Editor:

Mr. Marshall Berman in his 3/5/97 letter does his best to evade the specific scientific challenges I raised in my 2/27/97 letter -- issues that are at the very heart and core of the molecules-to-man evolution hypothesis. To review, I asked him to present to the Monitor readership "the essence of how biogenesis could possibly occur, or describe by what process a new gene necessary for genuine macroevolution can arise, or elucidate what conceivable laws of chemistry or physics can generate coded language." Mr. Berman supplied a long list of references that discuss and defend evolution, but which of them deals with any of these crucial issues and provides even a hint of an answer? Not one!

Why cannot Mr. Berman be honest and admit that he himself has no answer and that no evolutionist has any scientifically sustainable answer. Again I assert, and Mr. Berman's lack of response to my challenges supports this assertion, that evolutionists in claiming evolution is science or fact, when in reality they cannot provide answers for these most obvious and basic questions, are deceiving one another as well as the public and discrediting the scientific enterprise.

Let me again mention the recent book by Michael Behe, "Darwin's Black Box", in which Behe, a biochemist, surveyed every paper ever published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution during its 25 year history. He found that "none of the papers published in JME over the entire course of its life as a journal has ever proposed a detailed model by which a complex biochemical system might have been produced in a gradual, step-by-step, Darwinian fashion" (p. 176).

Behe searched also the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Of approximately 20,000 papers published between 1984 and 1994, about 400 were concerned with molecular evolution. How many elucidated a mechanism for molecular evolution? Behe found "no papers were published in PNAS that proposed detailed routes by which complex biochemical structures might have developed ... sequences upon sequences, but no explanations" (p. 178). Behe also reviewed all the major biochemistry textbooks over the last several decades with the same conclusion -- not even an attempt to outline a mechanism for molecular evolution.

Behe concludes that chapter as follows: "'Publish or perish' is a proverb that academicians take seriously. If you do not publish your work for the rest of the community to evaluate, then you have no business in academia... But the saying can be applied to theories as well. If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished. Despite comparing sequences and mathematical modeling, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be. In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish."

Mr. Berman seems astounded by the possibility that delusion on such a scale within the scientific community could exist. But evolution is more than a scientific hypothesis. It carries deep religious ramifications. For many it is religion. Richard Dawkins candidly admits in his book "The Blind Watchmaker" that evolution allows him to be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist." So what we have going on is a powerful religious idea mixing with the scientific enterprise. Many, including Mr. Berman it seems, have confused the two and concluded falsely they are one and the same.

John Baumgardner