Letter to the Editor redux
Well, I swore off letters to the editor (in this very blog) after they butchered the one I sent them, but I'm trying again. Too good an opportunity to try to poke a stick in the eye of our fucking dumbass (and a bad dumbass, not a good one) governor.Letter to the Editor:
I enjoyed the article "Genetic code isn't perfect, after all" in the April 6 "Frontiers" section. It reminded me of the excellent book "Genome", by Matt Ridley, that I read a couple of years ago. Both touch on the fact that the genome itself is composed of genes and even smaller DNA sequences that reproduce with imperfect replication under environmental pressure, i.e., undergo evolution. The article and the book both show the beauty and, more importantly, the explanatory power of evolutionary biology. All that is required to create the chaotic complexity of the genome, or of all of life on earth, or of the human mind, is imperfect replication under pressure to survive (and billions of years).
This is why it is so saddening and discouraging when our governor proclaims that intelligent design (ID), which has no scientific beauty and absolutely no explanatory power, is a "self-evident truth". No one with any scientific training would ever utter such words. In science, everything is a theory -- but there are good theories and bad theories, and all theories are constantly tested by observation and experiment.
Evolution is one of the best and greatest theories of science -- generally placed in the top four, with relativity, standard particle theory, and quantum mechanics -- while ID is one of the worst, ignored by 99.9% of scientists.
I guess, though, that we can at least be thankful that our governor no longer practices medicine.
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