When Chemists Attack

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 1^st 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:

1. No one has demonstrated that life can evolve where none existed before.
2. No one has demonstrated that a new sexual species can evolve.
3. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?

While it’s not nearly as bas as this stunning example, the Greenville News has another painful-to-read letter that shows us why we need to strengthen science education.

Education based on false hypothesis results in faulty logic and reasoning.

Evolution is unsubstantiated theory and problematic with many scientific and mathematical laws. Carbon dating doesn’t allow for appearance of age at creation. Basic scientific facts and medical cures are totally dependent on a constant state of matter. Minor change occurs but everything still brings forth after its own kind. Genetic manipulation confirms creation. Man, created in God’s image, on a small scale imitates God.

I mean, where do you start with someone like this? Carbon dating’s not used to determine the age of the Earth, for one.

Nest, I’d ask this writer why he doesn’t believe that the universe was created last Thursday, since he seems to believe that his god is a trickster who creates things “with apparent age” – presumably to fool folks who honesty try to figure out what is going on.

The writer (ironically) mentions a “constant state of matter” – which I’m guessing means that he assumes that the properties of matter (like radioactive half life) don’t change over time. Of course, he doesn’t like the conclusions that scientists draw from this about the age of the Earth.

In short, he seems confused about every bit of science he mentions.

Of course, I don’t know the writer’s age and if he is actually a product of South Carolina’s educational system – there’s not enough information in the rest of the letter to tell. But if he’s a fair sample, we have a lot of work to do.

CNN and BBC are reporting that a chemistry laboratory at the National Institutiuon of Higher Learning in Chemistry at Mulhouse has exploded, killing a professor and injuring others.

Some reported that the explosion could be heard a mile away, and there’s no word yet on what caused it.

The story so far is too sketchy for me to even speculate on what caused the explosion.

A person on the chemical education mailing list I subscribe to posted this opinion.

Apart from this accident, such chemical incidents give a negative connotation to the layman (and future students) – chemistry is dangerous.

Well, chemistry is dangerous – as are many things. That’s why chemical educators should be extremely cautious in the laboratory, especially when working with students who have little laboratory experience.