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Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children "religious or moral instruction." "The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians," said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. "Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program." Those who don't, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs. Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press. "I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids," said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago. The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn't attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science. "Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling," says the introduction to "Biology: Third Edition" from Bob Jones University Press. "This book was not written for them." The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its "History of Life" chapter that a "Christian worldview ... is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is."

The most likely scenario for the emergence of eukaryotes is that they arose from a symbiosis in which the host was an archaeal cell and the symbiont was a bacterium. According to this theory, the bacterial symbiont subsequently gave rise to the mitochondria -- the intracellular organelles that are responsible for energy production in eukaryotic cells. One hypothesis proposes that the archaeal host was dependent on hydrogen for its metabolism, and that the precursor of the mitochondria produced it. This "hydrogen hypothesis" posits that the two partner cells presumably lived in an anoxic environment that was rich in hydrogen, and if they were separated from the hydrogen source they would have become more dependent on one another for survival potentially leading to an endosymbiotic event