Evolution foes lose Kan. board majority
Battle waged over teaching standards
TOPEKA, Kan. -- Conservative Republicans who pushed anti-evolution standards back into Kansas schools last year have lost control of the state Board of Education once again.
The most closely watched race was in western Kansas, where incumbent conservative Connie Morris lost her GOP primary Tuesday. The former teacher had described evolution as ``an age-old fairy tale" and ``a nice bedtime story" unsupported by science.
As a result of Tuesday's vote, board members and candidates who believe evolution is well supported by evidence will have a 6-to-4 majority. Evolution skeptics had entered the election with a 6-to-4 majority.
Critics of Kansas's science standards worried that if conservatives retained the board's majority, it would lead to other states copying the Kansas standards.
Also Tuesday, Kansas Republicans chose a nominee to challenge Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius in November. With all precincts reporting early yesterday, state Senator Jim Barnett captured his party's nomination with 36 percent of the vote, besting six other candidates.
Control of the school board has slipped into, out of, and back into conservative Republicans' hands since 1998, resulting in anti-evolution standards in 1999, evolution-friendly ones in 2001, and anti- evolution ones again last year.
The school board contest was part of a larger effort by the intelligent-design movement to introduce its ideas in public schools. A suburban Atlanta school district is locked in a legal dispute over its putting stickers in biology textbooks declaring evolution ``a theory, not a fact."
Last year, in Dover, Pa., voters ousted school board members who had required the biology curriculum to include mention of intelligent design, which argues that life is too complex to have evolved randomly . A federal judge struck down the policy, declaring that intelligent design is religion in disguise.
A poll by six news organizations last year suggested about half of Kansans thought evolution should be taught alongside intelligent design.
Kansas's latest standards say the evolutionary theory, that all life has a common origin, has been challenged by fossils and molecular biology. They say there is controversy over whether changes over time in one species can lead to a new species.
With almost all the votes counted early yesterday, pro-evolution Republican Jana Shaver picked off a conservative incumbent and won the primary for the open seat. Janet Waugh, an incumbent Kansas City Democrat who opposed the new standards, easily defeated a more conservative Democrat who favored the anti- evolution language. 