There are several viewpoints about intelligent design including those of Phillip Johnson and microbiologist Michael Behe. Johnson and Behe believe that intelligent design (God) in some manner placed life on earth over geological time frames. I recently responded to Rick Fienberg's editorial in the March, Sky and Telescope, as shown below. It will be interesting to see if they publish it. I hope this isn't too controversial for the list. Working with several geologists and drilling wells to depths of over 16,000 feet we have never seen any transitional species in well cutting to support a gradualistic theory of evolution. The facts are the fossil record does not support it. What you see are new species arising during each time period as Steven J. Gould has said "almost as if they have been planted". I will be glad to email a copy of Berlinski's article to anyone who wants it. In response to: Evolution: We Can't Sit Idly By I hate to see Rick Fienberg fall into the trap of using the old whipping boy of the 6,000-year-old earth as the only alternative to evolution. Proponents of macroevolution have been fooled many times by such frauds as the Piltdown man, Nebraska man and most recently evolution frauds committed in China and published in 1999 in National Geographic 196:98-107, November 1999. Dinosaur bones were put together with the bones of a newer species of bird and they tried to pass it off as a very important new evolutionary intermediate. The reason proponents of macroevolution are fooled so easily is they are as guilty of gullibility as are the Christian fundamentalists they criticize. The most prominent and credible opponents of macroevolution such as Phillip Johnson, David Berlinski and microbiologist Michael Behe do not have problems with geological timeframes. Some like Johnson and Behe believe that intelligent design (God) brought about life on earth over a long period of time. Others like Berlinski don't take a stand they just point out the main problems with the theory. David Berlinski in the June 1996 issue of Commentary Magazine described in his article "The Deniable Darwin" the many flaws in macroevolution that are glossed over. As he states: "The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin's theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead." This is why Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge developed the theory of punctuated evolution because as Stephen Gould observed with respect to the Cambrian explosion "it is almost as if the species were planted there". "The known fossil record," Steven Stanley observes, "fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid." As briefly described above, there are many problems with macroevolution and it ought to be taught as a theory not fact. It has no predictive power like Einstein's theories, it is just a flawed historical hypothesis. Clear Skies Don J. Colton