The New York Times, August 3, 2000, Thursday, P.A1

Evolution Foes Dealt a Defeat In Kansas Vote

By PAM BELLUCK

DATELINE: CHICAGO, Aug. 2

    Voters in Kansas have repudiated the state school board's removal of
human evolution from the state science standards, making it all but certain
that the decision will be overturned.

    In a Republican primary on Tuesday, the voters defeated three
conservative candidates who supported the decision, made by the Kansas
Board of Education a year ago. They chose instead, in the first board
election since then, three moderate Republicans who pledged to return
evolution to the standards. And those three will be running in November
against Democrats who hold similar positions.

       As a result, the move to reinstate evolution in the standards will
command a majority of the board that takes office in January.

    "I think parents want their kids to have a strong, competitive
education," Sue Gamble, a moderate Republican, said after defeating a
conservative incumbent, Linda Holloway, who was the board's chairwoman when
it voted to revise the standards last August. "The message was that that
includes a full set of science standards, and that includes evolution."

    While the board vote last summer did not bar the teaching of evolution
in the schools, it effectively removed evolution as the sole explanation
for the origin of species, as well as the Big Bang theory of the origin of
the universe, from state student assessment tests. Many scientists and
educators therefore saw the move as a way to discourage teachers from
spending time on those subjects.

    That 6-to-4 decision was considered one of the most significant
victories for those who believe that the creation of the species was the
work only of God or some "intelligent designer." Proponents of such
theories have stepped up their activity in recent years, prompting several
states to dilute the teaching of evolution in one way or another. Many
other states, wrestling with evolution debates of their own, had their eyes
on Kansas as the primary neared.

    Indeed, the evolution issue transformed a usually obscure election into
a race of unusual intensity. Campaigns that typically raise no more than a
few hundred dollars received tens of thousands, some from out of state.
Candidates even ran television advertisements.

    High-ranking Kansas Republicans got involved in the race, with Gov.
Bill Graves endorsing the Republican moderates and Senator Sam Brownback
backing the conservatives. And Democrats switched parties just to vote in
the Republican primary, which in heavily Republican Kansas often determines
November's winner. One Democratic school board member, Bill Wagnon of
Topeka, even campaigned for Ms. Gamble, who now faces a Democratic opponent
in November.

    Five seats on the 10-member board were at stake on Tuesday. In the end,
only one of the four conservatives running against opposition was a winner:
Steve Abrams, an incumbent who helped write the new standards. In a fifth
district, Mr. Wagnon was unopposed in the Democratic primary and now faces
a conservative opponent, who was also unopposed. But whatever the outcome
in November, there will be no more than four conservatives on the board.

    Ms. Holloway, the former chairwoman who lost her seat, said she "had no
idea it would be that much of a defeat."

    Ms. Holloway maintains that evolution can be taught alongside
creationism or other beliefs. "There is clearly still a misunderstanding
of
what we did," she said. "There is still this stereotype that 'this is
religion, and this is science.' It was much more complicated."

    She blamed "this elite group in Washington that have an agenda, the
National Academy of Sciences and other science groups."

    Phillip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at
Berkeley who maintains that the universe is so complex that there must have
been an "intelligent designer," said: "I think that the academics and the
journalists succeeded pretty well in embarrassing the people of Kansas. And
there was a sense that 'people are laughing at us, people think we're
rubes, industry doesn't want to come here anymore.' "

    "This is very heavy-handed intimidation," Professor Johnson said.

    In the wake of the board's decision last summer, some districts reacted
by considering the teaching of creationism, and some teachers who already
favored the teaching of alternatives to evolution felt emboldened.

    Elsewhere, though, districts vowed to teach evolution only, and in
Kansas and across the country, their allies rejoiced today.

    "I am relieved, and I'm also thinking that we're back on the road to
reality and sanity," said Al Frisby, a biology teacher at Shawnee Mission
Northwest High School in the Kansas City suburbs.

    Mr. Frisby said that as a result of the new standards, "my life turned
upside down." In the past, when students or parents mentioned creationism
and objected to the teaching of evolution, he could always say that "the
State of Kansas wants us to teach this because it's on the assessment
test."

    Without that rationale, Mr. Frisby had to innovate in his classes. He
had students find colored toothpicks he had hidden in the grass and pick
them up with plastic knives, forks and spoons. (They learned, for example,
that red toothpicks had a smaller chance of "survival" because they stood
out more than green toothpicks, and that people with forks scoop up fewer
toothpicks than those with spoons, an analogy to the process of natural
selection.)

    Mr. Frisby joined the American Civil Liberties Union and Kansas
Citizens for Science, a group formed to fight the new standards. He even
went to a forum on creationism, where he asked why, if Adam gave Eve a rib,
Eve did not end up with male XY chromosomes.

    Today Mr. Frisby wore a tie that summed up his feelings. It featured
three see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkeys, with hands covering
the eyes, ears or mouth. A fourth monkey's mouth was agape.

    "I feel like the first three monkeys represent the conservative school
board members," he said. "They had their eyes closed, they had their ears
closed, they had an agenda they were trying to follow. And I'm the monkey
at the bottom, saying, 'Wow, it's remarkable.' "
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