Andy Peters                            
Bill Rawlins:  Chemistry Isn't Science!

The following is an excerpt (reprinted without permission) from
reference [1].  I'm posting it for the benefit of The Cotera (if he's
still out there) and his ilk, who insist that, because
"macroevolution" cannot be directly observed, and because evolutionary
biology largely involves inferential reasoning, evolution is not
scientific.

  The article is about a chemist's experience making a documentary
about chemistry.  The directors had come upon IBM marketing footage of
images from a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), which can, under
certain conditions, image the surfaces of atoms and molecules.  I've
cut out large sections dealing with more technical stuff, and have
included only bits which are relevant to t.o.

-----begin quote-----

...When we are lucky, the process produces an image related to the
surface topography.  Sometimes, we are not lucky.  We know that
graphite layers contain a simple hexagonal honeycomb of carbon atoms.
But the STM image of graphite, without fail, shows only triangles,
imaging every other atom.  There is still a dispute as to what is
being seen.  But it is not what we know is there.

  How, then, do we know?  Indirectly, but quite certainly...

  [In the next bit, the author is quoting a script he wrote himself
for the documentary -adp]

  We've looked in this program at the structure of the atom.  We've
described the experimental and theoretical steps leading to our modern
picture of the atom, this electron cloud around a nucleus.  And we saw
one technique, scanning tunneling microscopy, for seeing atoms.  Only
when we understand and see atoms, you might think, only then could we,
should we, go on to the next level of complexity, to molecules.

  Do you think that's true?  That development of a field should await
complete understanding of its foundations?  I hope you don't.  We knew
the earth was round centuries before Apollo astronauts took a picture
of it from the moon.  And we were dead sure of the existence of atoms,
and knew just how atoms connected up to form molecules, before those
beautiful clear STM pictures.

  Chemistry, like any human activity, proceeds simultaneously on many
levels, with partial understanding, always incomplete, sometimes
wrong, incredibly, mostly right.  A great intellectual achievement of
chemistry, of humanity, a chart organizing all the elements, called
The Periodic Table, developed 50 years before we knew what the atom is
about, is the subject of the next program.

[end quote from script, back to article -adp]

  ...And we all understood (I think) the point that you do not have to
see something to know, as sure as anything, what is in this world.

-----End Quote-----.

I _love_ this passage.  Replace words like "atom," "molecule," and
"periodic table" with words like "common descent," "evolution," and
"phylogeny," and it applies to evolution just as well as it does in
this form to chemistry.  I honestly hope that the creationists out
there honestly consider the parallels of chemistry and evolution (and
physics, and geology, and...), and honestly question the simplistic
belief that something must be directly observable to be considered
science.

[1] Hoffman, R.  1993.  For the first time, you can see atoms.
American Scientist, Jan-Feb '93, pp. 11-12.