By law, Kansas' educational standards require periodic revision. In 1999, a revision was scheduled for the state science standards. The state board chose a committee of approximately 25 expert Kansans, including science educators and businesspeople, to rewrite the standards completely. Although the committee did its work well, Creationists began attending the hearings of the science committee of the state board and toured the state giving presentations critical of the evolution in the draft science standards. At the same time, a local Lawrence, Kansas group called POSH (Parents for Objective Science and History) began lobbying the local school board for creationist changes to the Lawrence curriculum.
Despite the work of the committee, toward the end of the process, the creationists on the state board – who were primarily Young Earth Creationists - attempted to influence the standards. At that point, the board was split 5 to 5 on many issues. Led by Steve Abrams, then board president, the creationists collaborated with the Creation Science Association of Mid America to change the committee's recommendations, removing significant references to evolution and replacing material with creationist perspectives. They were able to convince one state board member to switch sides and vote in favor of the creationist science standards.
Reactions included recruiting those who wrote pro-science letters to newspapers in order to generate a core group of activists. Although these activists originally met to coordinate testimony before board meetings, a week prior to the actual BOE vote over the standards, KCFS was incorporated on 8 August 1999. Holding a media conference on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History the next day, they pledged to combat the anti-science activities of the board.
Two days later, on 11 August 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education voted 6–4 to approve creation science-friendly standards that minimized teaching the theories of evolution, the Big Bang, and geological time. Although they did not outlaw the teaching of evolution, they did open the standards to local control, prompting several communities, including Pratt, Kansas, to adopt overtly creationist standards.
KCFS recruited participants from across the state and led the fight to correct the standards the creationists had passed. They formed relationships with educational and scientific organizations both across Kansas and throughout the US. At the next election, Kansas voters replaced the creationists with a pro-science majority and within a few months, the standards recommended by the expert committee were passed, replacing the creationist standards that de-emphasized evolution.
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit membership organization in the United States whose stated mission is to educate the press and the public on the scientific and educational aspects of controversies surrounding the teaching of evolution and climate change, and to provide information and resources to schools, parents, and other citizens working to keep those topics in public school science education. Based in Oakland, California, it claims 4,500 members that include scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens of varied religious and political affiliations. The Center opposes the teaching of religious views in science classes in America's public schools; it does this through initiatives such as Project Steve. The Center has been called the United States' "leading anti-creationist organization". The Center is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
NARAL Pro-Choice America is a 501(c)(4) organization in the United States that engages in lobbying, political action, and advocacy efforts to oppose restrictions on abortion and expand access to abortion. NARAL is often used as a short form of the name. The organization was formerly known as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, then the National Abortion Rights Action League, and later the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.
Education in Kansas is governed at the primary and secondary school level by the Kansas State Board of Education. The state's public colleges and universities are supervised by the Kansas Board of Regents.
The rejection of evolution by religious groups involves an ongoing, recurring cultural, political, and theological dispute about the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. Species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation in accordance with creationism, but since the mid-19th century evolution by natural selection has been established as an empirical scientific fact.
The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist religious campaign for broad social, academic and political change to promote and support the pseudoscientific idea of intelligent design (ID), which asserts that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Its chief activities are a campaign to promote public awareness of this concept, the lobbying of policymakers to include its teaching in high school science classes, and legal action, either to defend such teaching or to remove barriers otherwise preventing it. The movement arose out of the creation science movement in the United States, and is driven by a small group of proponents.
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) is a Creationist apologetics institute in Dallas, Texas that specializes in media promotion of pseudoscientific creation science and interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative as a historical event. The ICR adopts the Bible as an inerrant and literal documentary of scientific and historical fact as well as religious and moral truths, and espouses a Young Earth creationist worldview. It rejects evolutionary biology, which it views as a corrupting moral and social influence and threat to religious belief. The ICR was formed by Henry M. Morris in 1972 following an organizational split with the Creation Science Research Center (CSRC).
The Creation Research Society(CRS) is a Christian fundamentalist research group that requires of its members belief that the Bible is historically and scientifically true in the original autographs, belief that "original created kinds" of all living things were created during the Creation week described in Genesis, and belief in flood geology.
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon, edited by Charles Thaxton and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE). The textbook endorses the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design – namely that life shows evidence of being designed by an intelligent agent which is not named specifically in the book, although proponents understand that it refers to the Christian God. The overview chapter was written by young Earth creationist Nancy Pearcey. They present various polemical arguments against the scientific theory of evolution. Before publication, early drafts used cognates of "creationist". After the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court ruling that creationism is religion and not science, these were changed to refer to "intelligent design". The second edition published in 1993 included a contribution written by Michael Behe.
"Teach the Controversy" is a campaign, conducted by the Discovery Institute, to promote the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while attempting to discredit the teaching of evolution in United States public high school science courses. The campaign claims that fairness and equal time require educating students with a 'critical analysis of evolution' where "the full range of scientific views", evolution's "unresolved issues", and the "scientific weaknesses of evolutionary theory" will be presented and evaluated alongside intelligent design concepts like irreducible complexity presented as a scientific argument against evolution through oblique references to books by design proponents listed in the bibliography of the Institute-proposed "Critical Analysis of Evolution" lesson plans.
The Kansas evolution hearings were a series of hearings held in Topeka, Kansas, United States from May 5 to 12, 2005 by the Kansas State Board of Education and its State Board Science Hearing Committee to change how evolution and the origin of life would be taught in the state's public high school science classes. The hearings were arranged by the Board of Education with the intent of introducing intelligent design into science classes via the Teach the Controversy method.
McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255, was a 1981 legal case in the US state of Arkansas.
The intelligent design movement has conducted an organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a pseudoscientific, neo-creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering on intelligent design.
Selman v. Cobb County School District, 449 F.3d 1320, was a United States court case in Cobb County, Georgia involving a sticker placed in public school biology textbooks. The sticker was a disclaimer stating that "Evolution is a theory, not a fact, concerning the origin of living things." The plaintiffs were parents of children in Cobb County schools who claimed the sticker violated both the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution and the separation of church and state clause in the Georgia State Constitution because its purpose and effect was to cast doubt on the scientific consensus regarding evolutionary theory in order to promote religious beliefs in the schools.
Kansas State Department Board of Education (KSDE) is Kansas's Board of Education, headquartered in Topeka. The board of education that controls the department is a constitutional body established in Article 6 of the Kansas Constitution. The ten members of the Board of Education are each elected to four-year terms. The Board helps determine educational policy for the state's primary and secondary schools.
This timeline of intelligent design outlines the major events in the development of intelligent design as presented and promoted by the intelligent design movement.
John Donald "Don" McLeroy is a dentist in Bryan, Texas, and a Republican former member of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE). The SBOE establishes policy for the state public school system. Dr. McLeroy, who represented SBOE District 9, served on the board from 1998 until 2011. McLeroy was appointed in 2007 as SBOE chairman by Governor Rick Perry. The term ended in February 2009.
Steven Dale Schafersman is an American geologist and current president of Texas Citizens for Science, an advocacy group that opposes teaching creationism as science in the public schools. He is also known for his blog BadGeology.com.
Steve Abrams is a Republican former member of the Kansas Senate, representing the 32nd District. He was a member of the Board of Education for Unified School District 470 in Arkansas City, Kansas. In 1995, he was elected a member of the Kansas State Board of Education, representing District 10. He served as chairman for the Kansas State Board of Education from 2005 to 2007. In 2009, he became the senator for Kansas Senate District 32. Reelected without Democratic opposition in 2012, by narrowly winning the Republican primary over Miranda Allen by 461 votes, he chose not to run for reelection in 2016. He was replaced by Larry Alley, who had lost House District 78 races to Democrat Ed Trimmer in 2012 as an Independent, and very narrowly in 2014 as a Republican.
In American schools, the Genesis creation narrative was generally taught as the origin of the universe and of life until Darwin's scientific theories became widely accepted. While there was some immediate backlash, organized opposition did not get underway until the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy broke out following World War I; several states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution while others debated them but did not pass them. The Scopes Trial was the result of a challenge to the law in Tennessee. Scopes lost his case, and further states passed laws banning the teaching of evolution.
New Mexicans for Science and Reason is a science advocacy organization based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded by Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier on May 16, 1990. As of 1998 the President is physicist and mathematician Dave Thomas. Thomas was still the President in spring of 2018 In 1996 creationists on the New Mexico School Board tried to change science standards to water down instruction of evolution. NMSR was instrumental in having that decision reversed.
