Science relies on what is plausible

To the editor:

I keep waiting for someone from academia to provide some insight for the evolution-creation controversy, but none seems to be forthcoming. My training was mostly in chemistry, but I took some undergraduate courses such as comparative anatomy and genetics.

You see comments like, "The theory of evolution has not been proven," so I believe the main problem lies in the definitions.

Evolution is a framework or frame of reference that accommodates the information we get from biological sciences. It is not a fact in itself or some harebrained idea that tries to compete with the poetic version of life as given in the Bible, which is not a science textbook.

Every discovery in biology, such as DNA, fits into this construct of evolution. If the data would not fit into this picture of life, we would have discarded the notion a hundred years ago and worked on a different hypothesis to explain the relationship of living species.

A parallel example might be the area of thermodynamics in science. It tries to explain how heat and other forms of energy are related to entropy in the universe but also in limited systems such as a car engine. We don't say these ideas cannot be proven. We say no exceptions to this concept have yet been found, so we accept it as correct. We might have to change the whole picture as we study the expanding universe and black holes, but for now it seems to be plausible.

HARLAN E. FIEHLER, Cape Girardeau