Pass the Oxygen

I recently sent the following letter to the Jewish Press (referenced here), responding to one of the anti-evolution diatribes that they publish every now and then:

To the Editor:

Regarding Dr. Yaakov Stern’s (no relation to me) letter in last week’s issue, for someone who writes so often about science, he ought to know that scientists test their ideas against nature, i.e. against objective reality, not against this or that holy book or the opinions of this or that Torah scholar. Evolution is successful because it explains a vast corpus of observable reality better than any competing theory. In fact, there is no competing theory that comes under the heading of science, in that it can be tested against nature. God wrote both books, nature and Torah, and, as Pope John Paul II observed, truth cannot contradict truth. It is not the Torah’s purpose to serve as a textbook of natural history, or to tell us how or when He got the tzelem Elokim into the human species, or how long the process took. Torah is focused on the here and now; today human beings possess the tzelem Elokim, therefore we must relate to fellow human beings with basic decency. That means, inter alia, that a Jew must, at a minimum, treat his workers, Jewish and Gentile, according to the requirements of the law, and that a Rosh Yeshiva must protect his students from pedophile teachers.

Sincerely,
Zev Stern, Ph.D.


The Jewish Press did not publish my letter, perhaps the reference to the late Pope was treif, never mind that the Rambam said to accept the truth from whoever said it. However, in this week's issue it published the following beaut by a Martin D. Stern, also no relation to me, stating in pertinent part:

As regards the evolution of species, the theory is much less convincing on purely scientific grounds. It claims that more complex species have evolved from simpler ones through random changes, which appears to be inconsistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics which asserts that, in the absence of outside intervention, systems tend to become more chaotic.
Also, most of the proofs brought for it depend on observed changes within species such as the preponderance of melanistic [sic] moths in industrial Manchester, England, as opposed to the lighter colored varieties previously prevalent. This is a far cry from evolution from one species to another distinct one - a phenomenon that has never been observed.

Reading it, I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. The Second Law of Thermodynamics? Good God, where did this clown go to school? The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to a closed system. The earth is not a closed system; it constantly receives fresh energy from the sun. It is that energy that allows living systems to order themselves at the expense of their surroundings; the total disorder of the universe indeed increases. And the Jewish Press publishes this garbage! As for one species evolving from another, this usually does not happen within a human lifetime, but it has been produced in the laboratory and it is the inescapable conclusion inferred from a vast body of observations; see my letter in Intercom. If the writer knows nothing about science he should pick up some books in the public library and educate himself before writing about a subject he knows nothing about, and playing his readers for fools.