The Texas textbook wars have finally yielded a win for the Enlightenment. In November, the state school board delayed final approval of a biology textbook that explains evolution as fact, but last month an expert committee overruled all objections and gave the book the green light for sale to the state’s public schools.
When Ide Trotter, a member of the board’s initial review panel, objected to Texas schools’ adoption of Biology on grounds of the book’s confident description of evolution, he expressed the views of many Americans. Either one third or nearly one half of all Americans deny evolution, depending on whether you favor Pew or Gallup poll results. Pew’s most recent study indicated that white evangelical Protestants make up a significant portion of that figure: 64 percent say they believe that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”
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