Gov. Jeb Bush, who seldom lacks political certitude, has twisted himself into a pretzel over evolution. If he's trying to appease religious conservatives, he will succeed only at a cost to his own credibility and that of the public schools he calls his highest priority.

Those educators are supposed to review science standards in the coming year, and the governor fools no one with his promise of deference. Bush and Winn already have replaced many of the professionals in the department with ideologues whose main credentials are partisanship. [K-12 Chancellor Cheri] Yecke, who was running for Congress in Minnesota before Winn hired her, once called criticism of her social-studies plan "the hate-America agenda."

The educators who don't work for Bush seem to have no problem establishing the worth of evolution, a 146-year-old theory rooted in scientific concepts. The lack of such guidelines was one reason the Fordham Institute recently awarded the state an F for its science standards. Wrote the institute: "The superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology alone justifies the grade F."

The governor is indeed entitled to his own religious beliefs about the origin of man, but the state's science classes are no place for them. If he insists that students meet the highest academic standards, then he should not ask that his religion dictate their science.