Letters to the Editor
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Liberal Bias: 'Direct Evolution'?
After reading this article, I'm afraid I have to say your bias is showing. Your source--a so-called 'expert'--claims that nature hasn't yet evolved a way to handle the toxins that humans have released into the system over the past 150 years, since most of these toxins are new or never reached such concentrations before. This implies that natural organisms develop evolutionarily as random mutations make them more or less able to deal with environmental pressures. Heck, your researcher even comes out and says it: he and his lab see their work as a form of "direct evolution"!
Would you call a mousetrap an example of evolution, given that its springs are irreducibly complicated? I mean, you can't get a mousetrap to work without having all the parts there! Get it? Just like a mechanical object needs all of its parts to eat toxic sludge, so too biological things can't eat sludge unless there's an Intelligent Designer (See the book, "On People and Pandas," if you need help grasping this.)
Rather than using evolutionary science to create methods of combatting ecological peril, I recommend we work from a premise that is as plain as the nose on your face: bacteria, sludge eating and otherwise, were either created by God as defined by a certain subsect of 20th century American Evangelical Christianity (aka 'God'), or by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Answer that riddle, and you'll be doing some real reporting!
Your piece shows how disconnected modern science has become from the ideas of the Dover School Board!
John
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jwr_12 -- you're joking, right?
Your comment on intelligent design: That's sarcasm, yes?
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Yikes!!
Wow! Those are some very involved concepts. I don't know if you are doing a good thing or not either. I can understand your friends at Greenpeace. It would be brilliant if we could actually implement some real enviromental change so that we didn't have to run the risk of altering an enzyme or some bacteria that has far reaching consequences that we can not even speculate about. It is distrurbing that we still have this false sense of being able to use some new science to bail us out of irresponsible enviromental behavior and policies.
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Practical solutions to practical problems
hotonetuc611-
Your comment exemplifies everything that is wrong with the environmental movement. The environment is a physical system and like any other is open to human understanding. Humans are not perfect, nor is our knowledge, we should proceed with caution as unintended consequences are likely. However the fact remains that the solutions to our current environmental problems will come from where they have always come from, engineers attempting to make things better cheaper and more efficient, not ideologues telling us to give up the advances technology has already wrought.