By Jack Cashill

(cont.)

It was a beautiful thing.

"I'm deeply grateful," said one fellow, himself a Vietnam vet, "that you're willing to listen to the average citizen." Others repeated this refrain. "Community spirit and local control," added one woman in all sincerity, "has always been the backbone of this country."

The opposition, mostly science teachers and university professors, was not so sure. "Thank you for the democratic process," noted one teacher, before adding the deeply ironic, "I think." Indeed, he proved not to be very thankful at all as he ended up denouncing the event as "just another state board shenanigan."

"Local control," added a science teacher, "means limited opportunities for students." Like others on his side, the state geologist hit this theme hard. These new standards would put students at "a disadvantage in the world marketplace" and would mark Kansas as "an intellectual backwater" to be "ridiculed by people of learning and enterprise."

It pained the almost universally bearded crew of profs to be there. Until the board had taken the issue up, the profs had presumed that this debate ended with the Scopes trial, that all Americans believed in Darwin as hero and evolution as fact.

Didn't they?

Maybe not. Though an ardent Darwinian, the late TV astronomer Carl Sagan had acknowledged that only 9% of the American public accepted the central finding of modern biology, namely “that human beings have evolved by natural processes from a succession of more ancient beings with no divine intervention along the way.” As Sagan well understood, It was the “no divine intervention” part that soured the American people, 90% of whom profess to believe in God.

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