News reports indicated that evolutionisnot being discussed by biology teachers, even in states where it is a formal part of the curriculum. Teachers and school principals are simply trying to avoid getting into trouble with conservatie parents.

Here is an issue for the American petroleum community to take as their own.

Evolution is a fact. You all know it.

The discovery of evolution is one of the triumphs of the Enlightenment, along with the beginnings of physics and chemistry, Adam Smith's elucidation of free market economies, and concepts about human rights. It was the end of religious dogmatism that let all this happen, and the mainstream Christian denominations long ago accommodated themselves to all of these ideas. Do you folks have to go through he Scopes trial all over again?

Why should petroleum geologists care? It should be a question of American pride and nationalism. Americans have wone more Nobel Prizes in science than the citizens of any other country. Why? Because of the spirit of imagination and of free inquiry for which Americans are famous. The world needs more of this.

But it will get rapidly less, if the conservative trends sweeping the United States increase their grip on teaching and research in your country. This matters, because it is free inquiry, especially the freedom to roam across the fascinatingspaces of inventive science, that have built the prosperous communities of the developed world.

America will contribute less to this, and benefit less from it, as the years go by, if these trends continue. The great prizes, the research monies, and the most inventive corporations, the most talented academics will gradually move out - to Canada, to Europe, to anywhere where they are free from the stifling oversight of the religious evangelist.

Why is it that some of the most conservative states also are the most petroleum rich? Texas and Oklahoma come to mind. How is it that these states, which have benefited the most from the full expression of the earth-science enterprise, are the most backward when it comes to integrating the knowledge that arises from the earth scienses into their daily lives?

I await some answers with interest. Andrew D. Miall, Toronto, Canada
(Editor's Note: Miall is the 2004 recipient of the Grover E. Murray Distinguished Educator Award.) . . .