The achievement by moderate conservatives of a majority on the Kansas State School Board of Education is a strike against the forces who want to teach Kansas schoolchildren that evolution is merely a “theory.”

Beyond the fundamentalist Christian realm, the common wisdom is that last week was a welcome slap in the face to those pesky creationists, who deny science by taking the Bible literally. And fie on those troglodytes in Atlanta who want to put stickers on biology textbooks warning students that evolution is “a theory and not a fact.”

Deeply secular person that I am, I “get” this. However, the case against creationism is not as watertight as evolutionary biologists imply.

Make no mistake: the window for creationism gets smaller all the time. For example, Darwin taught us that the world’s creatures are the product of gradual evolution from earlier ones. But creationists have pointed to places in the fossil record where instead, creatures just pop up fully formed, completely different from earlier ones.

A standard example used to be whales. In the rocks, whale fossils turned up all of a sudden, as if someone had waved a magic wand. Where were the fossils of “almost-whales”? Presumably at one point there would have been bearish, shore-dwelling freaks that spent half their lives in the water. Well, as it happens, there were: fossils of exactly this started turning up in Pakistan 20 years ago.

Science has not been much kinder to the “intelligent design” idea. That one goes that nature’s creatures are too complex to have developed step by step, and that something must have brought them about in one fell swoop, like a watch. Or a Lexus.

For example, when light hits the retina in the back of our eye, it sets off a long string of chemical reactions that end by making an image in our brains. But only the whole string of reactions allows us to see. Intelligent-design fans argue that this could not have evolved step by step, because just half of the string would have served no more purpose than half a stairway.

But this doesn’t work either. It turns out that the long strings of reactions are actually combinations of short “stringlets,” which all once had functions of their own. Evolution combined them; God didn’t have to.

The enlightened position, then, is that the creationists have been blown out of the water. Evolutionists are especially excited these days by new discoveries that supposedly put the last nail in the creationists’ coffin, showing how one cell becomes a whole creature without anyone needing to wave a wand. Presumably, we now know how one cell knows to become a kidney while another one becomes a fingernail.

Biology 101 is that DNA makes proteins, but alone, this has always left the question as to why our DNA does not just churn out a hideous soup of thousands of proteins all the time. But now there’s Biology 201. Each piece of DNA has an extra stretch that acts as a switch. The extra stretch can glom onto a particular chemical floating around, just like a key is fitted for a lock. The glomming either tells the DNA to produce its protein or tells it not to.

Turn some switches on and you get proteins that turn a cell into nerve tissue. Turn these three switches on and those two switches off, and you get a dimple. It’s not about God, it’s about flipping switches. What’s the matter with Kansas anyway?

And yet, I keep waiting for these books to tell me how any of this can explain how an amoeba becomes Meryl Streep.

I imagine we’re not far from being able to zap a cell with some switch-flipping concoction, leave it overnight, and come back the next morning and find a nostril. But Meryl Streep is more than her nostrils and dimples. We still don’t know how those DNA switches evolved step by step. Nor do we know how they get flipped in just such a way that proteins flow in the precise order that creates Meryl Streep — or even a paramecium. Scientists do know that the switches are turned on by other switches. And that those switches are turned on by other ones.

And then, those switches…well, at this point we run up against a void, like wondering what’s beyond the universe. At which point certain familiar proposals are typical. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, is an evangelical Christian, and his new book about DNA is called “The Language of God.”

Although evolutionary biologists think they have deep-sixed creationism, for me, despite my lack of interest in God, their books are the closest thing I know to church. DNA switches are neat. But they do not tell the whole story, and based on what I have learned from evolutionary biologists at this point, I know of no more tantalizing evidence for a Grand Creator than an infinitesimal blob of goo becoming a little girl.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.