Topeka ? While hearing more testimony Friday criticizing the theory, two State Board of Education members acknowledged they hadn’t fully read evolution-friendly science standards proposed by educators.

A three-member board subcommittee had its second day of hearings on how evolution should be taught in Kansas schools. The entire board plans to consider changes in June in standards that determine how Kansas students are on science.

State and national science groups are boycotting the hearings, viewing them as rigged in favor of language backed by intelligent design advocates.

Board members Kathy Martin, of Clay Center, and Connie Morris, of St. Francis, acknowledged they had merely scanned proposed standards retaining the state’s current policy of describing evolution as a key concept for students to learn. Martin’s acknowledgment elicited groans of disbelief from a few audience members.

“I’m not a word-for-word reader in this kind of technical information,” Martin said during a break.

But the subcommittee’s third member, board Chairman Steve Abrams, of Arkansas City, said he’s read the evolution-friendly proposal thoroughly and questions only a few of its 100-plus pages. He said the hearings were giving the board valuable information.

Intelligent design advocates continued calling scholars, biologists and chemists to attack evolutionary theory that all life arose from a common source and that change in species over time can lead to new species.

Similar battles over evolution have occurred in Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania in the past few years.

In 1999, the Kansas State Board of Education, with a conservative majority — including Abrams — deleted most references to evolution in the science standards. The next election led to a less conservative board, which adopted the current standards. In last year’s elections, conservatives captured a majority again.

Some Kansas scientists contend this year’s hearings are a public relations stunt for intelligent design.

Intelligent design says some features of the natural world are so complex and well-ordered that they’re best explained by an intelligent cause.

Intelligent design advocates want to expose students to more criticism of evolution. But many scientists contend the board is being pushed to endorse intelligent design, even if the concept isn’t mentioned by name in the standards.

Representing what he called mainstream science, Topeka attorney Pedro Irigonegaray repeatedly asked witnesses whether they believe life came from a common source and whether man evolved from ape-like creatures. Repeatedly, the witnesses said no.

Asked to explain the appearance of humans on Earth, witness John Sanford, an associate professor of horticultural sciences at Cornell University, said: “My explanation, humbly offered, is that we were specially created.”

The board has sought to avoid comparisons between its hearings and the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tenn., in which teacher John Scopes was convicted of violating a state law against teaching evolution. However, both sides are represented by attorneys, even if scientists refuse to testify for evolution.

On Thursday morning, the hearings filled a 180-seat auditorium, but by Friday, it was more than half empty.

Witnesses called by intelligent design advocates sought to show that molecular biology and other science actually challenges evolutionary theory.

For example, Edward Peltzer, a Monterey Bay, Calif., ocean chemist questioned the idea that life originated in a primordial soup and that molecules formed living microbes.

Robert Hagen, a Kansas University evolutionary biologist, acknowledged the problem may be difficult but added, “It’s a lot like the people before the Wright brothers who discussed heavier-than-air flight — ‘It’s a really difficult problem so (it must be) impossible.’ “

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