By Letter to the Editor on March 26, 2017.

A quick answer to J. Cameron Frasers question March 5: much as Jewish activists must, Christians, too, should defend each other. When John P. Nightingale attacks Tony Ouwerkerks Christian faith as an outdated line of thinking (March 2), he substitutes a worldview that doesnt exactly handle scrutiny.

Bacteria gain drug resistance through impaired genetic information, not by structuring new information in defence. The whale fossil, Pakicetus inachus, proved entirely land-based, and was declared a whale only from skull fragments. The question Was Darwin Wrong? might be better, Would Darwin have believed evolution possible, knowing what we now know about embryology, morphology, paleontology and more? Its a worthy question. The answer tells us whether Darwinism merits a part to play in the sciences.

Nightingale still has sarcasm: Science 101, right? Well, lets look.

If Trappist-1 has any luminosity increase, its planets would suffer heat spikes. That close in, the worlds are tidally locked, unable to rotate for a day/night cycle. Do they have atmospheres dense enough to retain surface liquids? Do they have magnetic fields strong enough to repel their suns radiation? Solar flares could sear away their atmospheres, and Trappists mere proximity would degrade them anyway our own suns depleted the atmosphere of Mars, which is much more distant. What foothold for life is possible around Trappist-1?

Mass spectrometrys isolated tissue elements like collagen fibres and red blood cell remnants in the fossilized bones of six different dinosaurs revolutionary findings, because tissue cant last for tens of millions of years. Paleochronology adds, unexpectedly, that every dinosaur fossil tested for carbon-14 offers an age of 22,000 to 41,000 years suggesting these dinosaurs might have been more recent, perhaps even fulfilling the human desire to see one.

Flat Earth is Nightingales ad hominem for home-schoolers, since no one in Christendom seriously doubts that the Earth is spherical. Resorting to such a projection sums up Nightingales apparent motivation: to lash out at Mr. Ouwerkerk for not agreeing with him.

A century before Darwin, Carl Linnaeus catalogued all known living things, classifying them in Latin binomial (e.g., Systema Naturae) which more helpfully arranged the categories of living things. Darwin, by contrast, admitted that he was supposing, with his tree of life schematic, the ancestries of known life forms. Today, Darwinism stays in force mainly through the vehemence of its true believers, who impose it on all new discoveries and insistently quell dissent.

Tom Yeoman

Lethbridge

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