US: President Bush has invigorated proponents of teaching alternatives to evolution in US state schools with remarks saying that schoolchildren should be taught about "intelligent design", a view of creation that challenges established scientific thinking and promotes the idea that an unseen force is behind the development of humanity.
Mr Bush told Texas newspaper reporters in a group interview at the White House on Monday that he believed that intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution as competing theories.
"Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about," he said, according to an official transcript of the session. "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," he added.
The comments drew sharp criticism from liberals, who said there was no scientific evidence to support intelligent design theory and no educational basis for teaching it.
The White House said on Tuesday that Mr Bush's comments were in keeping with positions dating to his Texas governorship, but aides said they could not recall him addressing the issue while president.
His remarks have heartened conservatives who have been asking school boards and legislatures nationwide to teach students that there are gaps in evolutionary theory and explain that life's complexity is evidence of a guiding hand.
"With the president endorsing it, at the very least it makes Americans who have that position more respectable, for lack of a better phrase," said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative leader who ran for president against Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries. "It's not some backwater view. It's a view held by the majority of Americans."
John West, an executive with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank supporting intelligent design, welcomed Mr Bush's remarks. "President Bush is to be commended for defending free speech on evolution and supporting the right of students to hear about different scientific views about evolution," he said.
Opponents of intelligent design, which a Kansas professor once derided as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo," say there is no legitimate debate. They see the case increasingly as a political battle that threatens to weaken science teaching in a nation whose students already are falling behind.
"It is, of course, further indication that a fundamentalist right has really taken over much of the Republican Party," said Democrat representative Barney Frank, a leading liberal in congress. Noting Mr Bush's own Ivy League education, Mr Frank said "People might cite George Bush as proof that you can be totally impervious to the effects of Harvard and Yale education."
The president's comments were "irresponsible", said Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He said the president, by suggesting students hear two viewpoints, "doesn't understand that one is a religious viewpoint and one is a scientific viewpoint."
Mr Bush's remarks came less than two months after Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, archbishop of Vienna and an influential Catholic theologian, said evolution as "an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection" was not true.
Cardinal Schonborn wrote in the New York Times that he said he wanted to correct the idea that neo-Darwinism was compatible with Christian faith.
Much of the scientific establishment contends intelligent design is not a tested scientific theory, but a cleverly marketed effort to introduce religious - especially Christian - thinking to students. Opponents say that church groups and other interest groups are pursuing political channels instead of first building support through traditional scientific review. - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)