In the beginning, Lois DeFleur created the Southern Tier, the mighty Susquehanna River and Binghamton University (ugly Engineering Building and all). And it was without form and covered by darkness, and then Lois said, “Let there be Pipe Dream!” And there was light.

And on the sixth day Lois had a headache, and then she sneezed, and from her nose poured newsprint, which fell onto the blank paper she was conveniently holding, and then she coughed out a few headlines and photos, and Pipe Dream, as you know it today, was born.

Yet the mere mortals of Pipe Dream felt something was missing, and in her infinite wisdom Lois said, “Ah, yes, drunken debauchery.” Then She took a piece of Pipe Dream’s already partially destroyed liver, and from that organ Weekend Warriors was created, and Pipe Dream was complete.

Or, is it more likely a group of hardworking students got together in 1946 because they felt they could help good old Triple Cities College (BU, before it evolved) disseminate important information among the student body, and has since grown and changed to meet the needs of the University and its students?

As entertaining as Pipe Dream’s creation story is, we’re pretty sure you were more inclined to believe that we evolved over the years into our current form — not that we sprung fully formed from the president’s head into the rag we are today.

So this little exercise brings us to our point: the importance of evolutionary studies in colleges, and even more importantly, the funding to make these studies possible.

With the federal government’s failure to include evolutionary studies on the list of approved majors for Smart Grants (see Page 5), many students who rely on these grants may not have the chance to explore programs on evolution.

Now, for a little game of cause and effect. Students’ inability to obtain a grant while concentrating on the subject of evolution will lead to a lack of interest in such studies, which will in turn lead to the decline of these programs. You don’t need an economics degree to figure out that when the demand goes down, the supply will follow.

Not to mention: Does anyone else find it a little unsettling that the federal government either forgot to include a very important scientific field on its acceptable major list, or (the more likely story if you ask us), purposely omitted evolutionary studies for political reasons and came up with a barely believable cover story (a practice that we in the real world call “lying”)?

It’s no secret that the Bush administration doesn’t seem to respect the separation of church and state very much. But it’s a big problem when a president’s personal religious views start influencing the research abilities and study of an important scientific field. While everyone’s entitled to his or her own views, religious or otherwise, evolution is a universally accepted scientific theory, and we doubt that the members of the scientific and academic communities will stand by and allow this injustice to go without a fight.

And students don’t have to either. There are ways to affect our elected officials and the decisions they make, like letter-writing campaigns and voting appropriately on Election Day.

So if you don’t agree with the government’s decision, take action and let them know. After all, it might be hot to dress as Adam and Eve on Halloween (those fig leaves leave little to the imagination), but is that really what you want to be learning about in your college science class?