Cleveland

The great debate on teaching evolution and creationism in American schools is back — this time with an added twist.

The Ohio State Board of Education is being pressed to instruct teachers in the mid-western state to include 'intelligent design' in their biology lessons, as a possible alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution.

Proponents of 'intelligent design' concede that evolution takes place, but argue that its outcome is too complex to have occurred by chance and so must have been designed by some unseen hand. They told a rowdy public hearing of the board in Columbus on 11 March that including the topic in the school curriculum would help students to understand that scientific theories are always open to challenge.

But many scientists regard 'intelligent design' as pseudoscience, and say that it is being used as a Trojan Horse to introduce the teaching of creationism into schools.

On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, scientists were protesting because of reports that Emmanuel College in Gateshead — a Christian-run technical college near Newcastle upon Tyne — is indoctrinating its students with creationist ideas. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford, accused the college of teaching “ludicrous falsehoods” and called on the government's education department to investigate further.

In the United States, school curricula are controlled at the state level, and Ohio's education board is revising its standards in response to instructions from Bob Taft, its Republican governor. But at least three members of the 19-person board have taken exception to a draft of the standards, produced in consultation with scientists, because it fails to acknowledge 'intelligent design' as a rival theory to that of evolution.

In response to these concerns, a subcommittee of the board invited two advocates of 'intelligent design' — Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells, both fellows of the Discovery Institute, a conservative think tank based in Seattle, Washington — to debate the topic with two of its critics, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and cell biologist Kenneth Miller of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Around 1,500 people attended the sometimes-heated debate, in which Wells and Meyer characterized Darwin's theory as being under fire from within the scientific community. Wells waved a list of what he described as 40 peer-reviewed papers criticizing darwinism, and Meyer asked the board to “just permit teachers to teach the evolution controversy”.

Krauss said that there was no such controversy. “'Intelligent design' is an idea,” he said. “It is not science, because it does not appear in any peer-reviewed literature.” Miller and Krauss both dismissed 'intelligent design' as “creationism dressed up as science”.

A subcommittee of the board is due to present standards for science, and other subjects under review, to the full board by September. The board is expected to implement the standards in December — just after elections for six of the board members.

Some observers of Ohio politics say that — with the tacit backing of Taft — the state might implement standards that will open the door to the teaching of 'intelligent design'. Biologists worry that such a move could force the topic into biology textbooks — and open the way for change in Texas, which will discuss its standards next year. “Ohio is just a skirmish,” says Miller, a co-author of five biology textbooks. “But it is a rehearsal for what will happen later.”