Sir

The News in Brief report “Evolution allowed back into Kansas schools” (Nature 409, 972; 2001) is not entirely accurate. In 1999, the Kansas Board of Education approved ill-advised science standards that did not include several key scientific principles, including macroevolution and the Big Bang.

However, contrary to many reports in the popular press over the past two years, the board does not have the power to direct schools to teach anything. The function of the standards is only to set the guidelines used in state-wide standardized testing, and they are used by teachers as a guide to help prepare their curricula.

Thanks to the good sense of Kansas teachers, the teaching of evolution was not left out of the curriculum in schools during the year these unfortunate and controversial standards were in effect. In fact, some anecdotal evidence suggests that evolution has been emphasized more than ever in Kansas schools since then.

The assertion in your News report that “creationists... briefly had the Bible's account of the beginning of the world taught instead” is untrue. There was never any mention of the biblical account of creation in the controversial standards, and there have been no reports that creation was taught as part of any public school science curriculum in Kansas.

The News report correctly states that the citizens of Kansas have rectified the situation by defeating several of the anti-evolution board members in last year's elections, and that new science standards are now in place that include the aforementioned key scientific principles.