In the Scopes trial appellate opinion, Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Chambliss noted that Scopes’ lawyers prominently featured this statement from Prof. E. N. Reinke of Vanderbilt University: “The theory of evolution is altogether essential to the teaching of biology. . . . To deny the teacher of biology the use of [evolution] would make his teaching as chaotic as an attempt to teach . . . physics without assuming the existence of the ether.”
Quite.
1 comment:
I appreciate the selective quoting that left out gravity's importance to astronomy while including a hypothesis that had been effectively disproven 35 years before (by the Michelson-Morley experiments) and supplanted by Einstein 20 years before.
Since Prof. Reinke would have been entered as an expert in biology rather than physics, this is perhaps better evidence for why it is so foolish for your side to hold up physicists, mathematicians, and others with no training and no research in molecular or cell biology as having special insight or expertise into the origins of life: When they rely on an impression acquired decades before, they can make their position look foolish.
Holding that quote up is also further evidence that IDers have no hope of ever supporting their brand of creationism, and can only sling rhetorical feces at the people doing serious work. Fortunately, this type of personality is well known and previously named on the Internet: net.kook.
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