

Members of a Florida county school board who last month wanted a classroom balance between evolution with intelligent design have quietly reversed their positions.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, four members of the Polk County School Board said they didn't support Florida's proposed science education guidelines, which designate evolution as a fundamental concept that every student should understand.

Wired Science covered the controversy, which came hot on the heels of a Texas education official's firing for telling people about a lecture critical of intelligent design. A new battle appeared to have broken out between proponents of evolution – the scientifically observed and accepted explanation for the development of life on Earth – and intelligent design, a religiously-inspired account of life's origins as being too complicated and coincidental to be explained by anything but divine intervention.

Barely a month later, reports the Tampa Tribune, "the controversy is dying with a whimper," with school board officials insisting that their personal belief in intelligent design shouldn't be taught to kids as science.

What happened? You can start with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The satirical religious Web site asserts that an omnipotent, airborne clump of spaghetti intelligently designed all life with the deft touch of its "noodly appendage." Adherents call themselves Pastafarians. They deluged Polk school board members with e-mail demanding equal time for

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism's version of intelligent design. "They've made us the laughingstock of the world," said Margaret Lofton, a school board member who supports intelligent design. She dismissed the e-mail as ridiculous and insulting.

The Tribune also credits attention generated by science bloggers, especially Pharygula and Wired Science, who took a locally reported story and made it national. And make no mistake – this was, and is, a national story. If evolution and intelligent design were forced to share classroom credibility in Florida, it would be that much easier for a similarly diluted curriculum to pass in Texas, which is embarking on its own curricula revisions. If Texas wanted scientifically bankrupt textbooks, then textbook manufacturers would provide them – and other states would buy them, too.

So chalk one up for science, and remember: just because you believe in God doesn't mean you can't believe in evolution.

Polk Needled, Noodled In Evolution Flap [The Tampa Tribune]

Image: Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

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