Editor,
After reading Carolyn Johnson's letter in Friday's Daily Lobo, I began to wonder whether some people write such editorials just to raise the ire of others. Let me begin by saying that evolution isn't presented as a fact - it is still presented as a theory. This is done not only to allow people who believe otherwise to hold onto their ideas, but also because Johnson is right. Evolution is not directly observable. Evolution is a painfully slow change over time and thus cannot be observed directly.
However, unlike religion, we can find evidence of evolution. The bones that Johnson speaks of prove that the human skull has changed shape over a period of some 15 million years to accommodate the development of a larger brain. In the scientific community, the Nebraska Man and other missing links that Johnson references were not disproved by the scriptures, but by scientists themselves. In fact, the only people who still reference the Nebraska Man are those who accept creationism as a fact to disprove science. That makes no sense. It is like quoting Aristotle to prove that the Earth is the center of the solar system. When new scientific evidence surfaces, old theories may be modified or dismissed completely. That is the beauty of science.
I can't understand why Johnson would dismiss carbon-14 dating as a hoax, either. It is, in fact, one of the most accurate tools any anthropologist has at his or her disposal. Carbon-14 is an unstable, radioactive isotope that is created when a living being absorbs carbon into its body. At the time of death, this carbon-14 begins to break down at a steady and observable rate. It has a half-life of about 5,730 years. After that amount of time, about 50 percent of the unstable element has broken down into more steady substance, and after another 5,730 years, about half of the remainder has broken down and so on. This is observable not only in carbon, but also in uranium, nitrogen and seaborgium. Since unstable elements break down at such a steady rate, we can easily observe how much of the stuff is left in a specimen and deduce its age.
In case you wish to doubt the idea of a half-life, seaborgium has one of about one second. The decay of unstable substances is a completely observable and mathematically predictable phenomenon.
Johnson claims creation science can be tested and observed, but no, it can't. What biblical phenomenon can we observe today? Was New Orleans razed to the ground for its unrighteousness? Is the war in the Middle East the fabled battle for the holy grounds? But what evolutionary data can we observe today? Well, now that the human genome is better understood, we have discovered that the average human is born with around three genetic mutations in their genotype. These are very tiny changes which either help or hinder the creature who possesses them. If they help, then they are passed on and the species takes on that mutation.
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Johnson cites sources like ChristianAnswers.net, which is inherently biased. Why not reference a scientific journal or some Nobel-prize winning anthropologist who does not agree with evolution? Good luck.
About the only evidence creationists have to go on is a series of documents written thousands of years ago, edited who knows how many times to accommodate the fickle whims of political nature. When was the last time we witnessed the spontaneous generation of a new creature by the hand of God? When was the last time someone was smitten for his or her unrighteousness? The Bible does not provide us with any kind of answers about our creation. It is a series of stories designed to give us moral guidance, much the way Pooh Bear stories did when we were young. There is no evidence supporting any kind of biblical phenomena.
Sediments laid down by catastrophes are not the result of Noah's flood, but rather by the meteor that upset the environment 65 million years ago. In fact, the sediments give us evidence of numerous catastrophes which occur in cycles of about 23 million years. The meteor actually left a very thin layer of ash and substances which are common among celestial bodies.
All these points are the result of my own research, not that of my professors.
David Martinez
UNM Student
