Letter to the Editor

Creationist not informed

In response to Brad Taylor’s letter to The Collegian, published on Sept. 14, this is one of the more typical examples of uniformed commentary on evolution made by creationists and also exposes a weak understanding of science.

Mr. Taylor calls for an open mind but it is clear he only wants his viewpoint heard. An honest evaluation of the evidence has concluded, for over 150 years, that evolution has and is taking place.

How else would you explain the sudden resistance of HIV to medications? All viruses and bacteria are not the same genetically, so when you apply medication to them some will naturally be resistant. The medication kills many of the viruses off, but a few survive and multiply.

Is this an act of God or simply evolution?

It should not go unstated that a lack of understanding of evolutionary biology by many physicians has led to many bacteria acquiring resistance to most antibiotics. This ignorance has sometimes proven fatal.

Simply inserting God into gaps of knowledge may satisfy a lack of belief but it is not science. There are no components of Intelligent Design (ID) that are scientific. The use of big words does not make something science, rather it is the ability to test and falsify that does. Nothing that ID proposes is testable and nothing in ID is scientific.

While simply citing a quotation may seem legitimate scholarship to Mr. Taylor, none of what he cites contradicts evolutionary theory (and by theory I mean the scientific sense of the word – a set of laws that explain a phenomenon), they simply are rhetoric.

Mr. Taylor’s explanation of the second law of thermodynamics is woefully inadequate. What is conveniently left out of his argument is the fact that his definition is restricted to a closed system, as used in small-scale chemistry and physics experiments. If his argument were valid, how would he explain that he started from a single cell and became an organism of trillions of cells? Mr. Taylor’s own existence has disproved his argument.

Chris Hamm
graduate student