Theories, lies pave way for evolution debate
It is good that the "Science" of Margaret Sanger is presented for all to see. However, disinformation and loose Hegelian logic is embedded in Cecil Kelly's letter to the editor so that it begs our response.
No less an evolutionist than Stephen Jay Gould has said of the late 1800s theory of Ernst Haeckel (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), "...evolutionary racism, Haeckel's call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a 'just' state, his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others... All contributed to the rise of Nazism." ("Ontogeny and Phylogeny," p. 78)
While I note Haeckel's falsified drawings of the embryo are in high school textbooks, they are a bold lie, as is Kelly's letter. The religious doctrine of common descent of man falls flat before the new work "Darwin's Doubt" by Stephen C. Meyer, a Cambridge Ph.D., Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle (2013). Meyer points out that of the 26 body types (Phyla) that leave a fossil record, 20 appear in one short period in history called the Cambrian explosion. And they suddenly appear without precursors, meaning the evidence of a family tree of worms to man doesn't exist.
The human genome's 3 billion character instruction set is too small to completely develop a human. The additional "epigenetic information" needed to assemble the beating child's heart at 18 weeks is massive and we don't know where those "smarts" come from, let alone the complete information for the development of the human brain.
The crudeness of Mr. Kelly's justification to steal body parts from a living, breathing child in the womb is outdated misinformation of the worst kind. When our teachers taught us that we are "grown up worms" and we believed it we can now look back on that false instruction and understand devolution in our society today.
Kelly's teaching misses the mark greatly. If faculty fail to teach this evolution disinformation they lose their jobs. This spreads Sanger's religion for now. Shouldn't we have a little more rigor in this argument? We are talking about ripping babies apart to market their body parts for heaven sake! When my students asked me "What is the frequency of beneficial mutations?" I searched and found nothing but an empty database for the answer. Evolution is in trouble, big trouble. Biology doesn't have an acceptable theory of everything any more than the Physics Department down the hall.
Charles Carter, Ph.D., is a Hayden resident.