Reuters is reporting:
The Kansas Board of Education on Tuesday threw out science standards deemed hostile to evolution, undoing the work of Christian conservatives in the ongoing battle over what to teach U.S. public school students about the origins of life. The board in the central U.S. state voted 6-4 to replace them with teaching standards that mirror the mainstream in science education and eliminate criticisms of evolutionary theory.
Predictably, the Discovery Institute is not happy:
"You have a board in Kansas that is so extreme," said John West, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, adding that evolution supporters were "anti-religious."
So "extreme" that is mirrors the mainstream.
Read more DI-crapola here, while Pat Hayes over at Red State Rabble has more from a pro-science perspective.
It's the usual religiobabble: "evolution is anti-religious" re-defines the argument into "motherhood" terms: "You can't be against religion, can you?" Well, yes, I can, but religion and evolution have nothing to say to each other. Stephen Jay Gould was on to something when he talked about Non-overlapping Magisteria. I peeked at Uncommon Disorder the other day and found them flogging the usual dead-horses-not-even-in-the-race of abiogenesis and cosmology, as though a gap in our knowledge there could invalidate speciation. Keep up the good work, Stranger!
But..but ...but... I thought ID was about science, not religion!
Why do these people keep confirming the wisdom of the Dover ruling?
Cheers.
Had the Kansas Board of Education reached its decision 24 hours before, on Darwin's birthday, I'm sure the IDers would have collectively had one extreme hissy fit. In any case, it's good that rationality won out this time around.