A report surfaced this week that suggests Kentucky legislators may be experiencing a sort of cognitive dissonance that is likely to be a preview of things we can expect elsewhere. After dictating that schools in the state include tests based on national standards, the state lawmakers were shocked to find that evolution made a prominent appearance on the science tests. The same legislative body was considering undercutting evolution less than two years ago, so this may have come as a bit of a surprise.

It really shouldn't have.

Nationally, the No Child Left Behind Act has dictated that there needs to be standards for educational performance, and standardized tests will be used to make sure those standards are met. Although that push started with basics like math and language, national science standards were also called for. Many states have since implemented them; the Kentucky legislature apparently adopted the national standards in 2009. ACT, a company that creates and manages standardized testing, was contracted to handle the science tests.

Given that evolution is extremely well supported and provides the central organizing idea of biology, ACT's tests featured it heavily. That made a number of the state legislators rather unhappy, and gave them the chance to demonstrate that they should not be setting education policy.

"I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution," the Lexington Herald-Leader quotes Senator David Givens as saying. Givens is apparently unaware that creationism is not a theory, and that the Supreme Court has ruled that teaching it is a violation of the establishment clause.

The same report quotes Representative Ben Waide, who demonstrated his lack of scientific knowledge by saying, "The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science—Darwin made it up." Waide went on to say that "Under the most rudimentary, basic scientific examination, the theory of evolution has never stood up to scientific scrutiny."

The legislators apparently asked ACT whether it could create a Kentucky-specific version of the test; one that, presumably, would be a sort of formal recognition of the state's distaste for mainstream science. They were told, however, that doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

Kentucky is hardly the only state that has issues with evolution, though. Both Louisiana and Tennessee have passed laws that specifically target the teaching of evolution. These state-level efforts, however, are now running up against national science standards that accurately depict evolution's status as a well-supported scientific theory. Kentucky will certainly not be the last state where the conflict between local desires and national standards ends up creating problems.