EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION IS UNDER OUR NOSES

http://www.laconiadailysun.com/story/james-veverka-1-20

We can find evidence of real evolution right under our noses

Jan 26, 2012 8:10 pm

To the editor,

The latest attempt to inject creationism into science classes will fail as it always does. The Supreme Court has already ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) that states cannot require public schools to balance evolution lessons by teaching religious creationism. In the most recent court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) the judge called the attempt to inject creationism into Dover, PA schools, “breathtaking inanity”. No appeal was filed.

One of the greatest ideas Americans came up with is the separation of religion and government. When one intrudes on the other we get terrible trouble. Millions have died due to religious wars. What those that support religion in government don't realize is that once religion becomes part of politics, it can be legitimately attacked as bad politics. After all the belly-aching about being attacked, we should just tell them "you asked for it" by making it political.

John Demakowski tells us that teaching children evolution leads to godlessness. How about teaching "hellfire and brimstone" to children creates lifelong inner conflicts in believers and makes them slaves to irrational fear and guilt? Or that a good man is more apt to commit evil? Mr Demakowski erroneously claims "What we know of history seems to support that the early chapters of Genesis". Nothing exists to support such a claim. There is not a shred of geologic evidence for a world wide flood. In fact, the flood story is a knock-off of a more ancient Babylonian myth, "The Epic of Gilgamesh". Because civilizations almost always sprung up on oceans and rivers, oral traditions of floods are understandable but nothing in the geological record supports a global flood.

Atop that, the vast majority of 'Biblical archeologists' will tell you there is no archeological evidence for any Exodus or Conquest. We can find prehistoric bones and campsites all over the world but we can not find any evidence for a mass of people living in the Sinai for 40 years and then conquering Israel. The Egyptian civilization was one of the first great civilizations to invent an alphabet and were real record keepers yet there is no record of a Jewish captivity. One thing is true, though; the Semitic Hyksos Dynasty in Egypt was toppled in the 12th century BCE and these rulers and their families fled but nothing about the story resembles the Biblical one.

Contrary to what Mr Demakowski wants you to think, we can find evidence of evolution right under our noses. One of the most glaring examples of natural selection at work is the story of a moth, the Peppered Moth. The story is set in the English industrial revolution. This moth's color is controlled mostly by one single gene. Before the industrial revolution, 98-percent of these moths were quite light but some were dark. This coloring provided adequate camouflage from predators UNTIL the black soot of the industrial revolution darkened the Birch trees the moths landed on. Because of the soot, they were easily seen and eaten by birds. Guess who survived? The Dark Moths! By 1900, 95-percent of the moths were dark. The environment changed and so did the species with it. Macroevolution is simply the mass accumulation of microevolutions.

Another example of evolution is the existence of ring species. When a species is split up into different environments, they each adapt to their environment accordingly. Each species is able to interbreed with another who is close by within that ring but not with those farther away. The ones that they can't breed with have become genetically too different yet they were originally the same species until natural selection pressures occurred. Ring species and the moths are examples of the continuing process of "speciation" which is successfully explained and predicted by evolutionary sciences.

James Veverka

Tilton