Ridicule and public shame are the only ways to get through to these people. The reason they reject it in the first place is because it gives them social cred in their peer group. So you need to get through to them that while their peer group may give high-fives for willful ignorance, the rest of the world will not.
You need to make them embarrassed to believe the stupid shit they believe, at least out loud.
People are working on the problem. I recently discovered The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky [PDF]. I can’t say it’s the end-all, be-all panacea, but it’s a damn good step in the right direction.
“Of course they’ll all fit on the ark! There’s not that many of them! We’ll just unload them and they’ll just rapidly evolve, which by the way, I don’t believe in except when my religion requires it, in which case I do, and then they’ll suddenly stop evolving once people actually start looking into it! Duh!” - Noah to his sons.
It certainly helped make things worse; same goes for the evolution of pesticide resistance and the evolution of resistance in tumor cells to anticancer medications. And of course making evolution unlikely to be taught in schools. Anti-evolutionism has slowed scientific research, promoted ignorance, distorted medical treatments, and promotes destructive practices inlcuding, yes, misuse of antibiotics.
There are plenty of people who emotionally feel and still believe in evolution. Hire those people instead
I don’ really think that you can so easily convince someone who has believed in such a thing maybe all his life.
So you feel things evolving have no connection with evolution?
Your post is now my cite.
And do you feel that Creationists were open to the concept of “micro-evolution”? Or is this just their fall-back position when the evidence of evolution became so overwhelming that they realized their ongoing denial of all forms of evolution was going to discredit their beliefs? So they conceded, in the face of reality, that one type of evolution exists while continuing to deny every other type of evolution.
If I insisted that the earth was flat and you took me on a trip around the world to prove I was wrong, how would you feel at the end of our journey if I said, “Okay, I concede that the part of the earth we traveled on was round. But I still believe that the rest of the earth is flat.”
Debate them on a single piece or category of evidence (for example, radiometric dating, or the geological column). Let them choose the category, then make sure to keep the discussion on topic - they’ll almost certainly try to shift it to something else rather than concede, but if you insist on keeping the debate within scope, it helps.
Then at the end of that debate, let them pick the topic for the next one.
No, and I don’t know how you got that out of my post. I have no problem with the theories of mainstream science about evolution. I am very skeptical that any large number of people have misused antibiotics because they reject the theory of evolution, and I don’t think that claim can be supported with facts. If you can present facts that show otherwise, please do.
:rolleyes:
This is always my first reaction. It makes me rage that people can publicly say they don’t believe in evolution and still be taken seriously. If people went around saying they didn’t believe in gravity, they would get laughed at. But this OP took a different approach and I like it. He debated him on his own terms. The anti-evolutionist thought the OP was on his side.
Some examples, please? I have a hard time believing that anyone who looks at the evidence and is still a creationist is going to do very well as a biologist. How does creationism distort medicine?
Now, a creationist is not going to have the mindset to understand why the overuse of antibiotics (and germ killing cleaners) is a bad thing. But I rather suspect that people who do accept evolution, but who are not scientists or very aware of it, do much better. The problem are people who say “germs bad - kill!” rather than anything having to do with evolution.
There is a George Carlin bit about how he and his friends used to swim in the polluted Hudson, and so never worried about polio because the virus was scared of them. That’s the right mindset.
Hold your eyes still for a second.
Before I start explaining the issue, I need to know what you think is going on. Can you explain what you think the problem is with overusing antibiotics if you don’t think it involves evolution?
The overuse of antibiotics in healthcare and pesticides in the environment may require some knowledge and intuition on Chemistry and Biology. Both cases involve resistant organisms due to artifactual selection, and humans must be informed about them. Artifactual selection is a part of evolution, which is the bigger picture.
Evolution is a very big topic. It covers gene flow, genetic drift, natural selection, artificial selection (human selection), artifactual selection, and sexual selection. Evolution can be branched into two topics, microevolution and macroevolution. The terms are scientific terms, not religious terms, but some people misuse those terms in the phrase, “I believe in microevolution but reject macroevolution,” even though there is no definite line between the two terms. One is only the extension of another.
I’ve found that for a lot of people who adhere to ‘alternate’ beliefs, the problem is not religion per se. It is that they lack the apparatus, cultural, intellectual, or otherwise, to distinguish worthiness of arguments. That is really why they go for what “feels right” rather than what science has demonstrated is the best explanation.
I’m not talking about the theory of evolution so much as the whole mindset.
They have learned through various means (not all religious) to be mistrustful of what one could call conventional wisdom. Hey, I am – I am incredibly mistrustful of what Monsanto has to tell me about agriculture, or what Exxon has to tell me about our bright energy future, or what my elected representatives tell me about pretty much anything.
However, I was raised by a pair of newspaper journalists (the old-fashioned kind), so I learned to fact check, to follow the money, to assess the crazy-fringiness factor, etc., of any presentation, more or less at my mother’s knee. How many people know how to do this? It takes some training, frankly.
What most people do faced with conflicting “theories” is they throw up their hands and choose what makes them feel warmer and fuzzier inside, or what their respected friend or colleague (or pastor) says is true. You could say lazy but it would be just as accurate to say, lack of skill/means.
So to answer the OP, I think teaching children how to detect logical fallacies, to question intelligently, to recognize different levels of — shit, just starting with the building blocks of the scientific method would help.
Is this possible?
Biologists are virtually never creationists; but that doesn’t mean the people who make funding decisions aren’t. And creationism (and religion in general) distorts medicine and so forth both by funding decisions, and by fear; people are afraid of a backlash from the believers, so they avoid speaking of evolution or anything else that offends the believers.
Please provide facts to back this up. I am not aware that anti-evolutionists have ever managed to cut off funding to scientific research. I have some interest in the subject, and I’m pretty sure I’d be aware of it if this sort of thing happened at any significant level.
I am totally at a loss to understand this response. I have never said anything, in this thread or elsewhere, which would indicate or suggest that basic principles of evolution are not involved in the dangers of misusing antibiotics. I don’t know where you’re getting this. Please quote the exact words where I supposedly said this.
Seriously?
When I said that thing about your post being my cite, I didn’t realize it was going to be so literally true.
That sentence simply does not say what you think it says. It says that people who misuse antibiotics seldom or never do so because they reject the theory of evolution. If you see something else in it, you put it there.