This letter is in response to the column by Elton Wong in last Thursday’s Daily. He addressed the ignorance of the Kansas Board of Education decision to eliminate the teaching of evolutionary theory.

Wong also talked about the evolution/Biblical creationist debate. There are a few points in Wong’s column I would like to address.

The first comparison Wong makes is between a backwards decision to round the irrational number pi to 3, to a verse in I Kings of the Old Testament.

The problem is, it is a false analogy. The text from the Bible that Elton uses was written, I am guessing, about 1200 B.C. around the time of Solomon.

The mathematical constant pi was most prominently discovered by Archimedes in about 200 B.C.

The fact that the Bible shows an approximate 3:1 ratio between circumference and diameter is about as accurate as technology allowed for in those days.

This cannot be compared to senators making a willfully ignorant decision to round an infinite number to a whole integer.

I would like to turn my attention to whether evolution should be viewed as scientific fact or altered/eliminated by our ever-increasing knowledge of molecular biology/biochemistry.

Wong says, “Science does not deal in absolutes. Rather, it gathers evidence and draws conclusions based on the evidence. Science is value-neutral, assumes nothing and questions everything. Evolution, like gravity, atomic theory and relativity, is considered scientific fact because it does the best job explaining the evidence found so far … So far though, evolution has not been truly challenged.”

Science is not completely value-neutral or objective. Humans make up the scientific community, and humans bring all manner of biases and presuppositions.

Evolutionary theory cannot be compared to gravitation or the atomic theory because it can not be tested directly.

I am not saying that evolution is untrue because it cannot be tested directly. I am making the point that it cannot be compared to the theories stated above.

I believe that Wong makes the point that evolution has not “truly been challenged” because his is a biology major.

As students, we usually accept things on the basis of authority. We are taught things in class and read things in scientific journals and accept them as fact. This is necessary, otherwise we would be “reinventing the wheel.”

This leaves students and other researchers open to accepting the personal biases of others.

I felt challenged in my faith by the growing popularity and acceptance of the evolutionary theory as fact.

I would suggest looking at “Darwin’s Black Box”, by Mike Behe.

Behe is a professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, and in his book he addresses several major obstacles to the Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian positions, including:

1. The mathematical/statistical impossibility of evolution.

2. The interrelated parts problem, also called the problem of irreducibly complex systems. In his book Behe painstakingly goes through five chapters to show how different biological systems could not have developed gradually over time.

3. Behe quotes from leaders in the field of biology, paleontology, genetics and mathematics to show how over the last five decades as the fields of science have grown more precise in their measurements, the leaders in those fields have found it harder to correlate the empirical evidence to the 150-year-old theory.

4. With a challenge to the fossil record Behe says, “…biochemistry offers a Lilliputian challenge to Darwin. Anatomy is, quite simply, irrelevant to the question of whether evolution could take place on the molecular level. So is the fossil record.”

With all this mounting evidence against the evolutionary theory, it begs the question whether evolution belongs in the category of science at all or simply dogma.

If science is unwilling to reevaluate a theory based on the many questions that the theory is no longer able to answer in the face of advancing technology, why should they hold on to it at all except for matters of faith?

All this having been said, I would like to encourage those of you who are staunch evolution advocates to read the strongest articles written against your point-of-view, if you do not then you have no reason for what you believe to be true.

In any case, I believe it was far from ignorance that prompted the Kansas decision; they may be setting precedent for a country that allows the media to dictate what science is for fear of the other ramifications.

J.T. Bridges

Senior

Exercise and sport science