This is completely insane. Here is an email I sent to Andy Tompkins, the commissioner of the Kansas State Department of Education.

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Recently, scientists found a way to slow light to around 35 miles per hour by passing it through a strange thing called an "Einstein/Rosenberg field". (It really exists, search cnn.com for news about it.)

There were a few people at my house when I read about that. Me and my friends read that and thought that was extremely interesting. However, the husband of my wife's cousin was also there. He didn't get it. He wanted to know why on Earth there would be any purpose in doing such a thing. We were flabbergasted... Speechless. We were at a loss as to how to answer his question. Here is a monumental advance in science, and here is this poor fellow, too uneducated to realize the significance of such a thing.

I feel the same way when reading of the news that the Kansas Board of Education has removed the study of evolution from it's textbooks. I have no idea how to reply to people of this nature. A fish will not turn into a frog. That is not evolution. A species of fish, over a very long time, will slowly adapt to changing environmental conditions, until the species has changed so radically that it can no longer be classed as the same species. That is evolution in action. There is no hiding your head in the sand to avoid this.

This is a very sad day. A complete failure in the educational system. You have bowed down before the uneducated raving of the very people you have failed to educate. I cannot think of anything else to say...
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The most ironic thing here is that if you go to the Kansas State Department of Education website, it says that their mission statement is:

Our mission is to prepare each person with the living, learning, and working skills and values necessary for caring, productive, and fulfilling participation in our evolving, global society.

Note that they use the word EVOLVING!!!!  What a herd of complete ignoramusii!!

Now I've seen everything!

There is also a huge amount of discussion about it on Slashdot!

Wow, who is in charge here!!  Obviously not the educated.  Why would a
"board of education" ever remove a topic, from the school curriculum,
that has so much scientific research backing it up.  Evolution has been
touted as one of the most influential theories of the 19th century.
This theory has allowed us to better understand every aspect of our
existence, from the origins of life, to our biologically diverse planet,
to human behavior.

I am certainly glad that I don't live in Kansas.  The group intelligence
of that state will most certainly decline over the next 20 years.  They
should bring back corporal punishment in schools, and un-wed female
school teachers, while they are at it!

(From ft.com)

EVOLUTION: Throwing away a part of our universe
In Kansas, all references to evolution have been wiped from the school curriculum. Christopher Wills rues the decision

I feel embarrassed for my country as the rest of the world raises a pitying eyebrow and notes that the US has made an idiot of itself again.

The Board of Education in Kansas has voted 6-4 to delete any reference to evolution in the state's public school curriculum.


This will intimidate teachers who try to teach the subject. It's possible that parents could sue them for teaching their children about evolution, since they do not need to know about it in order to graduate.


This latest effort on the part of Creationist religious fundamentalists to destroy intellectual freedom in the schools is particularly insidious, because it says: "Teach evolution if you like, but remember that it doesn't matter."


In California, a number of school boards are also trying to end the teaching of evolution.


What is maddening about this anti-intellectual debate is that many people in the US, including Tom DeLay, the majority whip of the House of Representatives, look on evolution as an intellectual poison that warps the mind and rots the soul. In their attempts to neutralise this "poison", they are doing their best to stunt the intellectual growth of a generation of school children.


This would be a tragedy. To understand ourselves and the world around us, we need to understand evolution. And our need grows with each passing year.


I have spent my working life exploring the ways in which evolution works. I have looked at how we have been shaped, and continue to be shaped, by evolution. There is no other explanation for our giant brains and for our clever, sensitive hands.


A kind of feedback loop has shaped our evolution. We change our environment, and it becomes intellectually more challenging as a result. This new environment selects people who are best able to meet the challenges. Some of these people, in turn, make the environment even more challenging, and over time this feedback loop continues and accelerates.


The acceleration has been tremendous. It took us 2.5m years to venture beyond our birthplace in Africa. It has taken us only a few decades to conquer the air and begin to conquer space. Because of the feedback loop, as our cul ture changes, our species changes as well.


And, although the biological change always lags behind the cultural change, it, too, is accelerating.


These changes can be directly demonstrated. Along with a group of other geneticists and anthropologists, at the University of California at San Diego and elsewhere, I have been working with human DNA to find out how it has altered over the past few million years. In the course of these studies, we have discovered that our species' DNA shows strong traces of dramatic evolutionary events in the past.


Clues buried in our DNA show clearly that, about half a million years ago, we were brought to the edge of extinction. Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, were not affected. How did this near-disaster affect our own evolution, and demonstrate our differences to these ape relatives? We are trying to find answers to this important question.


I am also looking at human viruses, to find the ways they have been influenced by evolution. Our laboratory has found that a common human virus, called HCMV, has certain classes of genes that allow it to adapt quickly to new environments. These genes, along with their ability to evolve quickly, have arisen through evolution.


These are exciting challenges that have taken me around the world, into the depths of rainforests and to the fringes of the Arctic.


And I am not alone. Thousands of scientists around the world are probing into how living organisms work. The experiments they do all depend on an understanding of evolution.


This is what makes the latest attempts to suppress this fundamental concept of biology so infuriating. No biologist or biotechnologist can function without knowing how evolution works. To do so would be like an engineer trying to design machines without knowing about Newton's laws. Or like a chemist trying to do experiments without knowledge of the periodic table. Evolution is a part of the universe we live in.


The world of biotechnology depends on an understanding of evolution. For example, as we learn how bacteria evolve, and how their genes change, we can use such information to fight them. Bacteria are always evolving resistance to antibiotics. How can we anticipate this, and give them new challenges they will find very difficult to surmount? Only an understanding of evolution can give us the ability to do this. It gives us the knowledge we need to survive as a species.


One of the most remarkable examples of how evolution works is the malaria parasite. The parasite has changed as a result of evolution, the humans who harbour it have changed as well, and the mosquitoes that carry it from one human host to another are also evolving rapidly. To conquer this terrible disease, which is responsible for millions of deaths each year and for a burden of desperate illness around the world, we must understand how we and the parasite have evolved.


Evolution even affects what we eat. We are changing the natural world around us more quickly than ever before. The animals and plants on which we depend must change, too. We need crops that can grow in salty water, animals that are resistant to diseases, insects that have an increased ability to attack insect pests.


In future, when science and industry recruit young people to fill positions in colleges and research institutions, they will have a hard time finding any from Kansas.

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* Christopher Wills is professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego. His latest book, Children of Prometheus, was published by Penguin in August, £20.

Now brainwashed children in New York are refusing to answer questions about evolution on school tests. Stupid birds putting their heads in the sand...

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has issued a statement disassociating themselves from the Kansas Science Education Standards.