The Cobb County statement

"This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically examined."

And now a word from the author
Kenneth Miller is a Brown University biology professor and one of the most prominent voices in the science community's debate against intelligent design creationism. He also happens to be the author of one of the textbooks -- "Prentice Hall Biology" -- in which Cobb County will place disclaimers that warn students about evolution.
So what does Miller think about the decision to put the statements in the textbooks? He suggests Cobb County's logic is seriously flawed:

"Evolution is a theory. It is a theory in the same sense as the atomic theory of matter or the germ theory of disease. This is what scientists mean by theories: In the scientific hierarchy, theories are higher than fact, because theories explain facts. Facts are simply individual, isolated, verifiable observations or experimental results.

"For example, is it fact that the sun is shining in the sky where I am right now? Yes. Is it a fact that in an hour the sun will have apparently moved its position? Yeah. That's a fact as well. Is it a fact that the moon will rise a little bit later today after the sun sets? Yeah. So you have all these facts. How can we put all these facts together? The Copernican theory of the solar system, the heliocentric theory of the solar system, is a theory that makes sense of all these facts.

"Evolution is a theory that makes sense of millions of facts of natural history -- the age of the earth, the succession of fossils in the fossil record, the genetic capabilities of organisms -- and as such it ties things together in an extraordinary way that has been equaled by few theories in biology.

"Should evolution be critically examined? Yes. Everything in science should be critically examined. If the disclaimer were to urge that all scientific theories should be critically examined with an eye toward the evidence and contrary points of views and so forth, it would have my complete agreement.

"The one mistake that I see in the disclaimer is singling out evolution as apparently the only theory that should be critically examined in science. There are counter-arguments to just about everything in science, including general and special relativity, which are still highly controversial in physics, but nonetheless we teach because they are the best and most widely applicable, generally acceptable theories. The mistake of the disclaimer is to single out [evolution] for special attention and special criticism as if it alone among scientific theories is uniquely weak, uniquely shaky or uniquely suspect. That is definitely not the case."