Posted on 07/27/2003 3:05:40 PM PDT by rhema
Two recent articles in the Pioneer Press (article, July 18; Art Coulson column, July 20) have probably given readers the impression that people who believe in creation are trying to get the Genesis account into science classrooms.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These straw-man arguments put forth by editors and evolutionists alike are causing harm to the current discussions surrounding the teaching of evolution. This is all done under the guise of worrying about the scientific mental health of our public school kids if they are taught something other than evolutionary theory.
The debate about evolution versus intelligent design is not about teaching origins, but rather about letting students hear about scientific challenges to the theory of evolution. Every student at some point ponders the complexity of living organisms, yet challenges to random-chance, purposeless, undirected events (evolution) are typically not allowed to be taught in today's public school environment.
The English evolutionist Richard Dawkins eagerly reminds the world that despite all appearances of living creatures having been "designed," one has to constantly keep telling himself as an evolutionist that life was not created, it only appears that way. Students who ask what the probabilities are for arriving on the earth by chance alone need to be given scientific answers to their questions — not sermons from those of us who speak the loudest or carry the biggest sticks — even if some of those answers challenge evolutionary dogma.
This debate is not about getting religious ideas taught in science classrooms, nor is it a clash between religion and science with some sort of wall separating those realms. Quite simply, this issue involves whether students and teachers will be allowed to address the numerous scientific challenges to evolutionary doctrine in the open forum of the classroom, or whether only evolutionary stories will allowed to be taught.
As one simple example of the kind of challenge to evolution that should be taught, consider how inefficient random chance is at producing complexity. Teachers, ask your students to try to type by random keystrokes a simple four-letter word (e.g., "Help"). If they type as fast as 100 words per minute it will still take them more than 200 days of continuous round-the-clock typing just to have an even chance of getting this four-character word by random chance from their keyboards.
Incredibly, even a short sentence of just 10 such words would never be obtained in the lifetime of the universe. So, biology teachers, how does one account for the complexity of the 3 billion (3,000,000,000) base pairs of the human genome by chance?
Let's consider another example a student might ask about. "How likely is it that the human eye could be 'wired' correctly to form an image, by random chance connections?"
This is a very tough problem for the evolutionist because forming an image requires specified complexity to be achieved by purposeless processes, which is vastly more difficult than the unspecified complexity of accepting any kind of life forming from lifeless material.
In a very simplified retina for example, if only 12 rods or cones of the retina are to be "connected" to the brain correctly to form an image, there are 479,001,600 possible combinations (12 factorial) for that seemingly trivial scenario. Go ahead, readers, and try to do those 12 connections randomly, and you will quickly see how poor the odds are for evolution solving this simplified eye problem by chance.
For a real eye, there are more than 120 million rods and cones to be connected, and for us humans there is yet another eye that needs to have exactly the same specified wiring as the first, an even more troubling problem for the evolutionary biology teacher.
No wonder evolutionists do not want other people challenging their sacred territory with difficult questions. But students think of these same questions, and hundreds of others, and typically never get a good answer.
Students deserve a format that challenges evolutionary teaching with questions such as these, and they will ultimately determine if evolutionary theory is providing the best answers.
Stoltzmann (e-mail: dstoltzmann@ cs.com), of Bayport, is a physicist and founder of Optical Engineering of Minnesota, a company that specializes in optical system design, engineering and testing.
Oh, please!
Perhaps you could provide a definition of evolutionary theory so we could follow your point.
Good luck getting a straight answer.
The classic Darwinian scenario is common descent via variation and natural selection. Only the variation part is presumably random. The joint operation of variation and natural selection produces a convergence toward fitness in the current environment, a fitness that will be heritable by the offspring of the fit. That is not random.
You read the main article and its table-pounding on the complexity of the eye and you would get the idea that every eye of every human must be assembled by random chance every time. That's what the author seems to be saying, and of course it's ridiculous. Nobody thinks it happens that way, every time a new baby is conceived and starts to grow.
Well, noboby seriously thinks it ever happened that way, even once. All the attacks on the improbability of all the parts coming together in just the right way suddenly one day show up very well the difficulty and improbability of ... special creation. That's the only version around in which things Shazam! together in just the right way all at once.
Evolution, by comparision, says you start simple. Natural selection selects what works. Over time, the population will tend improve further on what has been working so far. Incredibly complex eyes evolve from simpler eyes, which evolve from photosensitive spots. A range of such eyes, mirroring such a progression, exists now in extant life forms.
It is said that there are no dumb questions, but asking the questions the author encourages reveals an ignorance of evolution on the part of the person asking the question. In theory, I suppose that the teacher could explain the idea well enough that such questions would not arise. In any event, I can hope most teachers can answer such if they come up.
But the "dumb questions" do not deserve to be presented inside the curriculum as part of a body of knowledge.
For a primer read this.
The article's example purports to show how difficult it would be for evolution to occur purely by random chance--that must be the "Random Chance Theory of Evolution."
Environmental stressors and natural selection are strong biasing factors, for example, that lead to profound deviation from random.
One needs to fully familiarize themselves with the statistical concept of "Random Variable" before they compare evolution (which is not a random process) with random selection.
The author of this article has made an error by falsely assuming that Darwinian evolutionary theory is the same as the "Random Chance Theory of Evolution."
There is another?
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