Tired of anti-evolution arguments

Mark Foley's letter of June 26, "Chances are slim for evolution," uses the same tiresome arguments that creationists and intelligent design wonks have been promoting for years. They have been defeated in the scientific community, in the courts, and at the ballot box, so all that remains are letters to the editor.

Foley asserts the 470,000 scientists who believe in evolution "could be wrong", and he cites as the reason for that mass delusion "the indoctrination found in most textbooks as well as in the general media." It strikes me this doesn't qualify as a reason why any self-respecting scientist would embrace a concept. Scientists have been cheerfully challenging established belief systems since the days of Aristotle. Foley also fails to explain why we should place our faith in the mere 1 percent of "scientists" who reject evolution but have no rational alternative explanation other than "God did it."

The central argument in Foley's letter revolves around the statistical improbability of life being created spontaneously in the primordial soup; but his reasoning is flawed. He presupposes the astronomical number of trials needed to create a single amino acid occurred sequentially at the rate of one per second, and based on that fact, he concludes the spontaneous creation of amino acids was virtually impossible given the 4.5 billion year history of earth. The flaw is simple; given the earth's enormous size and complexity, it is probable that millions of such chemical trials were occurring every single second in every damp corner of the earth.

The intelligent design crowd is not interested in advancing scientific inquiry; they want to end the debate with the presumption that a supreme being simply "poofed" the universe into existence, with all of its diversity and complexity. If we allow that to happen, science will be reduced to the reading of Genesis.

William S. Hicks

Carpentersville