Austin, Tex. — The Texas State Board of Education, in a move watched closely by science educators nationwide, voted on Friday to remove two controversial provisions from its science standards that would have raised questions about key principles of the theory of evolution, but approved a compromise measure that scientists say still could be used to undermine the teaching of evolution.

The board rejected, in two 8-to-7 votes, requirements that high-school biology students study the “sufficiency or insufficiency” of common ancestry and natural selection of species as explanatory principles behind the development of life on earth, The Dallas Morning News reported.

The votes followed a contentious, daylong debate. The board’s chairman, Don McLeroy, a Republican from College Station, had favored including those requirements and said he was disappointed by the outcome. “Science loses, Texas loses, and the kids lose because of this,” said Dr. McLeroy, a dentist. He has argued that the fossil record undermines some aspects of Charles Darwin’s theory.

However, in a move described as a compromise with social conservatives, the board voted in favor of a provision that students be required to scrutinize “all sides” of evolutionary concepts such as common ancestry, natural selection, and mutations, The Austin American-Statesman reported.

The Discovery Institute, which wants schools to teach that the universe is the product of an intelligent designer, called the vote “a huge victory for those who favor teaching the scientific evidence for and against evolution.”

“Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can’t be questioned,” said John West, a senior fellow at the institute.

Hundreds of college and university professors from Texas and around the country joined other science educators in September in signing a statement endorsing evolution as “an easily observable phenomenon that has been documented beyond any reasonable doubt.” Many of those educators testified this week at the state board’s hearings. A preliminary vote took place on Thursday.

Ronald Wetherington, an anthropology professor at Southern Methodist University who supports evolution, said that while the board’s actions would make it harder for the state to reject texbooks that take an uncritical stance on evolution, the language about teaching “all sides” of theories could encourage some publishers to interject pseudoscience into the texts.

“The battle has been largely won today, but we are nowhere near winning the war,” he said.

The standards approved by the state board also instruct students to take a skeptical look at global warming, the American-Statesman reported. Dr. McLeroy, to the chagrin of environmentalists, made his feelings clear. “Conservatives like me think the evidence [for human contributions to global warming] is a bunch of hooey,” he said.

The controversy over curriculum standards in Texas has ramifications outside the state because many major textbook publishers revise their offerings to conform with standards in Texas, whose schools form one of their biggest mass markets. —Katherine Mangan