Nov. 22 submitted letter. (unpublished)

Editor, The Globe and Mail,

 Paul Sullivan (11/20/00) labels the creationist convictions of Stockwell
Day as "nonsense" and paints creationists in general as morons with
respect to scientific understanding.  As a professional scientist with a
Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of California, I would like to
suggest that Mr. Sullivan himself has missed out on some crucial
scientific reality.  I suspect he, like most people today, have acquired
their understanding of these issues from educational institutions and the
popular media.  But the bias in these circles on the matter of evolution
is so strong that several vitally important aspects of the origins
controversy have been almost entirely censored >from public awareness.

 One such topic is efficacy of the Darwinian mechanism at the most basic
level.  Darwin observed the spectacular successes of plant and animal
breeders of his day in applying the techniques of selection to emphasize a
wide diversity of specialized characteristics in the varieties they
produced.  He reasoned that because in the wild most organisms produce far
more offspring than actually survive, a process he called natural
selection would, given sufficient time, lead to not only new species but
account for all the diversity we observe in living forms, both living and
extinct. Given Darwin's ignorance of modern molecular biology, his
conjecture was not a bad attempt to account for what he observed.  But
given what we know today, we can say with certainty that his grand
extrapolation from the visible results of plant and animal breeding to the
creation of radically new forms of life fails utterly.  The reason is
simple.  There are not enough rolls of the die.

 Proteins, one of the primary building blocks of life, are in effect 3D
nanomachines that perform incredibly sophisticated and specialized
functions.  Although it is possible to tinker somewhat with the details of
their design, there is a limit to how much alteration they can tolerate
and still have any biological functionality.  The blunt reality is that
these complex biological molecules are so special that no process of the
sort Darwin envisioned can select them.  Whereas bacteria have on the
order of 1000 different types of these nanomachines, mammals have on the
order of 100,000.  If evolution is really a true account of the history of
life on earth, somehow a vast number of the specialized molecules must
identified and incorporated in the presumed tree of life.

 A protein molecule is like a long chain of Legos of 20 different types
that folds into a complex 3D structure.  For a chain with 300 such
Lego-like pieces, there are 10 to the 390th power possible configurations.
Studies indicate, however, that for a given biological functionality only
one out of every 10 to the 195th power of these possibilities has any
level of that functionality.  Are there enough generations in the history
of life on earth to search through the possibilities and have any
reasonable shot at finding a viable candidate?  The quick answer is an
emphatic no!  If one compares with an estimate for the maximum number of
molecules that could possibly existed in all the history of the cosmos,
assuming every atom in the cosmos interacts with another atom once every
femtosecond (a thousand million million times per second) for a span of 30
billion years, one would require 10 to the 82nd power such universes to
have enough rolls of the die!

 Evolution is therefore a failed theory because it has no mechanism.
Evolutionists persisting in their unsupportable claims in my view is
nothing but science fraud.  I defy any fellow scientist on the planet to
demonstrate otherwise. On the other hand, if ever there were unambiguous
objective evidence for God's existence, the elegance and specificity that
exists at the molecular level in living organisms must qualify.  In my
opinion such evidence represents the most powerful logical testimony for
God's reality the human race has ever confronted, at least in almost two
millennia.  So just whose beliefs about origins lie in the realm of
"nonsense"?  The answer should be crystal clear.

John Baumgardner
Los Alamos, New Mexico

http://www.theglobeandmail.com

COMMENT

So Adam and T. rex go into this bar . . .

PAUL SULLIVAN [The West]  The Globe and Mail, p. A19.

Monday, November 20, 2000
 

 Every election campaign has a defining moment, that point in the process
at which we decide who we're going to vote for, or at least who we're not
going to vote for.

 For me, that point did not come when I found out that the Prime Minister
had phoned the head of a federal bank to apply a little high-level heat on
behalf of a loan application for a hotel in his own riding. Perhaps it
should have. A bad business.

 But no, the political penny dropped for me when I found out that
Stockwell
Day apparently believes the world is 6,000 years old, and that human
beings
and dinosaurs rambled Earth together, as in B.C. the cartoon strip.

 This nonsense is part of a canard called "creationism," and Mr. Day tries
to justify this as a "belief" along the lines of religious belief that
should not be used "in a detrimental way in an election campaign." That's
fine if you keep your beliefs in church where they belong. But he also
insists "there is scientific support for both creationism and evolution,"
and apparently believes creationism should be taught in school. I say
"apparently" because the source of this story is an academic who says he
attended a Day speech in Red Deer where the Alliance leader let it all
hang out.

 But Mr. Day won't deny his "belief" and confirms that he further believes
there is scientific evidence to support creationism, that somehow
creationism and evolution are on the same level, science-wise.

 I may not stand for much, but I do stand for evolution and against
"creationism."

 Don't get me wrong. I suppose God could have created the world and all
its creatures behind the elaborate mask of evolution and its prime
mechanism, natural selection. But there's no scientific evidence for God.
There's plenty, and I mean plenty, for evolution.

 But creationists never give up. And in the United States, it could even
be argued that they're winning. Kansas, thanks to an intense creationist
lobby, has deleted any mention of evolution from the state's science
curriculum. Alabama, New Mexico and Nebraska all prevent the teaching of
evolution as anything other than an unproved theory. Biology textbooks in
Alabama carry a rider calling evolution "a controversial theory some
scientists present as a scientific explanation for the origin of living
things."

 Now that Mr. Day is out of the creationist closet, we can expect more of
the kind of stuff that appeared on this page on Friday. In Defence of
Creationism by Jonathan Wells, an allegedly learned individual with a PhD
in biology, trucked out the standard baloney about how evolution is not
supported by fossil evidence and that, if natural selection is operating,
its observed effects are "trivial."

 Like most thinking creationists (oxymoron?), he doesn't try to make us
believe that the world is 6,000 years old or that troglodytes danced with
dinosaurs. He takes a more subtle approach, maintaining that evolution is
in trouble, even in the scientific community, because it fails to explain
the explosion of animal life in the Cambrian era about 570 million years
ago. He also argues that evolution fails to explain the major changes we
see in the history of life, and that there's a perfectly good creationist
theory, which he calls intelligent design.

 There is no room here to debate this stuff, but you should know that
intelligent design is the work of a mathematician, not a biologist, and
there is a vast array of fossil evidence supporting evolution. When a
creationist asks you to explain how whales evolved from land animals,
refer that person to Hooking Leviathan by its Past,one of a collection of
essays compiled by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in Dinosaur in
a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History,a marvellous account of the
fossil record of the return of land-based mammals to the sea. As for the
Cambrian explosion, there is now a thorough record of the soft-form
creatures that made up the vast majority of life forms from the dawn of
life 3.5 billion years ago to the present. More than two-thirds of species
on Earth continue to be bacterial.

 I can't believe we're still having this argument. The world is 6,000
years old because an Irish bishop counted up the "begats" in Genesis and
concluded that the world was created at noon, Oct. 23, 4004 BC. This
chronology was enshrined in the King James Bible and is now worshipped
with the same literal fervour as the rest of Genesis.

 If Stockwell Day "believes" that our best thinking about the origin of
the world and its creatures, supported by a voluminous body of evidence,
is worthy of no greater consideration than the musings of Bishop James
Ussher, circa 1650, he should not be prime minister of this country,
whatever the alternative. What he should do is catch up on his reading.
---