I've just finished reading Tom Frame's latest book "Evolution in the Antipodes: Charles Darwin and Australia" (University of New South Wales Press, 2009).

Tom Frame is Professor of Theology at Charles Sturt University, and an Anglican Bishop.

It gives a brief account of evolution and the way it was accepted in Australia, including many of teh disputes about evolution in the late 19th century. Some of his criticisms of creationists are worth reading: although he tries tio be polite, sometimes the outrageous things he reads come through in his comments.

We can now, thanks to Tom Frame's researches in preparation for this book, push the introduction of the teaching of evolution in Australian schools back to some time prior to, at the very latest, 1914. One paragraph, on page 241, reads:

Despite its imperfections, Spencer's work demonstrated the extent to which Darwinian theory had prompted considerable convergence in longstanding academic disciplines and generated interest in biochemistry, biophysics, paleontology, morphology, ecology, population genetics and behavioural traits. The theoretical concepts of evolution were also being subjected to empirical testing when and where possible. Where theory could not be tested, such as the hypothesis that evolutionary processes observable today were solely responsible for the transmutation of species seen in the fossil record, there was a willingness among Australian scientists to concede that practical verification was not possible. But evolutionary theory was acknowledged to be a more plausible explanation of the known fossil record. There was debate among evolutionary theorists about rates and degrees of evolutionary change, but not the fact of evolution. By 1914, Darwinian ideas were in the mainstream of academic thinking in Australia and had become part of most school curricula as well.

Note Frame's use of the adverb "solely" he is definitely _not_ saying that evolution cannot be tested.

The Spencer referred to here is not the well-known Herbert Spencer, who was responsible for the phrase "survival of the fittest".

So can we please have no more comments about the introduction of evolution in schools in the 1960s? All that happened then was the selection of various parts of the already approved curricula in different areas of science into a single, general science, subject.

Salaam Ken Smith