Whether I.D.'s scientific core is "impressive and sophisticated," as West says, is debatable. Certainly Judge Jones didn't think so. Still, biology teachers are being pressured to bring it into their classrooms. A recent study published in American Biology Teacher, for instance, shows a near doubling over the past decade of public-school teachers in Minnesota who report being pressured from students, parents or administrators to spend less time teaching evolution in their classes. The study also shows growing pressure to teach creationism as an alternative to evolution.

An increasing number of high school science teachers are happy to comply. Twenty percent of Minnesota science teachers and nearly 50 percent in Kansas have endorsed teaching some form of creationism alongside evolutionary theory.

"The real danger is not that teachers will start teaching creationism," says geologist Warren Allmon, the director of the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, N.Y., which features an exhibit on evolution seen by thousands of school kids every year. "It's that they will stop, or reduce, the teaching of evolution. Many now just assign [students to voluntarily read] the chapters on evolution and don't cover it in class, in order to avoid controversy."

Allmon's museum has initiated a special training program to help museum docents answer the growing number of questions about creationism and intelligent design that come from visitors. "There has been a definite increase over the past two years," he says, "though the questions are by no means all hostile ones coming from creationists. Even visitors who understand evolution are curious about what all the commotion over I.D. is about." The museum docents explain to visitors that the theory of evolution neither confirms nor denies the existence of God and that such questions are simply not the bailiwick of biology.

Many high school biology teachers still object to even discussing I.D. in their classrooms, saying that although there are lively controversies within evolutionary biology (arguments, for example about the relative importance of natural selection, sexual selection and physiological selection, or about the mode and tempo of evolutionary change), they are not "weaknesses" but inevitable and welcome signs of a lively science. Teaching I.D. alongside evolution would give it more scientific credibility than it deserves, they say.

"Whenever you debate, you should really have one person representing I.D. on one side and 10,000 scientists on the other," says Brown University biologist Miller. "That would give a fair representation of the division of opinion in the scientific community."

But refusing to discuss it gives the wrong impression, too, making it appear that scientists are afraid of it, think it is irrelevant, or are just too arrogant to bother. "There is an intellectual curiosity on the part of kids I teach," says Mark Stefanski, a high school science teacher at Marin Academy, a private school in San Rafael, Calif. "I don't want to teach them creationism and I won't. But they do want to know where all of this interest in intelligent design and creationism is coming from."

College-level academics and research scientists face a more acute Catch-22. If they debate creationists and I.D. proponents in public, they lend credibility to the notion that there is a substantial debate going on within science, says Miller, one of the few prominent biologists who publicly debates intelligent-design advocates. His many debates and published point-and-counterpoints with I.D.'ers were cited as evidence of scientific controversy in Dover. "But if we don't engage, it can mean ceding the public square to the other side, and that can be a huge mistake as well."

"The important thing," Miller says, "is always to make the distinction between the very real debate that is going on over science education and the non-debate among scientists about the validity of evolution on the whole. There is not a single scientific organization of any size anywhere in the world that has endorsed the point of view that these folks want to elevate to the level of science."

Teachers are addressing intelligent design in their classrooms in a variety of ways. Carol Dixon, a high school biology teacher in Castro Valley, a suburb east of San Francisco, tells her students that any discussion of religious subjects must be kept out of the science classroom because the First Amendment's establishment clause, protecting the separation of church and state, requires it.

"If my students ask about intelligent design or creationism, or ask me about my own religious views, I simply tell them that it's not an appropriate subject for science class," she says. "If I were required to teach about creationism or intelligent design, I'd have some serious problems. I'm just not trained to teach religion. And I don't want to."

Melissa Kindelspire, another high school biology teacher in Castro Valley, doesn't pull any punches when it comes to teaching evolution. "The theory of evolution via natural selection is the thing that ties everything else we are learning in my classroom together. If and when there are other [non-evolution-based] scientific theories that are accepted by scientists, I will introduce them," she says. But in her opinion, I.D. doesn't come close to fitting that bill.

Kindelspire says that she has heard from some students and parents who are troubled by her straightforward defense of evolution. But when parents give her brochures about creationism, she simply thanks them and puts the brochures aside. However, one recent incident did make her a little uneasy. She was told that the science department, and her name specifically, came up at a local church in a sermon about "evil influences on the parishioners' children's souls."

Other teachers, such as Dawn Wendzel and Julie Olson, who teach seventh-grade science in Gull Lake Middle School, near Kalamazoo, Mich., have simply woven I.D. into their curriculum. The two teachers, both evangelical Christians, presented I.D. as an alternative to evolution and had their students write papers comparing and evaluating the two views. Complaints from parents brought their practice to a halt. But Gull Lake school administrators have decided to make I.D. the subject of an elective social study class available to high school students.

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