Kansas Vote on Teaching Evolution

What irony that the Kansas Board of Education’s denial that evolution is a scientific fact (Aug. 12) comes with a farmer as a spokesman. Board member Scott Hill must be the most voluntarily ignorant farmer on the face of the Earth, because farms are the one place where everyday evidence about the fact (not theory) of evolution is painfully obvious.

The tenets of evolution are preeminently obvious in and essential to the breeding of new crop varieties and livestock breeds. And if any farmer is in denial about the fact of insect resistance to pesticides, his livelihood is at stake. Insect resistance is the evolutionary method by which crop pests can modify entire populations and species, making them resistant to chemicals through genetic change. That’s evolution in a nutshell, obvious to any farmer who lives according to the evidence around him rather than according to some archaic ideology that puts him in a state of medieval denial. I guess that state is now called Kansas.

DONNIE DALE

Hollywood

* Now that the Kansas Board of Education has dealt with evolution, will they soon be reviewing the flat-Earth controversy?

TIMOTHY R. RYAN

Capistrano Beach

* Although Pope John Paul II and his church accept evolution as a scientific fact while continuing to believe in God, the Kansas Board of Education believes evolution is dangerous to students’ faith.

JOHN MAYS

Malibu

* Re “Faith and Fact Can Coexist,” editorial, Aug. 13: Modern dogma dictates that humans, spiders and seaweed have a common ancestor. The state must teach this unquestionable dogma to our children so that society does not move “backward toward ignorance and obscurantism.” Today is not unlike 500 years ago when the great minds claimed that the Earth was the center of the universe: a “fact” beyond question to those who bothered to inquire; that must be taught to the children.

RANDALL COLLINS

Redondo Beach

* Toto, I don’t think we’re in a state of higher learning anymore!

DREW SCHRIEFER

CHERYL SCHRIEFER

Costa Mesa