Evolution Schmevolution

Television's sharpest wits poised to carve up Kansas
'The Daily Show' trains its satirical eye on the evolution debate
By AARON BARNHART
The Kansas City Star

Uh-oh, Kansas Board of Education - now you've done it.
America's most-quoted source of liberal dissent, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," is devoting four nights to the debate over intelligent design.

Beginning tonight, the news-parody show will air "Evolution Schmevolution," a nightly segment examining the scientific theory of life's origins and its faith-based challengers.

It will be the first time the popular cable program, which has a nightly audience of 1.4 million people, has devoted so much time to a single cultural issue.

"We wanted to pick a subject that was guaranteed to offend a large body of people, so that left race, sex and evolution," said Ben Karlin, the show's executive producer and former head writer. "With the current tenor in the country, this felt like the right time to do it."

Karlin said specific mention will be made of Kansas, where conservatives on the state Board of Education have called for science standards that allow more criticism of evolution. The new standards would not mandate the teaching of intelligent design, but opponents say the standards would open the door to it. Proponents of intelligent design believe that some aspects of the universe are too complex to be explained by natural causes alone.

On Friday Steve Abrams, the board's chairman, declined to comment on "The Daily Show" or the ongoing debate.

For its series of reports, "The Daily Show" sent its "correspondents" - improvisational comics who imitate with uncanny accuracy the style of TV news reporters - to two hotbeds of the evolution controversy: Dayton, Tenn., where the 1925 Scopes trial was staged; and the Galapagos Islands, where Charles Darwin conducted his research that formed the basis of his 1859 work, The Origin of Species.

"Daily Show" correspondent Ed Helms also will challenge a "helper monkey" in a battle of minds.

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