I've been sending my standard e-mail policy response to the creationists who dun me with their misconceptions, and what do you know, one actually agreed to let me address his complaints publicly. It's on the high end of the literacy scale (I'd feel a bit guilty to be picking on an illiterate, after all), but about on par with most creationist mail on the comprehension scale, so it's easy stuff. Here's the first letter from Dr Gary Luce.

Paul, I read your entry on the nmsr website and took the trouble to run down your email address. I am a Ph.D. physical organic chemist employed at Eastman Chemical Company, and in the interest of honesty, have to tell you that I am a Creationist and tend to follow that mode of thinking. Now please do not dismiss me as a crank on that basis. I do not have peer reviewed publications as bona fides, but I do have a number of U.S. patents and have designed and supervised the startup of 4 new chemical plants for my employer. I obtained my Ph.D. under B. L. Shapiro and Ken Harding who graduated from Carnegie Mellon and were postdoctural students under the great (some say greatest) organic chemist R. B. Woodward at Harvard University. So my bona fides are in fact....bonda fide. I had a good education.

A good education in chemistry. I had two years of training in chemistry as an undergraduate, which is far more chemistry than most chemists have of biology, but I wouldn't think of going down to Eastman and telling them how to improve their chemical processes. It's funny how everyone thinks they have the background to dismiss evolutionary biology.

I was very interested in what you wrote on the nmsr website concerning Haechel's embryos. Your writing on the website does in fact contain true statements that Haeckel's theory was discounted in the 19th century and, yes, evolutionary theory is not based on Haeckel's work. If it stopped there, all would be well.

I guess the surprise to me is that Haeckel's material is still taught as fact in public schools. When I took Embryology as an undergraduate at Texas A&M University in the fall of 1973, my professor made great note of his work. I still have my class notes and textbook, "Foundations of Embryology", Bradley M. Patten, McGraw-Hill Publishers, 1958. Now that is an old reference, but the fact is, my two sons who have taken honors level biology classes in high school have been taught the same thing in two different states (Texas and Tennessee). It seems to me, that the evolution-creation debate suffers from a considerable amount of memory of convenience. In other words, the science education system continues to promote outdated and disproven concepts such as Haeckel's, and then when confronted, bring up the discreditation story. Creationists lob a few shells over the wall attacking such discredited theories and then snicker. How are we ever going to get past this when so much is at stake? As an educator, I would encourage you to challenge the education system to root out the facts and not just continue to regurgitate the same old tired theories. Our future, the lives of our students and the souls of men are depending on it.

They use 25 year old textbooks at Texas A&M?

Note the erroneous elision and broken logic. 1) admission that biology discounts Haeckel's concepts, 2) complain that biology still uses Haeckel's 'material', 3) accuse biology of dishonesty for continuing to promote Haeckel's concepts. Dr Luce doesn't comprehend what he is talking about, and is using a tiny amount of information to draw a false conclusion. To use a chemical analogy, it's as if I remembered just enough chemistry to know that the phlogiston theory was discredited, but then learned that my kids were being taught about rust and burning in high school chemistry. Why, those dastardly chemists! That's just phlogiston, all gussied up in a fancy new word, "oxidation". How dare those professionals lie to us! How clever I am to know something those fancy-pants Ph.D.s thought they could fool me with!

Haeckelian recapitulation is in the same boat with phlogiston. It's a discarded theory that is not taught anymore, except as an instructive episode in the history of science. But that doesn't mean that embryos don't go through a broad stage where they resemble one another as they assemble key elements of the body plan; just as it doesn't mean that things stopped burning when phlogiston was evicted from the body of science.

And no, it doesn't mean that every time a teacher shows a picture of a chick and a human embryo that they have resurrected the corpse of Haeckel. It means they are teaching them good biology.

Copyright © 1999 Benjamin/Cummings

Here's his second e-mail, in response to my request that I address it publicly.

I'm sure you do get some "unusual" mail and, yes, I would agree to a public reply with my name associated with it. And here is why. I am not just trying to pick a fight, or "prove" someone else wrong or myself to be in the right. I am a deeply committed scientist as well as a believer. I don't agree with some of the tactics of the intelligent design and creationist movement. I think there is an element of self-righteousness associated with it that is unnecessary and destructive to useful debate. I think the same thing exists on the side of proponents of evolution. And the more I have read and studied over the years, the more I have felt misled by the system that provided my education. And that is what prompted my email to you. I think we all need to back up a couple of steps and listen to the other side a little more.

As a trained scientist, Dr Luce should know that scientists back up and change their ideas all the time—in response to evidence. Evidence. That's the key thing. And the creationist side has consistently failed to present any. What he calls "self-righteousness" is actually exasperation at all these people who demand that we abandon the evidence to conform to their superstitions.

Note also the interesting construction, "misled by the system that provided my education". Along with the usual careful list of their credentials, this is a phrase that must be required by the creationist mind-set, I've seen it so often. I have never yet seen one say, "misled by my religion."

As a Christian, I have long had difficulty with the young earth scenario. Yet at the same time, if the Lord God is really who he says he is in the scriptures, then the old earth becomes a problem as well.

Why, yes. And if Hello Kitty is the apotheosis of perfect organic design, then the oral cavity is an abomination and we commit heresy every time we speak. Everything becomes a problem when you start admitting absurdities as a premise. That doesn't mean we throw out the realities of the world we see around us, it should mean that we reject the premise.

Dinosaurs are obviously very real. In fact, I live only about 25 miles from the new site at Gray, TN where highway construction has uncovered a very rich "pit like" discovery of rhinoceros, horse, cat, and other intact fossils similar to the LaBrea tar pits. I have myself walked the dinosaur trail at Glen Rose, TX. I must admit I don't agree with the conclusions of the park staff with regard to that find, but that is the nature of our field. There are in fact different options.

How unscientific of Dr Luce. No, all proposals are not equal; they are more than "different options." Some are reasonable, promising, and supported by the evidence. Some are not. As scientists, we give greater weight to good ideas than we do to baseless speculation or antique superstitions.

And yet when I think back to when I was in junior high. I remember a book my parents gave me for Christmas that talked about the classic theory of a wet, hot swampy earth, coal formation and fossil preservation. Even then I simply could not rationalize what I understood about decay, scavenger behavior and bacterial decomposition. As a 15 year old kid I could look at the information and form my own conclusion, "that is just not possible."

Why, yes, creationism becomes tenable if we approach it with the uninformed mind of a teenager, reject anything that seems counterintuitive, and base our intuition entirely on our extremely limited personal experience. Is this supposed to be a legitimate example of support for creationism, or an account of creationist shortcomings?

That 15 year old kid's understanding about decay was simply wrong. I'd tell him now that he ought to look up the magic word "taphonomy" and read up on it.

And of course I could go on and on, and will in fact if that should prove useful to our discussion. But the bottom line is this. The classic problems of biochemistry, cosmology, physics and paleontology have become less clear, not more clear with time and increasing advances in our technology development for study of them. Old problems like Haeckel's embryos should have been dealt with forcefully and clearly long ago. As scientists and educators, we owe it to the generations that follow us to see to it that truth is as rigorously maintained in our debate as it is in our collection and interpretation of data. Again Paul, if the claims of the scriptures are true, and I believe that they indeed are, then there is far more at stake than at first appears. The result will not be temporal, but eternal.

Another tired creationist canard I hear over and over again, that science is making evolutionary interpretations increasingly untenable. This is not true. I just got back from a major scientific meeting where people were discussing the latest, hottest stuff in developmental biology, and there was more talk about evolution there now than there was twenty years ago; what we're seeing is an amazing synergy between evolutionary biology and other disciplines, with each informing the understanding of the other. Claiming otherwise is like hearing some crank argue that we've lost clarity in our understanding of chemistry, because once upon a time there were only four elements, and now there's around 112, and those danged godless nuclear chemists keep trying to add more.

Haeckel's embryos have been dealt with forcefully and clearly repeatedly. Von Baer argued forcefully against the interpretation of recapitulation thirty years before Haeckel, Gould dealt with it at length in the 1970s, and I and every developmental biologist I know teaches that it is plainly wrong. The only people who have "memory of convenience" on this matter are creationists. And rigorous maintenance of the 'truth' (not a term we use much in science) demands that we treat creationism as old garbage.

Both of Dr Luce's letters end with another common creationist trope, the threat. They are more politely phrased in this case than the more common, "You're going to burn in hell," but it's still the same old thing. No, Dr Luce, I do not accept your absurd, unfounded belief that some invisible hobgoblin is going to do mean things to me once I'm dead, all because I try to teach the most honest interpretations of the material world around us. I do not even consider it. It is not part of the equation when I am trying to weigh the accuracy of truth-claims in the real world, although clearly it is part of yours.