest says. “These bills cannot supersede the constitution and will not protect the teachers from litigation.”

“The Discovery Institute is pushing the legal envelope and inviting litigation because they have been shopping around for years for the right judicial district in which they could win this kind of case,” she told New Scientist. “They need a district where they can control the people on the ground, as they do in Texas. They want a ruling that conflicts with Dover in a different judicial district, because that would be the most likely scenario in which the Supreme Court would hear a case. That is exactly what they want.”

Insurance salesmen

Meanwhile, pro-science legislators are also doing their best to fight these actions. Senator Rodney Ellis and House Representative Garnet Coleman – both Democrats from Houston, Texas – have introduced legislation (Senate Bill 440 and House Bill 3382, respectively) that would transfer authority for textbook adoptions and curriculum approval from the Board of Education to the Texas Education Agency.

“When you have dentists and insurance salesmen and attorneys deciding what students should learn about science in a public school classroom, you’ve got a problem,” says Quinn.

And elections for the members of the Board of Education will be held next year, so voters could potentially get more science advocates on the board before the textbook reviews the following year.

Science took some blows in Texas on Friday, but the battle isn’t close to over, and Quinn, for one, is optimistic that people will continue to fight the good fight. “When you have an elected body doing everything it can to undermine the education of your kids and making it harder for them to compete and succeed in the 21st century,” he says, “that’s when people take notice and stand up.”