Kansas Hearings Draw Media, But Few Protesters

In a cramped, second-floor auditorium in a state office building only steps from the Kansas Capitol, evolution’s detractors were offered a prime venue May 5-7 to lay out their case before the public—and a swollen assembly of the national and worldwide media.

One floor beneath them, scientists boycotting those state hearings had set up a makeshift camp of their own: a small booth, from which they passed out fliers and folders and described the proceedings upstairs as a politically calculated farce to reporters, passers-by, anybody willing to listen.

That two-story standoff symbolized the divide that has re-emerged across the country in recent months over calls to allow views such as “intelligent design” a place in the science classroom alongside Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Here in Kansas, the issue received its most prominent stage in recent years, as a three-member subcommittee of the state board of education held a series of hearings to review what place evolution—accepted by the vast majority of scientists as a fully valid explanation of how life on Earth developed—should have in...