“Evolution” stickers are back in court, and I am back online. I had been on trip to England. And there in England, on every £10 (pound) note was a picture of Charles Darwin (replacing the other Charles, Charles Dickens). All I could think of was what would happen in the USA if we put Darwin’s picture on a $10 note? Upon arrival home, I learned that the Cobb County, GA (where I live) school board is back in a Federal Appeals court, appealing Judge Cooper’s order to remove stickers that were placed on all life science and biology texts in Georgia’s second largest school district. The stickers were removed last school year from all of the books, but the school board has resisted accepting the Judge’s ruling, and is now appealing the case. A group of science advocates calling themselves Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education expressed concern about the proceedings on the first day of the appeals hearing. Apparently one of the judges took the lawyers for the defendants to task, and according to “court watchers” this was not a good sign. As in many of the cases involving evolution, the paucity of understanding the nature of a scientific theory surfaces. Evolution is considered “just a theory” and is therefore less credible than say gravity or plate tectonics. In the field of science however, this is not the case. Theories are explanations of scientific facts and observations, and in the case of evolution, we might say that no theory has been scrutinized more than evolution.

About 25 years ago I formed a group of Georgia citizens. We were small. We were concerned about the emergence of “creation theory” as an alternative or equal partner (equal time was the concept) with evolution. We called the group “GO-APE” (Georia Ontological Association for the Preservation of Evolution). We went to meetings. We shared literature about teaching evolution in science classes. It was a time when evolutionary teaching was being challenged by creation theory. The advocates of creation theory made a lot of progress in impacting local schools, and in impacting state science standards. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. Back then our answer was GO-APE!