Well, I shouldn't get into this because I could write volumes which I imagine nobody would read, but as a member of the science community in Kansas, I need to respond at least a bit.

First of all, the title of this thread is wrong if you are referring to what happened in Kansas. NEVER confuse CREATION with CREATIONISM!!!!!!!!! Every major religion that I know of, and a lot of religious bodies that I know little of, have their own idea, belief, dogma, call it what you will, about the creation story and noone in any public school has ever questioned those. Creationism, on the other hand, is a very narrow and specific belief system that was brought to the forefront in this country in the late '60's and early 70's, mainly by Henry and Gish (they being the leaders). Their believes are too long to go into here, but some of them are that the world and everything in it was created at the same time about 6000 to 10,000 years ago. Obviously, that does away with geology, physics, chemistry, and biology as it is practiced today.

Evolution is being singled out by the creationists as the "bad guys" because of the emotion it generates, and the purpose of the creationists is to have one and only one creation story, and that one should, they say, be taught in public schools.

In Kansas, a group of science persons wrote State Standards for science. IMHO, they were excellent. Then some of the fundamentalist creationists got elected to the State Board of Education. They rewrote what the science people had written about evolution by taking it completely out of the standards. It was later shown that the board member who rewrote what had been written by science people was written by: Ta Dum - a Creationist.

Also - never forget that all fundamentalists are not creationists.

We recently had a primary election for school Board officials in the state, and all but one of the anti-evolutionists lost. Several of the candidates (from both parties) have assured us that the original standards will be back in place in January.

Two lessons to be learned here:

1- There is a difference between creation and creationists

and

2 - Be careful of very biased strong willed people who are single issue. Their most recent MO seems to be to get on local boards disguised as something else until they are elected.

Lyle