If someone’s just trying to score points, I’ve gotten a little bit better (not much, just a little) at internally rolling my eyes and shutting up. No percentage in beating my head against the wall, despite my instincts.
If they’re asking a genuine question–like, they’ve heard this thing from creationists, and it puzzles them–then I might try to explain my understanding. “So, I think evolution doesn’t say that monkeys turned into humans the way that I turn into a wolf under the light of the full moon. It’s more like over thousands of years some primates had kids who looked more like chimpanzees, and other primates had kids who looked more like humans. Does that make sense?”
After 31 years in education, I conclude that the proper place for correcting the scientific errors of others is in the classroom (or other educational setting) and the proper motivation for doing so is that it is your job to instruct that person. Casual social settings and getting a piss-shiver out of feeling superior are right out.
So, he asked, and… what? You said “ah, you got me”?
I would have answered the question on his level with the aim not to make him feel stupid at all. Though, the question kind of looks like creationist 101 refutation of evolution. If I answered and sensed creationist pushback I’d probably just “agree to disagree” and finish the conversation there.
FWIW, I disagree. He asked a question and it deserves an honest answer. If he finds the answer unacceptable, so be it. But perhaps he really wants to discuss it in a serious way. Then you owe it to him to try to explain it perhaps oversimplifying it a bit. For example, in this case you could point out that apes were living in trees and went on doing so. But the ancestral hominins happened to live in part of Africa where the trees mostly disappeared and so were forced to adapt to a new environment. Which they did. Brilliantly. This is the kind of explanation that might start him thinking.
No, I answered his question. I made an analogy between my cousins and myself, pointing out that we descend from the same grandparents, and explained that the human-monkey relationship is similar. I just didn’t pursue the issue very hard because I am not Jason’s School teacher or his daddy, just his friendly customer.
I think in this particular circumstance there was good reason to try to educate this young man because of the use of evolution as a justification for racism.
He asked, so while you weren’t obligated to answer, you would have not been wrong to at least have given him the Evolution Cliff’s Notes. i.e. Evolution isn’t a straight line, but rather a path with many forks. Some successfully navigating the obstacles of survival and some heading to sinkholes and quicksand and the occasional lion’s den.
Here’s something that you might not have considered: Generally, people fucking hate to be corrected. In an educational setting, they are conditioned to be more accepting of it from people who are their designated instructors. In social settings, one might correct another on something both factual and noncontroversial, like the atomic mass of Deuterium maybe, without it being an issue. Correcting another on a controversial topic, such as evolution in the OP, won’t change any minds but may well generate ill feeling.
Don’t believe me? Look how well “correcting” each other works out on this board and we are, supposedly, smart.
I rarely (if ever) let a error pass.
If it’s an honest error, I will try to politely correct the person making the error.
If it’s dishonest, or a “talking point,” I am not so polite. I once corrected my bosses’s wife - we were having a discussion about evolution, and she said, incredulously, “you believe that we are descended from apes?” My response was “Were you asleep in high school? Darwin never said we were descended from apes, just that we both had a common ancestor.” She was honestly flustered by that, since she had always been “taught” (probably by her church) that Evolution meant we were ape-spawn.
I think I once lost an extremely sexy girlfriend when I scoffed at something she had picked up at a conference. The speaker had said that the absolute worst thing that people consume was Nutrasweet. When she said that to me, I instantly responded with, “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” She asked me how I could say that, and I said “Think about it - there’s a HUGE experiment going on every day - millions upon millions of people consuming Nutrasweet, day in and day out. If it was that bad, you would see people dropping like files."
His ability to ever get certified for such a job depends on an ability to understand a simple concept like evolution and understanding why there are still monkeys.
Nobody has ever asked me that question IRL, and my gut reaction would be to answer in a way that is specifically considered a bit rude on this message board, because my answer (to a person asking the monkey question) would be “You can’t have even bothered to Google that question”.
To test my gut reaction, I just googled “If man evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” - the entire first page of results was useful (in fact I had to wade through quite a few results pages to find anything that wasn’t useful) - so I’m fairly comfortable with “Google is your friend, if your question is genuine”
Despite being formed as a question, the utterance is evidence of a severe lack of curiosity.
Careful, there, kenobi. You got off easy with the Elvish education line. Next, he’s liable to accuse you of coming from Etruscan stock.
ISTM that you missed out on an opportunity to inquire if you had lost him with the term “non-extant primates.” That needn’t have come across as excoriating, and would have been a suitable response to his query (rhetorical though it may have been).
