New Mexico has a vibrant scientific co mmunity, with two world-class national laboratories (Los Alamos and Sandia), the Santa Fe Institute, astronomical observatories dotting its southern mountains, research universities, and noted biomedical and microelectronic research facilities.
So perhaps it should not be such a surprise that when the state’s public education department said it wanted to make a few changes and deletions to the nationally recognized Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for public schools that the state’s scientists and educators rose up in defiance.
The proposed changes would have deleted key terms and concepts such as evolution and the 4.6-billion-year age of the Earth. Specifically, “evolution” would be called “biological diversity,” the specific age of the Earth would be changed to “geologic history,” and a “rise in global temperatures” would be changed to “temperature fluctuations.”