Texas is the largest single purchaser of textbooks in the nation, thus what Texas wants in its textbooks strongly influences what other states get. In past years, evolution was systematically deleted or downplayed in textbooks because Texas required textbooks to print a disclaimer that any textbook dealing with evolution.

Curriculum standards have many important applications. They are used as guidelines by curriculum developers, by textbook publishers, and by examination writers, among other things. I was first asked by the Thomas B Fordham Foundation to evaluate the science education standards of every state that had them in 1997. I surveyed 36 documents — a pretty dull but (I hope) useful task (Lerner 1998).

The Evolving World was a book that needed to be written and ought to be read by everyone — but particularly those of us who promote evolution education to the general public. The main message for this audience is that other scientific theories, such as germ theory and heliocentrism, that are now widely — though perhaps not universally — accepted among the general public took much longer to gain acceptance than has evolution — at least so far.

A strange thing happened in the scientific literature recently. A pair of creationists, who have seemingly legitimate scientific credentials, attempted to publish some creationist assertions in a peer-reviewed journal. Their effort was nearly successful, mostly because they hid their pseudoscience in the middle of the article, surrounded by legitimate scientific discussion of unrelated topics. Luckily, they were caught just in time, and it turned out that they were pretty clumsy. In fact, if they had been just a bit more clever, they might have gotten away with it.