The Kansas State Board of Education has decided by six votes to four to include stronger criticism of evolution in its high-school biology curriculum. Science advocates fear that the move paves the way for ‘intelligent design’ — the idea that an intelligent creator shaped living things — to reach the classroom.

“This is a religiously motivated strategy,” says Harry McDonald, president of Kansas Citizens for Science in Olathe, which vehemently opposes the new standards. “Religious advocates have decided that they can push their views forward by casting doubt on science.”

The Kansas Board of Education's chairman Steve Abrams, who helped write the amendments, dismisses the charges as “baloney”. “Is it wrong to teach critical analysis and critical thinking?” he asks.

This is the second time that the board has tried to alter the state's standards for the teaching of science. In 1999, the board voted to remove evolution, cosmology and geology from Kansas's curriculum, leaving teachers to decide individually whether or how to teach the subjects. But these topics were reinstated into the high-school syllabus after activists from science and business communities helped elect more moderate members to the board in 2000 (see Nature 406, 552; 200010.1038/35020725).

Now, a newly elected, more conservative board is seeking to augment the evolution curriculum with criticisms of Darwin's theory commonly espoused by the intelligent-design movement. The criticisms include gaps in the fossil record and the inability of evolution to explain the first life on Earth. The standards also refer to macroevolution as a “controversial” theory.

“These standards are very clearly denigrating evolution,” says Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California. She believes that the standards are part of a new nationwide strategy by intelligent-design advocates to undermine the way evolution is taught in public schools. In 2002, Ohio passed education standards that mandate teaching that scientists “continue to investigate and critically analyse aspects of evolutionary theory”. But the new Kansas rules are far bolder, says Scott.

The board will now send the new standards out for an external review, with a final vote scheduled for later this autumn.