I would like to congratulate Chris Major on his editorial rebuttal of my earlier letter. He is correct in his observation that evolution is in essence based on a religious belief rather than on scientific facts. I was actually trying to illustrate this truth using a tongue-in-cheek methodology. I believe that all significant points of the evolutionary theory require the same leap of faith to which I referred, whether it is the appearance of an eye, the production of any cellular components from inorganic matter, or the change from one family of species to another.

It is interesting to me that the scientific community can spend upward of $6.4 billion (in American dollars) to build the Hadron Collider for scientific research in particle physics, yet we see no similar facility for evolutionary experimentation. Why not spend the money to develop a laboratory dedicated to the science of producing life from inorganic building blocks? It should be much easier for scientists to produce life, than for time and chance, since we have the advantage of reverse engineering.

The University of Montana has state-of-the-art equipment (at least they did 15 years ago when I attended) capable of producing proteins. What our cells do in seconds, they were able to reproduce in 24 hours with approximately 90 percent accuracy for very short proteins (about 100 amino acids long). Proteins, it turns out, are hard to reproduce, requiring protecting one end and activating the other. Impossible to do without sophisticated equipment. Evolutionists, show us an evolved protein.

ALLEN ORTMANN

Coeur d’Alene