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ANN ARBOR - If Michigan is to have any hope of returning to its former prosperity, everyone agrees it needs to attract the high-tech, highly-skilled, "new-economy" jobs of the future.

That hasn't been easy. True, the state has one superior and two excellent research universities within an easy drive of each other.

There is a strong manufacturing base and a technically educated work force. But the cash-strapped state has been chronically underfunding higher education in recent years.

Thanks to its old "brawn-based" assembly-line economy, Michigan has a smaller percentage of young adults with college degrees than average. And despite having a major center at the University of Michigan, it has the most severe restrictions against embryonic stem-cell research in the country, worse even than the controversial federal guidelines established by President Bush.

And if that weren't enough, now comes one more effort to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools.

State Sen. Bill Hardiman (R., Grand Rapids) and State Rep. John Moolenaar (R., Midland) have introduced so-called "academic freedom" legislation that would require teachers and students to explore the "strengths and weakness" of evolutionary theory.

"This is about science and helping prepare the best scientists of the future for our state and country," said Mr. Moolenaar. He added that he wants students to have the "academic freedom to explore and critically examine scientific theories."

That sounds fine, but is in fact, nonsense, scientists say. "Very often over the last 10 years, we've seen anti-evolution policies in sheep's clothing," Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education told the New York Times. This is just another such attempt.

While scientists call evolution a "theory," they do not use that term the same way laymen do. Essentially, all of modern science is founded on an acceptance of basic Darwinian evolution - the idea that species gradually change through time, and that those more adaptable to present conditions tend to survive.

For that matter, modern agriculture, and dog breeding, use the same concepts to artificially select certain characteristics.

There are, to be sure, disagreements and controversies among scientists about how certain evolutionary mechanisms work.

But those arguments are being carried on largely among post-doctoral scholars in research laboratories. The idea that elementary or high school students could grasp the "strengths and weaknesses" of complex evolutionary theory doesn't make any sense.

What is really going on is one more attempt by the religious right to drag in "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution. Nor is this something limited to Michigan. The bills introduced in Lansing are very similar to those introduced in half-a-dozen other states.

All of them closely follow a template prepared by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, the leading center for anti-evolution strategy. Federal and state courts have repeatedly ruled against laws mandating teaching of "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolution. This appears to be a clever attempt to do the same.

Worse, the Senate version of the bill also makes mention of presenting alternative information on other scientific controversies, including "human impact of climate change," i.e. global warming.

The odds of the bills passing in Michigan are, fortunately, probably small. Democrats control the House, and the governor is unlikely to be sympathetic. Frankly, Republicans ought to oppose this bill on purely economic grounds. Michigan is in a struggle to compete for a highly educated work force and the jobs of the future.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist, or even an evolutionary biologist, to know that positioning Michigan as America's leading anti-science state isn't exactly likely to be good for business.

History shows that lawmakers meddling with school curricula is almost never a good idea. Which raises the question: Don't these legislators have better things to do?

When It's Over, It's Over: One of the main architects of the Michigan primary fiasco was Debbie Dingell, Democratic National Committeewoman and wife of powerful Rep. John Dingell. Though Ms. Dingell stayed officially neutral, the decision to force an early primary was seen as an attempt, as a top insider put it, "to hijack the primary" and deliver a victory to Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was widely seen as the certain nominee.

Congressman Dingell himself endorsed Senator Clinton. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Tuesday afternoon, just hours before the polls closed in the final primaries, Ms. Dingell made a belated endorsement … for Sen. Barack Obama.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade's ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

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