Oh, I get it. It makes sense. It’s just hard for anyone to think in terms of “very large chunks of time way beyond anything you can imagine”. Well, for me anyway. 
First off, there isn’t that great of a leap between Charlie Sheen and a bonobo.
Second, now I know not to joke in a science thread. :eek: I was thinking about early fossil discovery and the word dinosaur.
Tom may be right that evolutionary theory takes a long time to explain, but this is in no way an answer to the OP.
The OP asks a particular question about an undeniable and reasonably unique phenomenon. Why does this particular scientific concept attract so much denial from a particular group?
The crux of the answer cannot be something that would apply equally to other scientific concepts. Merely being hard to grasp isn’t sufficient to cause a scientific concept to become the target of active denial by a powerful lobby group. Nor can the answer be “because there is so much misinformation and/or ignorance about the subject” because that just begs the question as to why Creationist leadership works so hard to prevent ignorance being dispelled, and on spreading misinformation.
Creationists are a subculture that have made creationism part of the set of faiths that form their identity and culture and distinguish them from others who are not of their subculture. Some more fervent creationists have also made proselytising their faith and actively fighting alternate views a part of their culture. The question of why this particular faith and activity forms part of their creed is not necessarily one that has to yield a rational answer: all religions have particular beliefs that cannot be justified by evidence or rational thought.
Having said that, it is not hard to see how this particular culture could have developed: Creationists tend to be a subset of Christians, who believe their deity is amongst other attributes the creator of everything - and particularly human beings - and is even referred to by them as “the Creator”. While it is not necessary to deny evolution to maintain this view of the Christian deity (one can find various ways to reconcile the two) evolution could be seen as tending to usurp at least parts of the role previous said to have been personally undertaken by the Christian deity, so it is not hard to see how fetishisation of creationism (in opposition to evolution) could arise.
Nice hypothesis, Princhester, but it tends to ignore the fairly large number of Muslims and the smaller percentages of Jews and non-believers who also doubt that evolution is responsible for the current diversity of life. The Muslims and Jews might get thrown in with the “religious” people whom some posters insist must be the only ones who ignore the evidence, but you’re still left with a chunk of unbelievers, (and, frankly, a lot of C&E Christians who haven’t ever even heard a sermon on the topic), who have still failed to grasp the concept.
I would guess that more people reject evolutionary theory on the basis of simply not being able to accept the various intricacies of the biome than are following the dictates of some religious system. The most recent polls tend to show that the number of people who doubt evolution in the U.S. are a bit over 50%, yet the religious denominations that rail against evilution make up only around 30% of the population. The RCC has accepted the scientific basis of evolution since before 1900 and I have never met a priest who doubted that evolution has occurred, yet a significant number of Catholics do doubt that evolution has occurred.
In terms of why there are more people who doubt evolution than quantum mechanics, I suspect that you can lay that at the feet of religion, but not in the way that the blamers in this thread would wish to assert. It is more a matter that the Creationist religious people tend to keep the spotlight on the issue of teaching evolution in schools for religious reasons, so that more people are confronted with some reference to evolution over the years, even when they are not following the doctrines of any belief system. There is no group, (and darned few individuals), who are upset about quantum mechanics, the geometry of Lobachevsky, or similar areas of math and science to keep any of those theories and practices in the public eye.
They are the ones who have the motivation to do so. The only unbelievers I know of who developed an outright anti-Darwinian-evolution agenda would be Lysenko and his followers in the USSR, and they are extinct. Right here and now, the people who have a reason to discredit evolution are the believers whose religions were severely damaged by it. And who would love it if they could discredit evolution so they could offer their God as the only possible explanation for life, just like in the old days. They want their trump card back.
Like it or not, it’s been a long, long time since the argument over whether or not evolution is true has been anything but a religious one.
The idea that humankind exists because of a series of somewhat unfortunate events is what’s hard to grasp. We spend our whole lives wondering what the hell we’re doing here, what’s the purpose of life, what am I gonna be when I grow up, what will happen when I die, etc., only to come to the realization that we’re here just because…we are. Kind of like horseshoe crabs, but they’ve been here for 450 million years.
Even scientists who believe in evolution grapple with what makes us the so-called superior species. Linguists argue about relativity, geneticists fret over eugenics, philosophers claim that human nature could be our end, women are fraught with the notion that they are little more than subservient mammalian baby makers, Christians try to save us, and we’re all really peons on this teeny planet called Earth in a massive galaxy of billions of stars until you remember that we could actually destroy the planet we live on and that damn horseshoe crab will have the last laugh.
Couple that with the idea that homo sapiens did not appear on this earth fully civilized and you have yourself an identity crisis and a minor depressive episode.
As to your first point, this just reinforces the connection that I make. Indeed, given the close relatedness of the Abrahamic religious traditions it would be downright suprising if (assuming my hypothesis holds water) there weren’t Muslims and Jews who didn’t accept evolution.
You make it sound like Creationist religious people keep a spotlight on the issue that that is some sort of neutral tone. Stop kidding yourself. They keep a spotlight on the issue that is bright red and flashing, with a loud hailer playing loops comprising a bunch of carefully crafted lies designed to discredit evolution. That has to have effect, and is designed precisely to do so, in exactly the way the “blamers” in this thread suggest.
Further, in my view your statistics discredit your conclusion. 30% of the population belong to congregations that actively rail against evolution and they only manage to take an additional 20% along for the ride? I would have thought they would do rather better if evolution was actually (religion aside) so difficult to convince people about.
You do not even seem to be reading my posts. There is nothing “neutral” about the Religious Right harping on Creationism and nothing I have said can be construed to make that claim.
From my perspective:
Lots of people with all sorts of backgrounds and beliefs don’t “get” lots of scientific explanations.
Among the scientific explanations that they fail to understand are those involved in the Theory of Evolution.
Most abstruse science is simply ignored by most people.
The Creationists keep a spotlight on Evolution by trying to jam it into public education, so among the various scientific disciplines that a majority of people fail to understand, the one that they hear about and, thus, bother to draw conclusions about even though they fail to understand it, is evolutionary biology.
That the Religious Right, in the U.S., is a major force for that confusion is clear. More people accepted evolution as fact in the 1960s, before the RR began pushing their agenda through the 1970s and beyond.
However, the question was not whether Fundamentalist Christianity was a major factor in the lack of acceptance of volutionary theory. It certainly is. The question was why do people not accept the scientific evidence and the answer to that, it would seem to me, has more to do with people simply being uncomfortable with the idea of random changes resulting in the various intricate aspects of life combined with scientific ignorance. Of the people I know who reject evolutionary science, fewer than a dozen resort to Genesis or other religious claims. The majority react with suspicion or non-acceptance to evolution based on the sort of things that Behe brought up in his early claims for Irreducible Complexity rather than on religious grounds. (And yes, I am aware that Behe talks out of both sides of his mouth when pretending to not have a religious agenda, himself. Again, however, whatever his motivation–a motivation NOT prompted by the teachings of HIS church–but I am talking about that sort of complexity, not any particular examples from his book.)
Sure, but as you scale up the size of something, the mass increases at a much greater rate. If everything in the universe suddenly doubled in size, it’d be instantly detectable, because the physics of every object in the universe would radically change.
As for why Creationists (especially YECs) keep harping on teaching their model in public schools, my sense is similar to Tom’s but a little different. The motivation, I think, is this. In Sunday School, they teach their little ones the Earth was created by God 6000 years ago. Then, an authority figure in school tells them this belief is wrong. Frankly, I think it’s perfectly understandable that they find this threatening. It’s almost a reverse-establishment of religion (or at least YEC). It’s all very well for us to say “dem’s the facts, so just deal with it,” but one shouldn’t be surprised if they decline to see it that way. QM and other science don’t provoke the same response because they don’t pose the same challenge.
Consider an example of something similar. American Indians have begun to resist genetic testing, in part, because scientists use the data to construct migration theories which conflict with the Indian’s own myths of creation in place. Here, because of the backdrop of genocide and cultural discrimination, folks tend to be more sympathetic, although the same “dem’s the facts” rationale applies. Of course genetic testing is a little different because it requires consent, but that goes to why the objection succeeds, not whether it’s valid.
Which isn’t to say I think we should be teaching creationism in schools, or teaching the controversy (in scientific terms, there isn’t one). But I do think it’s unfair to assert Creationists are being stoopid when they get exercised about the issue. They’ve got a real problem. Bearing in mind it’s inerrancy, not evolution as such, that YECs care about.
I hate to be ‘that person’. I don’t want to be the Joo Police. I don’t. But so much of SD is about religion that it’s hard not to participate sometimes. So, yeah, um, Jews have been accepting evolution since the 1900s. There is even Tamudic commentary that says Adam wasn’t the first man.* I don’t know how that meshes with your hypothesis (since some Jews are “God created us and we just don’t know the details and support scientific theory” [theistic evolution] and others are “science, baby!”) but I’m kind of interested in how it plays out now.
I like browsing this thread. 
*controversial, but somehow it made it past the censors
:eek:
:: ducks back into her Ignorant of Physics shell ::
That’s right. Most people don’t understand most science. But the science that gets attacked is attacked because some subset of people have ulterior motives. Besides evolution, we have climate change and vaccination.
You must hang out with interesting people, since I doubt one out of 100 evolution deniers or supporters understand the issues well enough to make that kind of argument. On talk.origins there were a very few creationists who understood biology well enough to make arguments that needed someone who knew the details to address. I don’t recall any person with that much background coming to GD in ages. Behe’s sin is not denying a religious agenda, it is more acting like 99% of a standard accepter of evolution to one audience and 99% a creationist to another.
With all due respect, you’ve misunderstood the point. The question raised by the OP isn’t whether evolution is correct. S/he, you and I agree on that point. The question is why evolution deniers do so. That drug resistance is an example of evolution in action goes to the first question, not the second. On the contrary, it’s a good example of the point I was making. It’s not something that comes up in most people’s everyday lives and not something as to which believing or denying evolution makes a difference. To the extent it makes a difference, it’s how the medical community acts which matters and they may be presumed to understand evolution. (For that matter, I don’t see that it matters whether they understand it as an evolution problem, so long as they recognize the public health issue.) I’d love to be able to point to examples of how getting evolution wrong matters in real life. I don’t think drug resistance and simlar problems fit the bill.
In that ‘Dilbert guy doubts evolution’ text quoted above, I found it particularly telling that he ends his claim with:
He knows the fault in his own words, but somehow thinks that putting in a disclaimer about it will nullify that fault? Science *is *continually revising itself - no scientist (or no good scientist anyways) has ever claimed to know the absolute truth and advised that we just stop researching because we’ve reached the end of what we can know. Absolute truth is a claim of the religious, and the fact that they try to use the lack of it as an attack on science demonstrates how poorly they understand science.
I can actually understand, to some extent, why people feel like evolution is a bit mysterious. It occurs over unimaginably long periods of time and it has had mind-blowing results. The really zealous creationists, the ones who write things like Answers in Genesis, prey on the poor understanding of evolution to make their own theory seem reasonable. While the underlying mechanism is easy enough to understand (as others in the thread have said), fundamental misunderstandings of the process abound. Irreducible complexity, the idea that evolution proceeds towards an ‘ideal form’, the idea that evolution cannot be directly observed in the field - all these things are common misconceptions, and those really pushing creationism know it.
Yes, it does. When people misuse medication because their religious beliefs tell them it is impossible for disease or cancer to evolve, they make themselves and others sicker, or dead.
Because if they actually take creationism seriously, their immediate action will be to deny that it happens at all. They can’t recognize it as a public health problem when they are busy denying it exists.
But I’d assume that the idea that you can’t distinguish between everything growing and gravity is based on he idea that mass doesn’t actually cause gravity, and that everything including the particles that carry forces and the scale of quantum phenomenon would change along with it. I think the idea is (loosely) based on the equivalency between acceleration and gravity in relativity, actually. If anything I think the problem is in the other direction; if everything is increased or decreased in size in perfect synchrony, it wouldn’t cause any detectable differences at all including imitating gravity; nothing is actually accelerating relative to anything since everything is changing together.
It seems to me to be the sort of hypothesis that gets rejected according to Occam’s Razor, anyway.
Sure. As I said in my first post “evolution” and “deity as creator” can be reconciled and I don’t doubt you that most Jews do so. However, Tom said some Jews don’t. That doesn’t surprise me either for reasons previously given. Religious beliefs are all over the place.
I have read your posts carefully. A couple of posts ago you said “It is more a matter that the Creationist religious people tend to keep the spotlight on the issue of teaching evolution in schools for religious reasons, so that more people are confronted with some reference to evolution over the years”. You distinctly make it sound like Creationist actively merely results in people receiving some exposure to evolution. Whatever you intended, you come across as utterly downplaying the nature of that exposure.
People accept all sorts of scientific evidence without understanding it and even if it is counterintuitive: they just presume that scientists who have studied it probably know what they are talking about. But the difference is with evolution that they are being actively fed misinformation and cleverly constructed superficially plausible but false objections by Creationists.
You would probably say (obviously correctly) that religious Anti-antibioticists (say) couldn’t cause people to deny that antibiotics work because it’s just so obvious that they do, whereas it isn’t so obvious that evolution is correct. Consequently (you might say) it is the nature of evolutionary theory that is the key cause of its denial, not religion.
If that is a correct summation (I hope it is) I disagree or alternatively to the extent you are right, I disagree that you are getting to the heart of the matter. Causation and blame are inexact sciences at the best of times but in my view it is more meaningful to blame those who actively work against understanding than to blame the charactistics of the subject matter. Sure, people might say they doubt evolution because of irreducible complexity, not religion, but who fed them the idea of irreducible complexity and why? If for some reason QM was regularly in the spotlight, but no one was pouring out misinformation about it and cleverly constructed superficially plausible but false objections to it, would people deny it to the level they deny evolution?
To quibble a bit, you expressed another misconception. Yes, evolution occurs over long periods of time, but it also occurs over quite short periods of time. In fact, evolution is happening every time a predator takes out some prey. But, to go beyond what creationists accept, speciation can happen with a human lifetime. Ancient primates evolving into man takes a long time, but two separated populations of rats speciating does not.
^^ that’s a matter of micro and macro thing. I don’t know of any person who denies evolutionary biology 100 per cent, they just may deny the field of human evolution as it is currently presented.
Curiously, the cro magnon and neandertal mystery aid some of the Creationists, no?
Princhester, sure, some Jews don’t believe in evolution, but that’s a minority.
There is no “micro and macro thing” except inside the heads of the creationists. Calling something “microevolution” is just their way of denying evolution when it’s happening right in front of them.
I doubt it. What mystery are you talking about?