Editor,
I would like to address several key points raised in Dennis Kinzler's letter in the Daily Lobo on Wednesday. First, Darwin did not propose a theory "to dispute the Bible." He made observations of the natural world, took into account other information available to him at the time and proposed a theory in accordance with the natural world to explain how these observed phenomena may have occurred. In other words, he did science.
Darwin's work differs markedly in both style and substance from the Bible and the Quran. To say that The Origin of Species is on par with the religious texts of two of the greatest faiths strikes me as a bit strange, and to compare Darwin to God and Allah would have troubled him as much as much as it would most Christians and Muslims. Far from overturning Biblical teachings, it may come as a surprise to Kinzler that Darwin was deeply religious.
Secondly, it is often the case a theoretical description of factual basis in observable reality does not translate into immediate acceptance of the theory by the scientific community. In fact, the person who proposes a new way of looking at reality is often castigated by both the scientific and other communities. Galileo and the heliocentric solar system are a classic example. Factual bases of reality exist without regard to human time scales or prejudices. To describe evolution by saying Darwin invented the idea back in the late 1800s is analogous to saying Einstein invented the mass-energy equivalence described in the equation E=mc2, or that the sun orbited the earth until Galileo invented the heliocentric solar system.
Third, while Kinzler is correct in saying that biomedical and geological science may proceed without a foundation in evolutionary biology, both fields are benefitted by the concepts of inherited traits, long-time scales and change of living forms on which Darwin's work rests. Themes found in evolutionary thinking help make sense of genetics and the fossil record. Finally, evolutionary theory has corroboratory experimental data that require no faith to believe and would seem to fall outside Kinzler's liberal definition of religion. Or, maybe, I'm just not a good evangelical evolutionist.
I would caution Kinzler to avoid making the common mistake of confusing descent from a common ancestor with currently observable forms. His tree-hanging zoo animal has descended from a common ancestor that we share, not a direct relative. Modern apes differ from humans because they followed a different path of divergence from our common ancestor. I would also caution him to avoid sentiments such as the jingoistic line: "Even the followers of the Quran had sense enough to start theirs thousands of years ago." Islam, begun about 1400 years ago, hardly needs Kinzler's myopic analysis of its history. And if I'm not mistaken, don't students currently decide which classes to attend?
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Jeff Thompson
Daily Lobo reader
