New
York Times: In February, the Florida Department of
Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the
first time, the state's public schools to teach evolution,
calling it "the organizing principle of life science." Spurred
in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to
favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other
states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what
has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse
life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a
process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of
years.
But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God's individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.
