I’m trying to figure out why so many people still reject the idea of evolution, and have come to a few possible conclusions:
It sounds wacky. Let’s face it, a miniscule point of energy explodes, and a few billion years later, we get Bill O’Reilly, fully formed and spouting gibberish. It sounds more like fantastical scince fiction than science.
Evolution is mired in science. Science is the province of intellectuals. Intellectuals are strange and untrustworthy. Guilt by association.
Evolution – for some oddball reason – disproves the existence of God. If no God, then I don’t get to go to heaven and spend eternity playing canasta with Ricardo Montalban. The thought of that makes me feel icky, so I’ll reject the source of that ickiness rather than face an unpleasant truth.
“I was never a monkey!” Some people really believe that evolution implies this, and take it as a huge insult.
Boiling all of these down, it seems that they all fall into the categories of ignorance and selfishness. While #1 is somewhat forgivable, a little education could shed a lot of light. #2 is not only ignorant, but a celebration of that ignorance. #3 is purely selfish, and employs a great deal of denial. #4 is an amusing mix of both ignorance and selfishness. And misplaced pride.
well, i’d say part of it is conflation of several fields into what is popularly referred to as ‘evolution.’ in your OP, your first point (big bang) is more an astrophysics question, where evolution is biological. geology is also a different discipline that gets lumped in (dating, etc.)
so we have all these debates, and the anti-evolutionary crowd can make claims and in order to rebut, their opposition has to have a commanding knowledge of all of these fields to convincingly speak. basically, the anti crowd just needs to know 1 book (the Bible, usually)…the defenders must know a lot more and be able to communicate it to laymen, which is also very difficult.
It’s also easier to shoot off all sorts of claims and then let the defender try to parry them all- very little work on the part of the anti-evo crowd. sort of like a newspaper making a false claim and then retracting on page 17.
aside from that, i pretty much agree totally with your points.
Good point. But to anti-evos, it is only one discipline. So the very nature of the debate is flawed, since both sides are playing by different sets of rules.
One other thing I’ve noticed – it seems to me that most of the time evolutionists are put on the defensive. Even if creationism is attacked at the outset, it’s ultimately evolutionists that have to do all of the explaining, which makes them look like they support a weak position.
People who recognize the validity of evolutionary theory (“evolutionist” sounds too much like a philosophical or religious term IMO) also know that they can’t go on the offensive. If they do, they’re perceived as attacking religion.
The big bang isn’t really related to evolution, but then again, some creationists claim that the Earth is only about 6000 years old. Therefore, their position requires that the Big Bang can’t have been billions of years ago and that the dating of fossils and such can’t be valid. So those things get tied together because creationsim not only rejects evolution (and science in general), it throws out astrophysics, geology, and a bunch of other things.
Okay folks, I think the theory of evolution is ridiculous. I do not subscribe to Creationism either. I will explain the simple reason that I think evolution doesn’t hold water but will also state from the outset that it could be my lack of understanding of evolution and biology at large that brings me to such a conclusion.
I know very little about the subject but I am under the impression that the theory of evolution presupposes that modern man came into it’s current form about 10,000 years ago. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve read about numerous archeological discoveries that show evidence of man at times much earlier than 10,000 years.
How do Evolutionists explain this? Are these archeological discoveries simply, and conveniently, disputed by Evolutionists? Or do they just avoid the subject?
You’ve definitely misread something someplace, lander, and I’ve never heard any proponent of evolution say something that patently ludicrous. If archeology contradicted evolution that flatly, the theory would’ve been fixed. A common estimate I hear is that homo sapiens has existed for about 2 million years. I think we ended up pretty much the way we are now (homo sapiens sapiens) about 100,000 years ago. I can’t really cite anything there; perhaps someone more familiar with scientific websites can?
To answer your first question, IIRC, the first civilizations started to appear around that time. Perhaps that is the source of your confusion.
To your second, yes the theory is evolving. As in any great mystery, the truth reveals itself in fragments, so there are necessarily some revisions. It’s how we learn.
To the last, I think it was about 3 million years ago, but there were several stages after that time. As to the latest and greatest iteration, about 50-100 thousand years ago.
I think you’re missing a crucial point here. Most people who accept evolution do so not on the basis of careful study of the science, and thoughtful examination of the evidence and facts, most people who accept evolution do so on the basis of authority. In other words an authority has told them that this is the accepted view and they have enough trust on that authority to accept that judgement. Conversely most people who reject evolution do so on the same basis. Which is
right?
And yes, I know, there will be any number of people in this board and elsewhere who will chime in here and say “Not true! I’m a biologist and that’s why accept evolution!” I’m talking real world here, not the SDMB.
By the way, I’m very unconfortable with the wording of this post where I talk about “accepting evolution”, I just can’t think of a better way to say it. On the other hand, maybe I am subconsciously trying to express the point that there’s little difference between the view of Science and Religion that most people take. In other words some worship God, some worship Science.
I swear I have not been smoking anything, the evidence of this post to the contrary.
Actually, you know, there’s kind of a misconception in lander’s post that should be cleared up. Evolution has nothing to do with the age of humankind. Evolutionary theory just says that organisms change and adapt to their environment, that those best adaptand so on. Survival of the fittest. (I’m told Darwin didn’t like the term ‘natural selection’ because it implied that someone was doing the selecting.)
The age of the Earth, humanity, the times things occurred, etc., are separate. Evolution doesn’t propose those; they’re estimates/findings based on research. Things like the age of a fossil are facts; evolution is a theory, whic is designed to account for findings and facts.
Actually, you know, there’s kind of a misconception in lander’s post that should be cleared up. Evolution has nothing to do with the age of humankind. Evolutionary theory just says that organisms change and adapt to their environment, that those best adaptand so on. Survival of the fittest. (I’m told Darwin didn’t like the term ‘natural selection’ because it implied that someone was doing the selecting.)
The age of the Earth, humanity, the times things occurred, etc., are separate. Evolution doesn’t propose those; they’re estimates/findings based on research. Things like the age of a fossil are facts; evolution is a theory, which is designed to account for findings and facts.
You can accept evolution on the basis of authority, but then again, it actually has facts to support it, which (say) creationism doesn’t. Worshipping science is impossible: science isn’t a religion, although creationists make this claim at times. It’s a methodology. It’s an approach, in other words, not a system of answers to philosophical questions.
Perhaps Lander got misinformation about evolution from the same place you did. In a nutshell, modern evoloutionary theory/field work says:
Humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about 6M yrs ago.
Human ancestors first evolved upright walking, with an expansion of the brain (beyond chimps size) following by many millions of years. Upright walking evolved at least 4M yrs ago, but stone tools don’t show up in the fossil evidence until about 2.5M yrs ago.
Human ancestors (Homo Erectus) left Africa 1-2M yrs ago and evolved into some side branches of the Human family that have since gone extinct. Neanderthals were the European branch of this event.
Modern Humans (Homo Sapiens) evolved in Africa 100 - 200k years ago, left Africa about 60k yrs ago to populate the rest of the planet.
That’s really oversimplified, but gives the broad outline.
Okay, so it seems I did have it wrong. Thanks for the update. Since it is an evolving theory, it was possibly old info that I was operating off.
So, per tdn and Marley, it seems that the theory currently holds that man has been around for about 100,000 years. What happens if evidence of man is found millions or even hundreds of millions of years ago?
Could the theory concerning the chain of evolution from species to species adjust to such radical changes? Maybe I have mistaken the theory to be somewhat specific in it’s presumptions. Can the theory simply be summed up by, “all species of life evolved from a single celled organism, but no-one knows when or through what chain of evolution?”
At the risk of paying you 2 compliments in one day…
Your first post was spot on. I might quibble about #1 (maybe I’m just a bit kinder than you) but #2 explains a lot of what is going on here, and #3 probably explains most of the rest.
