ID Fails in Polk County, FL

Five of the seven members of Polk County, FL school board have decided that teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution won't be necessary afterall.

Ask the Polk County School Board. The panel made news last month when five of its seven members declared a personal belief in the concept of intelligent design, the religiously based explanation of the development of life believed in by many Christians.

Four of those five sympathetic board members said they would like to see intelligent design taught in Polk schools as an alternative to Darwinian evolution, at a time when new state standards mentioning evolution by name for the first time are under consideration.

Just like that, it appeared the Darwin wars had found their newest battlefield.

Yet a few weeks later, the controversy is dying with a whimper. There's no board support for a challenge to the proposed standards. Some of the five school board members blame the local newspaper for trying to start a fight.

"It's not our agenda," said Tim Harris, one of the board members. "My personal opinion and how I vote don't always jibe."

What happened? You can start with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

You heard right. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster actually exists. And, they piled so much ridicule on the school board that it became a public embarassment. It didn't hurt that a science-focused State polytechnic campus of the University of South Florida is being built in Polk County also.

Backers see it as a potential economic engine and keystone of a high-tech I-4 corridor. They envision creating business incubators and luring technology companies.

So what was the reaction to news of intelligent design talk?

"I was surprised," said Marshall Goodman, a USF vice president and CEO of the existing and future Lakeland campuses.

Goodman, who has worked to promote the new campus among Polk's civic, business and political leaders, stopped short of criticizing local school board members. Intelligent design, however, merited no such tact.

"It's not science," Goodman said. "You can't even call it pseudo-science."