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Chick Tract Trashing: Big Daddy Chris Selmek February 16, 2006 |
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You’re father was a monkey (really).
Regardless of what Chick would like you to believe, genuine science does not blindly accept what everybody else thinks. Referring to people like me as evolutionists is a tad grating, as though we were simply another religion, but being as it is technically correct, I suppose I can’t complain too much. But I have to admit, he has occasionally come out with arguments that sound almost logical. I realize, as Chick does, that if there is even one example that evolution is impossible, it negates the whole thing. A couple have come damn close to making me switch teams (no, not those teams), believe it or not. A recent conundrum came from Chick’s new main page, from the article “little bugs evolutionists would like to forget." It’s about the bombardier beetle, which shoots blazing hot gas out its butt, kind of like Chris. Chick claims this beetle mixes two chemicals plus some kind of chemical inhibitor to stop it from exploding inside the beetle, then adds an anti-inhibitor when it decides it wants to fart. Fascinating. Also wrong. The truth is that the chemicals do not actually explode when combined. You can check it out yourself by buying hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide and mixing them together to see if they do not explode. The inhibitor and anti-inhibitor he mentioned don’t exist, because they aren’t needed. The bug drives off predators via natural selection, as you probably expected. I draw a lot of my information from www.talk-origins.org, a very good site that gives me a warm fuzzy because literally every question creationists can come up with has a response. Since Talk-Origins itself can be hard to understand without, at minimum, four master’s degrees, I might also recommend www.evowiki.org, an affiliated site that puts all the questions and answers in neat little bullet points. I should also mention that these explanations cause me to sound like a prude (as you know if you sat through the beetle thing). Take heart that half the time I don’t really know what I’m talking about either. Which brings me to my main, real point, this far down the page after you’ve already lost interest, that I want to systematically debunk the entire Big Daddy? Chick tract using the two sites listed above. A monumental task, you say? Maybe. I can do no more than begin at the beginning. I might also point out that the most blatantly stupid part of this tract comes in the very first panel, which lays out the premise for the entire thing. Presumably, this is a biology professor, although the tract never specifically says so, because otherwise I’m not sure why he would be bringing up evolution in the first place. You’ll also notice the nice picture of a monkey behind him with the title “Our Father.” This illustrates the height of Chick’s insanity, that he has become so insane he sees everyone as thinking exactly the way he does. If you don’t worship Jesus, well then, you must worship something. That’s just the way things are. So what do “evolutionists” worship? A monkey? Why not? I’m also tempted to make a point about professionalism, but I’m not sure if I’m really able to, being as I haven’t spend much time in a classroom. Granted, this professor pisses me off, but I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s impossible. First, he yells at someone for answering his question. I’m not really sure why he does this, but he does, on page three. On page four, he decided, no, rather than remove the troublesome student from the class for disagreeing with him, he’s just going to publicly disrespect him. On page five, he flies off the handle yet again, saying that it’s illegal to mention the Bible in school (a fact Chick is forced to admit is untrue). All the while, rivers of sweat are pouring off his face as though he wanted to keep the temperature in the classroom up so everything was as hellish as possible. Okay, so this is not a really loveable guy. Even so, you would expect a certain amount of competence from a college biology professor, even if he is a bad teacher. Sadly, it is not until the seventh page that he tries to make an actual point, rather than simply painting evolutionists as rude, institutional monsters that have no better reason for their belief than because someone told them so (if you’ll take a moment, you’ll see that this argument, as well, can be turned around). Chick claims there are six basic concepts of evolution: cosmic, chemical, planetary, organic, macro and micro. I’m prepared to take his word for it, though when I Googled it and came up with this, I couldn’t find any reference to six tenants of evolution that weren’t directly related to creationists trying to debunk it. It seems to make sense, though, so we’ll assume it’s true. He next claims that only the last one has actually been observed. This is absolutely FALSE (by the way, I’m going to keep throwing reference websites at you. This is just so you don’t think I’m lying.) My findings: 6) Micro: I’m going to ignore micro because the question is moot. Suffice to say, it is observed all the time. 5) Macro: There is no macro, just micro-evolution over the course of a million years. Chick hasn’t been around long enough to observe it. 4) Organic: Believe it or not, this has been proven! In 1952, Stanley L. Miller conducted an experiment where he simulated the conditions at the beginning of the earth, when there was nothing but rocks, gas and electrical storms. I was a bit disturbed myself to find out that something actually crawled out, nevertheless, amino acids, the building blocks of life, actually started to build up on the inside of the bottle even though there was no organic material present in it to start with. Man has actually created life! I’m prepared for you not to believe me, so here. 3) Planetary: I’m going to refrain from making another Chris Zasada joke because it’s too tempting. I will say, however, that with current satellite technology, we actually can observe planets and stars beginning to form (though the process still takes a couple centuries, so don’t expect to be wowed). I cite one example 2) Chemical: I can hardly bare to dignify this with a response. In any periodic table (like this one), 25 of the elements are synthetic. Meaning they were created by adding protons and neutrons to pre-existing elements. If science can do this, it stands to reason they have already synthesized one element into another. I realize this explanation is boring, but pretending you don’t understand it won’t make it stop being true. 1) Cosmic: Score one for Chick. No one was around at the beginning of time to see time begin. I’ve been reading some mighty interesting theories that I hope will advance in my lifetime, but presumably it has only happened the one time. On the other hand, no one saw God create the universe, either. I can’t believe I just proved evolution in one page of text. Nevertheless, there it is. That ought to have shattered Chick’s “little belief” right there. You can stop reading now if you want, because the rest of this is bound to be nothing but insults. Damn. Hell. Shit. Poo-poo. Still there? Too bad, because on pages eleven and twelve, Chick throws a table at you that is really just dishonest, even for him. Basically what he has is the entire chain of human history on a wall poster, with a tiny claim beneath every example saying how it isn’t real. If you really want to hear it, this is an example of good science. Chick actually did uncover a few pieces of fossil evidence that were disproved, which means that science continually corrects its mistakes. This in stark contrast to some creationist claims that are still being used even after they stop being realistic. I don’t want to go through the whole list. You can accuse me of being lazy if you want, or you can just look it up yourself. This is perhaps the best website out there for convincing you of evolution, so I encourage you to explore it is you have the interest and the extra time. In the next panel, the professor admits to himself the kid is killing him with overwhelming evidence. Bizarre, then, that I just completely discredited him. If I am indeed smarter than this professor, I think that’s reason enough for the school board to fire him at the end. Maybe somebody who has actually spent some time on a college campus can tell me that professors really are this dumb. Or maybe I’m just really smart. It is also in this panel the professor confesses he dates layers of soil by what kinds of fossils are in them, and they date fossils by what layer of soil they are in. Everybody in the class can see how utterly ridiculous this is. Ha ha! We scientists are so stupid! Not really. Layers of soil are dated by which ones are on top of others. Some fossils are found exclusively in one layer of soil, which are then referred to as index fossils to help pinpoint what’s what. Even then, radiocarbon-dating backs up anything the strata column suggests (which was being used as good science long before the theory of evolution, I might add.) The specific case of a whale being found buried vertically that the tract mentions is not true either. The whale was buried about 70 degrees off horizontal, but was still in the same rock layer. I don’t think Chick even knows what he’s talking about. He next says Earnst Haeckel falsified his drawings of human embryos with gill slits. I have several responses to this: 1) I’d like you to name a single science book that still credits embryos with having gills. 2) He didn’t make up the drawings. He emphasized a few points he was interested in and de-emphasized a few that were of no consequence. The fact there is any fuss over it at all proves science is self-correcting. 3) The discovery that embryos have something that looks like gills was made several centuries before Darwin and has absolutely nothing to do with evolutionary theory So there, pooty-head! The final “proof” offered by Chick is that vestigial organs in humans and whales are not absolutely functionless, and that they serve as the anchor point for important muscle groups. I’m going to have to go to the book on this one because I don’t absolutely understand the explanation: 1. The mere existence of vestigial organs might not be strong evidence for common descent, but because vestigial organs are a subset of homologues, common descent suggests that they should form a specific pattern. Unsurprisingly, this pattern is observed to actually exist. Hence, vestigial organs do provide evidence for large scale evolution. Creationists are generally forced to explain the pattern of vestiges in an ad hoc manner. As the number of vestiges that fits the evolutionary pattern increases, these ad hoc explanations become weaker, and common descent becomes stronger. 2. Darwin knew all about decay of vestigial organs. If an organ is no longer useful, then the organisms with the smallest examples have to give it less oxygen, nutrients, etc. These "savings" can be diverted to more useful areas, increasing the organism's fitness and hence chance of reproductive success. After that, the arguments falter. Actually, that’s unfair. Chick has just thrown everything he has at evolution, and it’s still pretty weak. But what can you expect? It’s Chick. He does throw something at us about particle physics that has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. I asked my high school chemistry teacher the same question once, and he basically said you have to have more than a high school education to understand it. Look it up yourself if you’re interested. It does answer one question, though. Apparently, atomic theory is just as evil and satanic as evolutionary theory. Doubtless we will soon learn about the evils of the theory of relativity and germ theory, not to mention the theory of plate tectonics. In case you didn’t know, these are all widely accepted conclusions as well, which have contributed to many more scientific and technological advances than the Bible. I’m surprised the Christians haven’t come out at science as a whole. But we must get back to our naughty professor, who has now completely lost control of his class to the super-Christian. I haven’t spent much time in a college classroom. Still, I’d like to think there was some sort of a requirement for becoming a professor. We’ve already established he’s not a very nice guy, but I’ve heard enough people complain of mean college instructors to know that much doesn’t matter. Still, to have gotten that far without even a basic knowledge of his own subject area speaks very badly for teachers as a whole. And, as you’ll notice, I just did all his work for him. Guess that means I’m smarter than he is. The last page is supposed to be ironic. Notice that all his colleagues are saying the exact same things to him that he said to the Christian at the beginning. One wonders if the scientist will in turn sway the entire scientific community as the Christian did to his class, or if this illustrates that the scientific community is stubborn and can never change. The question is left open ended. |