To the Editor:

The April 3 “Let science, exploration prevail in the classroom” editorial stated: “The topics of evolution and climate change are creating division.” Squelch truth; create division.

Evolution: As a subscriber to fanatically pro-evolution magazines, I always find it amazing that there still is no plausible explanation on how simple dead chemicals combined and formed the simple one-cell bacteria. What’s the problem? It’s just a dumb little bacteria like the ones residing in our gut.

Machines throughout the cell perform over a thousand operations at any one time. There are machines that make parts for other machines; machines that assemble machines and then check for errors; a shipping and receiving department that checks material going in and out; little trucks running all over the place hauling stuff for internal factory use and stuff going outside; gatekeepers; garbage-handlers; fuel manufacturing machines; highway builders for the trucks; a communications network that monitors conditions inside and outside of the cell, and communicates with internal departments and other cells.

Some are extremely complicated. For instance:?ATP synthase, which produces the chemical energy packets for other machines in the cell. It has 40,000 parts (atoms), all of which have to be in the right place, for proper operation. And all the instructions on how to do this are written on a master blueprint – DNA molecule.

This bustling city, with its central library of construction and maintenance information, arose from a pile of dead chemicals?

Obviously, all living things were designed, and then given a toolbox with just the right amount of hardware and software to make adjustments to their “systems structure” in response to pressures from the surrounding environment, but not to “evolve” into some new species that would then produce a motley mix of transitional forms, which we should see happening today but do not.

Climate change: Man’s carbon dioxide contribution still has no effect on climate. It’s a hoax. Picture all the gases in the atmosphere as a hundred story building; the carbon dioxide gas made by man amounts to the thickness of the linoleum on the first floor. There simply is not enough heat carrying capacity in our carbon dioxide to change anything.

At a February AAAS conference in San Jose, geo-engineering scientists said we may have to look at ways of blocking the sun’s rays to cool the planet. And that: “… even if we completely stopped carbon dioxide emissions today, the earth will continue warming over the next several decades.” One proposal is to waft sea salt particles into low clouds off the California coast to deflect sunlight. Another is studying the cooling effect of the exhaust haze given off by tens of thousands of ocean cargo ships, some of which burn up to 16 tons of heavy oil per hour and generate more than 4,000 tons of sulfur dioxide pollution per year.

Phil Drietz

Delhi