A letter to the editor of The Dallas Morning News read:
"If Bill Nye truly is 'The Science Guy,' he may wish to read Thomas Nagel's new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Nagel, an atheist and a professor at New York University, certainly does not accept that there is nothing left to debate on this topic, noting that scientists are most definitely not in agreement over the evidence for neo-Darwinian evolution. Shouldn't our students, in the interest of science, be taught that there is indeed significant current and ongoing scientific debate on this subject?
"Those who insist that evolution is 'settled science' are either willfully ignorant or intellectually dishonest."
[name omitted], Dallas
My response:
A couple of thoughts:
[P]eople who are well-versed in evolutionary theory and satisfactorily convinced by a century and a half of extremely strong, thoroughly documented evidence are neither willfully ignorant nor intellectually dishonest. They are merely well-informed. If a crackpot comes along and writes a book that says eating ice cream will cure cancer, must we then insist that all doctors read this book or be held up as willfully ignorant and intellectually dishonest? Why is it that so many people have no problem acknowledging the expertise of their plumber or butcher or mechanic or electrician, but think they obviously know more about science than the world's most respected scientists?
Another comment: I want to gently chide a few other commenters who have remarked that evolution explains the origin or emergence of life. Evolutionary theory explains a lot, but the origin of life, though undeniably a scientific concern, is not precisely in evolution's purview. Evolution deals with changes within species over generations and the appearance of new species (and other taxa) as they branch off from existing ones, in response to changing environmental factors.
Another letter read as follows:
"Since evolution is still a theory, is it a settled science.[sic] When a scientific idea becomes unquestionable it is given the title of Law. Big bang is theory also. There is a law of gravity, because it can be proven. So until it is proven (settled) there is still space for debate."
My response:
[Y]our misconception of the meaning of the word "theory" as it is used in the scientific community is a common one. Scientists do not use the word "theory" to mean a guess but rather to mean an organized body of knowledge. Yes, there is such a thing as "gravitational theory." A scientific "law" is not something a theory progresses to after it passes some standard; rather, a law is a specific statement (often, but not necessarily, in the form of an equation) within a theory. Thus, gravitational theory includes laws of gravitation. There is atomic theory; there is number theory; there's even music theory! Are these just guesses that hope to become legitimized some day? No, they're well-established, well-organized, thoroughly understood (by experts in their respective fields), and exhaustively tested bodies of knowledge.