There's no evidence evolution is false
As a scientist I am obligated to respond to Dan Toth's letter of Feb. 14, because it continues to propagate fallacies. The danger is that if these untruths are continually aired, people will begin to think that they are true.
The first fallacy is that there are two types of science: operational and origins. These are terms created by creationists to say some science is correct and some science is wrong. Scientists do not make this distinction because such a designation is untenable. For example, many of the new advances in medicine are rooted in the same science that is used to analyze evolution. Further, our understanding of the current world depends on how life and the universe evolved.
The second fallacy is that there is scientific evidence that evolution could not have occurred. Simply untrue. Intelligent Design concepts such as irreducible complexity, arguments involving the second law of thermodynamics and information theory, and others have been proven many times over to be false. These and many other false creationist claims are refuted at www.talkorigins.org/indexcc.
Third, evolution theory is not subjective as Mr. Toth asserts. Evolution theory has been objectively tested for 150 years; there is much scientific data that is inconsistent with a creation story. This is why scientists believe in evolution - it is the theory that best explains of the scientific data that we have.
There is one statement in Mr. Toth's letter that is true: "modern science doesn't rubber-stamp evolutionary (theory.)" Evolutionary theory is constantly being tested. Scientists do not blindly believe in something without proof that it is true. This is precisely why scientists believe that life evolved over hundreds of millions of years and not all at once less than 10,000 years ago. Scientific data have been used to validate evolution in many fields not just biology, but the creation viewpoint is inconsistent with scientific data.
Robert Nishikawa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Radiology and Medical Physics
The University of Chicago
Batavia