 Students are being lied to about the Big Bang. It's a big dud. It didn't happen. They're being lied to about the age of the Earth. The Earth is not billions of years old. They're being lied to about the caveman. There's never been a caveman. They're being lied to about the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs did not live millions of years ago. Dinosaurs live with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In the constant battle to keep creationism out of public schools in America, the National Center for Science Education plays a crucial role. At its head is Eugenie Scott. I think we should be teaching evolution the way we teach it at the university level. We should be teaching the scientific consensus on this. The high school classroom is no place to fight the culture wars. And this, unfortunately, is what is happening in Texas and in Louisiana and many other states where this issue has disproportionately affected education. In 2005, the NCSE assisted the plaintiffs in the case of Kitts Miller and the Dover School Board, in which the school board's policy of the compulsory teaching of intelligent design was being challenged in the courts. One of the expert witnesses called on behalf of the plaintiffs was Barbara Forrest. What you're going to have is an undermining of secular democracy itself. We have a secular constitutional democracy built along the guidelines laid out in the Constitution, which is a secular document, which mandates that the government be neutral in matters of religion, which means that public school teachers cannot, in any class, not just in a science class, but in any class, become an advocate for a religious point of view. And at the very least, it would mean that a science teacher is doing something very unethical, misleading children about science, or that the science teacher, if the teacher really believes intelligent design is science, is incompetent. In 2008, Louisiana passed the Science Education Act that leaves the door open for creationism to slip back into the classroom. A 17-year-old student, Zach Coplin, is seeking to have that law overturned. To be successful in the global economy and get a good science education and get good science and technology-based jobs, we need to be taught proper science, good science backed by the evidence. And that is the theory of evolution, and these textbooks do that. Aaron Ra, a long-time vocal critic of the Texas Board of Education The Texas Board of Education