Via Pharyngula and Unscrewing the Inscrutable, Meet Tom Ritter, a high school chemistry and physics teacher who seems to be a little out of his element. As a chemistry teacher myself (though at a two-year college), it bothers me to see a colleague become a fountain of stupidity. (I would prefer that chemistry teachers stick with ammonia fountains instead.)
What’s Tom going on abiout? Well, evolution, of course! He doesn’t like it. He and the Constitution Party of Pennsylvania want to have a debate, because he doesn’t think that evolution is “true science”.
It’s more likely that the (fringe) Constitution Party merely wants some publicity in the local newspapers, but that’s another issue. It might also be possible that this whole article is close enough to April 1st to be a parody, but I’ll pretend for the moment that Tom and the Constitution Party are serious.
Here are Tom’s problems with evolution:
- No one has demonstrated that life can evolve where none existed before.
- No one has demonstrated that a new sexual species can evolve.
- Evolution theorizes the human brain evolved from lower forms of life. Over 50 years into the age of computers, we can build machines that can crunch numbers far better and faster than humans, recognize and use language and tools, and beat us in chess. Yet science has yet to build even a rudimentary computer than can contemplate its own existence, the hallmark of the human brain.
- Evolution, as most people who have ready anything at all on the subject would know, describes what happens after we have something resembling life – i.e. things that can reproduce and pass on characteristics to their offspring. Tom’s problem seems to be abiogenesis, which no scientist is going to argue has been completely worked out.
- This one I’ll leave to a biologist, but I’d recommend a search for speciation on PubMed. Is Tom’s argument the new creationist version of “No new species have been observed”? Gotta love those moving creationist goalposts.
- So we don’t understand all the details about how the brain works. So what? In what way is that a failure of evolutionary theory? I’ll bet that Tom can’t tabulate for me either manually or with his chess-playing computer the momentum and position of every electron in all the atoms of a gallon of gasoline. Does that mean that he cannot possibly tell me how an internal combustion engine works?
With every one of these criticisms, Tom seems to be telling us that since biologists don’t know everything, they can’t know anything. That’s a dangerous position to take if you’re a chemistry or physics teacher. Does this guy teach atomic theory? Valence bond and molecular orbital theory? Kinetic theory of gases? Classical mechanics? The gas laws?
Further on down, Tom says something else that’s not really related to science, but is pretty silly anyway.
God with an upper case G is the Being recognized by Christians, Muslims, Jews and many others to possess remarkably similar traits, among them the ability to create.
Tom, you just try to tell some of these folks that they worship the same “Being” as the Christian God. I don’t think they would buy it.
Evolution may be right, at least in parts. But it is not treated as science and materialism is a faulty theory to rely upon.
Tom, in a footnote, defines materialism as “the theory that everything can be explained by things that can be detected and measured”.
Tom, do you know that’s how science works – by investigating things that have effects that can be tested and measured? Do you know that evolutionary theory is based on things that can be tested and measured, just like all the other scientific theories? If you don’t know this, then how the heck can you manage to teach science in the first place? Or do you just reject the science if it tells you something that you are unprepared to hear?