Excerpts from the official 1995 Position Statement on Teaching Evolution, by the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) (1995)

The following selected excerpts are from the official 1995 Position Statement on Teaching Evolution, by the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), (The American Biology Teacher, Jan. 1996, pp. 61-62). The numbers opposite the "tenets" are added for your ease of analysis.

"Evolutionary theory, indeed all of science, is necessarily silent on religion and neither refutes nor supports the existence of a deity or deities. Accordingly, the National Association of Biology Teachers, an organization of science teachers, endorses the following tenets of science, evolution and biology education:

1) The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

2) Evolutionary theory is significant in biology, among other reasons, for its unifying properties and predictive features, the clear empirical testability of its integral models and the richness of new scientific research it fosters.

3) The fossil record, which includes abundant transitional forms in diverse taxonomic groups, establishes extensive and comprehensive evidence for organic evolution.

4) Natural selection, the primary mechanism for evolutionary changes, can be demonstrated with numerous, convincing examples, both extant and extinct.

5) Natural selection - a differential, greater survival and reproduction of some genetic variants within a population under an existing environmental state - has no specific direction or goal, including survival of a species."