Last week the country got behind 14-year-old high school freshman Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested after bringing what he claimed was a homemade clock to school. Before long his story went viral and he was receiving praise from everyone from George Takei to President Obama. Mohamed has not been without his critics, however, and on Friday night’s Real Time, Bill Maher claimed that the reaction of the school was justified in that the clock “looked exactly like a f*cking bomb.”
Now detractors are taking things a step further, and claiming that Mohamed’s clock may not have been a homemade clock at all, but a “disassembled Radio Shack model stuffed into a metal box.” English evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins started a Twitter debate on Sunday questioning this very theory, citing a video which had gone viral on YouTube.
While he still thinks that the school and authorities grossly overreacted, he wonders if the public also did the same by immediately labeling Mohamed as a genius and hero:
This man seems to know what he's talking about. https://t.co/LtOFAAmVxK If he's right, Ahmed didn't build a (cont) http://t.co/5ylV1bUbNW
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
Assembling clock from bought components is fine. Taking clock out of its case to make it look as if he built it is not fine. Which is true?
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
Yes, there are other reasons why a boy might take a clock out of its casing & pretend he'd made it. Trying to impress teachers, for instance
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
If the reassembled components did something more than the original clock, that’s creative. If not, it looks like hoax http://t.co/bBcaWoJpbd
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
I'm not putting down the child. I'm putting down myself & the rest of us for being fooled. And the police for arresting him for nothing.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) September 20, 2015
Meanwhile, others boil the special treatment Mohamed has received as purely political, pointing the unfairness to kids who actually do build things, if indeed it turns out that the clock is a hoax. Bryan Bergeron, editor in chief Nuts & Volts magazine, spoke to The Daily Beast about Mohamed’s reception:
The problem with giving this 14-year-old—whom I have nothing against; I really know very little of him—kudos for being inventive, is that there are tens of thousands of 11-year-olds out there actually designing circuits, building them from scratch and ‘innovating.’
This treatment does a big disservice to the tens of thousands of pre-teens out there doing REAL innovative things with electronics and technology.
I assume the truth of the situation lies somewhere in the middle of all this, but it doesn’t look like the debate is going to be silenced anytime soon.
(Via Fox News, Daily Beast)