Senate Bill 96, which seeks to instruct Utah public schools to belittle evolutionary principles in favor of an unwritten but clearly religious view of a very narrow kind, was successful enough in that endeavor to pass the Utah Senate and move on to the House.

But even if it proves fit enough to survive that trial, and even if it is not made extinct by the veto pen of a governor who wants to enhance rather than ruin the state's reputation as a haven for good science, the legislation stands no chance of survival in the real world.

Admittedly cursory comments offered by the Legislature's in-house experts state that the bill presents neither a constitutional nor a fiscal challenge. But the reasons given for the introduction of the bill and the debate surrounding it ensure it will prove both legally vulnerable and, as a result of inevitable legal challenges, financially draining.

At the last minute Monday, the bill was amended in a way that was slightly helpful. But that followed another amendment the previous Friday, one that made the bill even less useful, less constitutional and less truthful than it had been before - which is saying something.

Monday's amendment made the bill slightly less of a mandate by stating that the comforting (to some) fiction that evolution is anything other than the solid core of biological science need only be presented if a particular class deals with the origin of life or the origin of humans in their present form. Not enough to make it constitutional, but an improvement.

But Friday's change did what some of us thought was impossible. It took a false statement and made it even less true. By adding the word "scientific" at critical points, the bill stopped saying that there were other ideas about the origins and development of life on Earth and started saying that there were other "scientific" ways of explaining those things.

There are not.

There are religious, philosophical and mythical alternatives to evolution, none of them in conflict with scientific thinking unless someone is stubborn enough to demand a fight to the death where none need exist.

But there are no accepted scientific alternatives. Even if the Legislature says otherwise.