Letter about ID

A letter to the editor in today’s St. Petersburg Times:

Kudos to the School Board candidates at the recent political forum in Beverly Hills who support the teaching of “intelligent design” in our schools as an acceptable alternative to the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution.

In 1996, Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe shook the foundations of Darwinism, the theory that all living things descended from a single ancestor, and that all existing life is the result of random mutation and natural selection, when he proposed the theory of “irreducible complexity.”

Simply put, organisms including the microscopic universe of the cell (totally unknown to Darwin) consist of several interrelated parts, all of which must be present for the system to function. The organisms’ existence is all or nothing with no stages of development in between, thereby ruling out the numerous, successive, slight modifications of evolutionary theory.

Intelligent design also brings into question the lack of fossil evidence that reveals one species slowly evolving into the next. Five hundred and thirty million years ago almost every animal phyla arose out of nowhere. After this occurrence, known as the Cambrian explosion, almost no new phyla appear in the fossil records and many became extinct, leaving a 500-million-year gap in the evolutionary process. At best, we see microevolution, the tweaking of an existing species to adapt to different environments, and nothing more.

Another supporting point is the age of the Earth itself, approximately five billion years. A single cell evolving into a human in five billion years defies all probability. It is mathematically impossible for this to occur in such a short time span.

To further put into question the soundness of Darwinism is the growing understanding of the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecule. DNA is a communication system within the cell. Just as humans have written languages, so do cells through the DNA code. This code (language) determines our physical characteristics and guides our development into adulthood. This genetic language suggests creativity that science has been unable to confirm in natural selection.

And, of course, evolutionists have yet to explain the biggest leap of all – how life came to be in the first place.

Certainly, these few points help build a compelling argument for the inclusion of intelligent design in our schools’ curriculums. The last thing we want our educators to do is summarily dismiss certain important possibilities as inherently unworthy of consideration. That would be the antithesis of education.

Sam Lyons, Hernando Beach

So, does anyone know about these school board candidates? Please speak up if you do.

About Brandon Haught

Communications Director for Florida Citizens for Science.
This entry was posted in Alert, In the News. Bookmark the permalink.