Teaching to support religious ignorance in public schools legalized in West Virginia.

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A news item from the current issue of Science.

West Virginia opens the door to teaching intelligent design

Subtitle:

Governor poised to sign bill allowing teachers to discuss antievolutionary “theories”

Science 18 MAR 20243:30 PM ETBYJEFFREY MERVIS

In 2005, then–U.S. District Court Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design (ID)—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved without nudging from supernatural forces—cannot be taught in public school biology courses because it is not a scientific theory. This month, the West Virginia legislature found a workaround, and passed a bill that doesn’t name ID but will nevertheless allow public school teachers there to discuss it in the classroom.

The bill, which the state’s governor is expected to sign before the end of the month, is the latest example of what Nicholas Matzke, an evolution educator at the University of Auckland, has called “legislation that avoids mentioning creationism in any of its varieties but advances creationist antievolutionism.” It comes nearly 2 decades after Jones, now president of Dickinson College, told the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board that its policy on teaching ID violated the so-called “establishment” clause of the U.S. Constitution that bans the government from taking action favoring any religion.

Last year, the West Virginia Senate approved a bill that would have specifically allowed teachers to talk about ID “as a theory of how the universe and humanity came to exist.” But the measure died in the House of Delegates. This year, State Senator Amy Grady (R) reintroduced the bill but revised it to remove the words “intelligent design.” Her colleagues approved it in late January and the House followed suit on 9 March, sending the bill to Republican Governor Jim Justice...