What might have been
Has anyone ever considered what might have happened to Indian tribes and this country if they would have won the wars against the U.S. Army in the late 1800s?
I firmly believe that if the Midwestern tribes would have defeated and pushed the U.S. military back across the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C., none of us would exist today.
They had no development of future inventions, innovations or advancement of modern warfare or even have the technology to produce a metal arrowhead, let alone gunpowder or a gun.
Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler would have come across the U.S. from Europe and met the Japanese Imperial Army in the middle of Kansas. Both of these foreign invaders would have met little or no resistance from the Native American tribes, thus would have conquered and taken the United States in less than a week and marched all survivors off to concentration camps and the ovens for total extermination.
So in essence, the U.S. Army, by defeating the American Indian, actually saved them and their magnificent culture for future generations of all Americans to enjoy and study.
John Webb
Reubens
Waiting for the facts
Regarding Cindi Mader’s Dec. 8 Tribune column: Mader says she’ll produce facts that disprove evolution. That would be nice if she did so; instead she substitutes the opinions of others.
She states David Berlinski claims “thousands of life forms appear at once.” No evolution biologist asserts this. In our long history there have been periods of rapid appearance of new species and equally rapid disappearance, but even these episodes take hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. The dinosaurs took some 30,000 years to disappear.
She asserts that science is disproving evolution. This will come as a surprise to doctors who are battling against various drug-resistant bacteria. It’s certainly the case that evolution in more complex life forms happens over a time span longer than us, but we can see it in action in hospital, libraries and elsewhere.
The fact that we don’t know how the big bang happened doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Furthermore, she conflates the big bang with evolution. The big bang is believed to have happened roughly 14 billion years ago. Earth itself only coalesced out of rocks and dust some 4 billion years ago, and life is believed not to have appeared for another billion of so years.
She recommends academics for further reading, and I plan to do so. She ends with, “My conclusion: Evolution does not explain the origin of life ... .” She is entitled to her opinion, but, based on what she wrote, it isn’t supported by any actual evidence ... .
George Grenley
Lewiston
