To the editor:

I choked with laughter at Wednesday’s front page article about Kansas University’s new course offering in intelligent design. Bravo for Professor Mirecki and the department of religious studies!

I found Mr. Calvert’s quote that Mirecki’s “effort will go down in history as one of the laughingstocks of the century,” the funniest thing of all. Does he not understand that it is he and the Kansas Board of Education who are the laughingstocks, and we don’t have to wait for history? Can he actually be unaware that he and his friends have made Kansas the butt of jokes the world over? I shudder to think how historians will portray this embarrassing page in Kansas history.

It is inconceivable to me how reasonably intelligent (presumably) and well-educated Homo sapiens can so confuse science with conjecture. Have they never taken college biology? Anthropology? Archaeology? Zoology? Botany? Genetics? Have they not heard of carbon dating, tree rings or other scientific methods of dating ancient materials – materials far older than 6,000 years?

Mr. Calvert’s comments clearly illustrated the intelligent design movement’s muddy thinking and lack of understanding of academia as well as science and scientific method. If Mr. Calvert is so certain of his theory and truly believes that Professor Mirecki is ill-suited to teach such a class (as he implied in the article), why doesn’t he offer to teach or at least come as a guest lecturer? That would seem to be a better use of his time and energy than working so hard to discredit the course.

Chris Lane,

Lawrence