Treatment of Evolution Inconsistent

States’ standards ignore many central concepts.

State standards for academic content vary enormously in how well they cover the topic of evolution, with many of those documents either ignoring or giving scant treatment to the core principles of that established scientific theory, an Education Week analysis shows.

Nearly all the science standards reviewed at least mention the theory advanced most famously by Charles Darwin, as well as the related concept of natural selection. But many of those standards, the basic documents describing what students are expected to know, fail to address the fundamental evidence supporting the theory, which explains how life on Earth developed.

Many states’ standards, for instance, make little or no connection between the theory of evolution and established scientific evidence about the age of the Earth, internal similarities between organisms, or the common...