The most important information a culture has is its creation story because from that a culture derives its morality and law.

That's why it's disappointing to read George Kauffman assert last week in The Bee that everyone should accept Darwin's "creation" story because a Quaker, physicist congressman had a House Resolution passed saying that we should!

Professor Kauffman, a man devoted to science, must know that House Resolutions are decorative statements, done to enhance politicians' résumés. I hope that we could all agree that if members of Congress had to pay the cost to produce such trivia, none would exist.

The truth is that for the last 150 years, slightly below the public's perception, Darwin's theory has been mired in controversy, challenged by scientists of every stripe. Here's why: Animals and plants appear in the fossil record fully formed and remain unchanged through millions of years. No knowledgeable individual denies this.

Over millions of generations of laboratory testing, fruit flies, as one example, when subjected to genetic changes have not changed into anything but mutated, crippled fruit flies.

So also much the same thing happened with the famous "Galapagos finches" whose average beak size became bigger when the conditions there made it harder to find food due to bad weather. Then when food became more plentiful, the beak size of those finches that survived returned to normal. Thus the finches changed a little, adapted, while remaining fundamentally unchanged. In this way, nature moves back and forth, in cycles, rather than in a permanent upward climb or downward slide.

Such changes as occurred with these finches are sometimes referred to as "evolution in action." But these infinitesimal changes are not "evolution" in the way that Darwin meant the word. For he meant to explain how nature by itself could make something new, how one animal or plant over long periods of time could transform itself into something quite different, like a trout changing into a tiger, or a bacterium into a whale.

The 19th century German monk, Gregor Mendel, discoverer of what are now called genes, was opposed to Darwin's progressive idea of "continuous variation" in nature. That is, Darwin wrongly thought that inheritance involved mixing traits, rather like mixing different paints. In contrast, Mendel found that inheriting traits involved something like mixing marbles, discrete characteristics like eye and hair color.

DNA studies have confirmed the traditional relationships and "genetic distances" between different plants and animals which have always existed as observed by humans over thousands of years.

Resistance to pesticides and antibiotics does not mean that the insects and bacteria who survive these threats have "evolved." Quite the contrary. Those organisms "resist" the antibiotic or pesticide poisoning merely because of some feature of their cellular structure that does not bind with the poison.

In 19th century Europe, many great advances and inventions were made. But some thinkers misapplied this technical genius in order to change society, thereby attempting to invent a heaven here on earth, a desire that still persists. It was thought that this "religion of progress" would replace Judeo-Christianity. This new system required a new creation story so it latched on to Darwin's explanation for life, due less to its scientific credibility and more because of circumstances.

Subsequently the tactic was to attack individuals who doubted Darwin by calling them "creationists" -- meaning "crackpots." As one historian writes, the Darwinists' attacks "have been in almost direct proportion to the shortcomings of the theory." Does this explain why congressional resolutions need to be relied on now to prop up Darwin?