Recently, Senate Bill 733 was passed in the Louisiana State Legislature, allowing teachers to bring any supplemental materials they wish into science classes with no oversight from the State Board of Education. Last month, BESE voted to remove wording that specifically prohibited allowing Intelligent Design/Creationist materials from being among those used by teachers. By allowing an unscientific idea to be taught to the children of Louisiana as science, we are needlessly sending them into the free market with a severe handicap, one not shared by their peers from other states and nations.Scientific hypotheses are, among other things, testable and practical. Evolution is quite testable and there are many researchers here at the University who use this theory in their daily work. Evolution is also practical. Many modern advances in various fields that benefit humanity rely in part on this theory. Advanced, genetically engineered crops developed through the application of evolutionary principles feed literally billions. Vaccines for diseases that once killed millions are now optimized for effectiveness annually based on evolutionary predictions. Comparatively, ID/Creationism is neither testable nor practical and offers no framework within which scientists may make any such advancements.Teaching evolution alongside ID/Creationism is a problem that cannot be ignored. When students are taught this unscientific framework alongside good science, they will easily become confused and lose the ability to discern between science and pseudoscience. This will confer on them a competitive disadvantage with all 49 other states that prohibit the teaching of Creationism as science. In this year that is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Origin of Species, Louisiana need no longer pretend this is a real scientific debate. It’s time we moved forward with the rest of the world and gave our children the future they deserve.—-Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics Organization at LSU