December 6 1999

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The August 12 decision of the Kansas Board of Education to exclude the word macroevolution from its recommended science curriculum initially led to a flurry of articles, editorials, and press releases examining the state of the "Evolution Wars." In the four months since the Kansas decision, the media continue to examine the battle. Interestingly, most media accounts these days still focus on Kansas, though similar measures have been taken in New Mexico, Kentucky, Illinois, and Oklahoma.

When the Kansas story broke in the papers, references to the 1925 Scopes trial were a dime a dozen. "Tennessee won in court, saw the decision reversed on appeal, and has since had to live with the historical black eye of being the state that arrested a science teacher for teching science," wrote a Miami Herald columnist. "You'd think the lesson would have thus been learned, but evidently they don't teach history so well in Kansas, either." But, as the Associated Press pointed out in a September 19 story, the Scopes trial has been radically misremembered. In an attempt to rectify the situation and to put Scopes, Kansas, and points in between in context, Books & Culture (a Christianity Today sister publication) puts "Darwin Comes to America," by Eastern Nazarene College professors Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa, on its November/December cover. The article briefly retells the story of the Trial of the Century, encouraging readers to read Edward Larson's Summer for the Gods for more detail, and looks at why scientists and the media are so quick to label every clash over evolution as a Scopes reenactment. Most interesting, however, is its examination of the phrase "Evolution ...