Equal Time for Eden

The U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down a 40-year-old Arkansas law forbidding the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution. Even Tennessee, scene of the 1925 "monkey trial" of John Scopes, finally repealed its anti-Darwin statute in 1967. Now some conservative members of the California Board of Education, joined by Public Instruction Superintendent Max Rafferty, want to redraw the state's education guidelines so that evolution is not the only theory of man's origins included in California textbooks. Rafferty and his fellow fundamentalists want equal time for the Garden of Eden and the rest of the biblical account of creation so that the children can decide for themselves between the Book of Genesis and Darwin's Revised Standard Version of creation.

Dr. Ralph Gerard, a University of California biologist who helped devise a new science curriculum for California schools, wondered aloud: "Should both views of the origin of man be presented, and the children allowed to decide? Should a scientific course on reproduction also mention the stork theory?"

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