The U.S. Education Department made it official today that students majoring in evolutionary biology will be eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students concentrating in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages.

The department’s original list of majors that qualify for the grants, awarded under the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent Grant program, did not contain evolutionary biology. That absence, first reported on Tuesday by The Chronicle, was made conspicuous by the fact that very few other hard-science majors were missing. And the line where evolutionary biology would have appeared, according to the government’s classification scheme, was blank.

Those facts raised eyebrows among education leaders and scientists because the teaching of evolution has been highly contentious in recent years.

On Thursday the department reiterated that the omission had been accidental (The Chronicle, August 25). Today the department announced that it had updated the list to restore “certain majors” that had been “inadvertently omitted.”