Evolution

School board members have rejected a plan to require high school biology teachers to give students arguments against evolution when they teach evidence in its favor. When Kelly Lafferty, a trustee on the Roseville Joint Union High School District Board, moved for approval Tuesday, none of the other trustees seconded the motion. The board now plans to consider a proposal to require teachers to present arguments against evolution, but would let them pick the anti-evolution materials they use.

The State Board of Education voted 6 to 4 in Topeka to include greater criticism of evolution in its school science standards, but decided to send the standards to an outside academic for review before taking a final vote. The Kansas school system was ridiculed around the country in 1999 when the board deleted most references to evolution. The system later reversed course, but the language now favored by the board comes from advocates of intelligent design.

The New Mexico board of education voted in Santa Fe to head off biblical creationism teachings by changing the language of state guidelines to make clear that only evolution belongs in science classes. The board voted, 10 to 1, to take the action, which sponsoring member Marshall Berman said was needed after a Kansas school board decision in August that opened the door for creationism by removing evolution as a key concept in the state's required science curriculum.

I see where Dianne Klein is once again treating us to the John Peloza vs. evolution story ("Teaching Kids--Religiously," Sept. 3). Klein appears to have mellowed slightly from her previous article of May 19, where she rather viciously attacked teacher Peloza with sarcasm and ridicule. However, it appears that there's still some misunderstanding concerning Peloza's views on evolution. Klein says, "Peloza's view (is) that fossil remains prove that species do not change." Peloza agrees that over a period of time there are changes within a species--commonly referred to as microevolution.

A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution, scientists reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The little adult skull was found at a site where the much larger Homo erectus lived, said Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution. Potts thinks the find shows that early humans lived in groups that came together and swapped genes every few thousand years or so before some became extinct.

Re "Evolution Isn't a Natural Selection Here," May 6: Kathy Martin, a Kansas board of education member, wants to teach religion as science. This is but another salvo in the culture wars. But the media have not correctly identified the two sides of the war, or its ultimate consequences. The war is between the people of faith versus the people of fact. It is the fable of an angry, violent deity found in dusty texts written 2,000 years ago by ignorant men who believed that the world was flat versus the men of science and the technology of the Enlightenment.

Old people may hold the key to human civilization, U.S. researchers said Tuesday. They found evidence that around 30,000 years ago many more people started living into old age, fueling a population explosion. Rachel Caspari of the University of Michigan and Sang-Hee Lee of UC Riverside think that groups in which old people survived better were more successful, in turn allowing more people to live into old age.

At 22, Emmy Rossum stars in "Dragonball: Evolution," the live-action take on the famous Japanese cartoon; it opens April 10. She has appeared in "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Poseidon" and is a singer as well; her 2007 album, "Inside Out," was released by Geffen Records. -- Do people ever mess up and call you, like, Rummy Epson? In school they used to call me Emmy Possum. I prefer Emmy Awesome. I mean, Emmy isn't that common of a name. My real name is actually Emmanuelle.

In a strong repudiation of the views of religious fundamentalists, the authors of proposed textbook guidelines voted Thursday to strengthen earlier recommendations that evolution be taught California school children as scientific fact.

In the Nov. 9 article, "Georgia Evolution Lawsuit Is a Fact," the writers make the same error as do the uninformed fundamentalists. In referring to the Scopes trial, they include the comment: "The theory is still rejected by many Southerners." Evolution is the scientific term for the millions of solidly established facts -- empirical evidence -- about how life-forms changed over the last several hundred thousand years on Earth. These facts are indisputable, and therefore evolution, the term that represents these facts, is also indisputable.