To the editor:

The Hall Center for the Humanities and the Biodiversity Institute are sponsoring presentations by Michael Behe, proponent of intelligent design theory, as part of their “Difficult Dialogues” series. Thus, Kansas University is providing Behe a platform to espouse his discredited pseudoscientific ideas that engender them with an air of respectability and credibility that they do not deserve.

The idea that there can be a dialogue between scientists at KU and Behe, or any advocate of intelligent design, is worse than a sham; it is a cynical farce. It is cynical because the number of professors appointed to the department of ecology and evolutionary biology who are genuinely interested in a scientific dialogue with Behe is zero. L. Frank Baum’s scarecrow is a beloved Kansas icon, but evolutionary biologists have never needed to make an argument against a straw man as a means to inform the public.

John Morris is a faculty member at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). Morris firmly believes and asserts the Earth is merely a few thousand years old. I am confident that the department of geology will not sponsor a farcical public dialogue about the age of the Earth with Morris. Hopefully, the Biodiversity Institute will not lure Duane T. Gish out of retirement from ICR for a dialogue about his crackpot anti-evolutionary theories that are no less discredited than intelligent design and irreducible complexity.

Walter Dimmick,

Lawrence