To the editor:

In Tuesday’s Journal-World, we saw headlines about a few Kansas University scientists signing an anti-evolution petition. This journalistic emphasis on fringe views makes it appear very important. Otherwise, who would notice? It’s not like people who know the subject are teaching this in university classes. The people involved could have gotten their medical degrees without ever having a class on evolution, except as a small part of freshman-level biology.

The list as a whole contains hundreds of signers (most work in areas that have no required knowledge of evolution). But how many Steves do they have?

Why ask such a question? A few years ago, the National Center for Science Education tired of creationists producing these lists (as if it proved anything). So they launched a drive, which I was happy to help, to get scientists named Steve to sign a statement supportive of evolution. Since most scientists do support evolution we obviously couldn’t get a list of all of them. OK, so let’s compare Steves. I was able to find four on the list you publicized. The official Steve-O-Meter is at 703. So, we can roughly estimate that the need to question evolution (more than we question everything in science) is agreed to by less than 1 percent of scientists. Of course, it is evidence, not lists, that proves things in science, but this gives an idea of how scientists view the evidence.

Was this really headline news? Are journalists contributing strongly to our country’s science literacy problem?

Adrian Melott,

Lawrence