Wesley writes:

> <clip>
> Evolution was restored Wednesday as a central theory in
> Kansas' science curriculum <clip>
> And that's all it is... theory... if anyone wants to know the truth about
> life and how it all got started just start reading Genesis chapter 1 verse
1.

That's a common response, but it's unfortunately not true. All unifying ideas
in science are theories, nothing is taken on faith, but as a theory, we have
vastly more evidence and understand far more fully the processes and nature
of evolution than we do for gravity.

The human genome project, whose data for the two competing groups is being
published in the two premiere journals this Friday, is being fairly compared,
I believe, to the Copernican revolution -- and as a part of this revolution
in understanding, Bill Joy, Chief Scientist at Sun Microsystems, said two
weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that the coming
revolution in biotechnology is going to simply swamp everything that has come
before. It will make the internet seem small. He -- and others -- expect that
biotechnology is going to generate $1000 trillion dollars worth of products
and services in the next 50 years.

Evolutionary biology is at the core of this revolution. It always has been.
Thirty years ago, Theodosius Dobzhansky said (for reasons completely
different than an evolution/creation debate), "Nothing in biology makes sense
in the light of evolution". Clearly there will be groups of people who will
not be a part of the coming modern world, but there have always been groups
who have been resistant to change, for whatever reason they may have.

But jobs do matter in all of this. The next generation of computer systems
are going to be increasingly designed around Darwinian principles,
self-testing, self-adapting, perhaps approaching the edge of intelligence by
2050. Medicine is already switching to a Darwinian underlying philosophy. And
the exploration of space will be increasingly a search for the origins and
evolution of life elsewhere, not merely a technical exercise in rocketry.
Indeed, it is already the driving force behind virtually all current
astronomical observations.

It was these few thoughts that the governor of Kansas had in mind when he
said that the 1999 school board's action was ``terrible, tragic,
embarrassing.''  It made Kansas look like a bunch of yahoos, in the words of
another state official -- and that certainly diminishes greatly Kansas'
competitiveness in the world-wide market for future economic development.

Wirt Atmar