A while ago a Gallup poll confirmed once again that only about one third of all Americans believe that evolution is a fact. 45% of Americans seriously believe there was no evolution, and a third of all Americans believe that the bible is the literal, infallible word of God, describing word for word how mankind came to be… without evolution.

This poll made its rounds all over the international media, and once again dumb Americans are a laughing stock around the world. How embarrassing:

Creationism and the U.S.

A craziness difficult to understand for Europeans

[…]

Within the United States the Deep South has the poorest standardized test scores. Among industrialized nations the U.S. consistently ranks toward the bottom on most scales, even while spending more than average.

[…]

Textbook companies sell different textbooks in different states – it’s big business. The tragic result usually has been textbooks of incredibly low quality, like described by Richard Feynman and later published as a chapter in his autobiographical book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”. And, of course, the creationists. As part of the political “religious right” they have in recent decades exerted considerable influence as when Reagan made a campaign promise to abolish the federal Department of Education. All of these political forces work toward keeping the educational system decentralized, over-ruling the widely-held public sense of badly needed reform, and resulting in creationism as a persistent issue in the United States.

Since this topic will surely cause fundamentalist christian nutjobs to get their panties in a knot, let me “pre-empt” by responding to a few typical christian fundamentalist misconceptions:

Q: Evolution is just a theory, and can’t be verified.

A: Wrong. A scientist’s definition of a “theory” is different from the colloquial meaning of the word theory. The biological process of evolution is a provable, verifiable fact. Go read up on pet breeding for example. For centuries dog breeders have used the concept of evolution and natural selection to make a living. American pitbulls are a human-made race of dogs, evolved from British bulldogs. Same goes for dalmatians and hundreds of other dog breeds. Almost all modern dog races are man-made. Breeders have selected specific animals to enforce certain traits and actively manipulated their evolution. So evolution is not just a theory, it’s solid fact, and there’s a whole bunch of people who actually earn a living by using the principles of evolution on a daily basis.

Or go to the pet store and ask them about parakeets. They will explain to you that all parakeets in nature are green and yellow. The white and blue parakeets are man-made. Breeders actively interfered in the evolution of parakeets and created white and blue birds by breeding specimen with certain traits and reinforced those traits through selective breeding in the subsequent generations.

Need more proof? Fine. Ask any doctor about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Bacteria evolve and suddenly become immune to the latest antibiotic. The same evolutionary principle can be observed in poison-resistant rats.

Evolution is not just a theory, it’s a fact that can be verified by anyone. Creationism denies that species change. Creationism claims that every species on earth today was exactly the way it is today way back when god supposedly created earth. Every pet breeder can confirm that this is not true.

If you admit that species do in fact change, you are admitting that evolution is real, and creationism is nonsense.

This is usually the point where christian fundamentalists ask the monkey question:

Q: If we evolved from chimps, how come I’ve never seen a chimp give birth to a human?

A: We did not evolve from apes. Apes and humans have common ancestors. We are evolutionary cousins, and about 95% of human and ape DNA is identical.

Creationists are similar to Flat Earthers. These days, only a complete fool would believe that the earth is flat. In order to believe that, you must be ignorant of all the satellite photos that prove that the earth is round. Same goes for creationism. It only sounds believable if you lack actual knowledge about evolution.

For someone who understands that evolution is all around us and we can observe evolution with our very own eyes, it’s impossible to deny that evolution is real.

That’s one of the reasons why they say that ”knowledge is the enemy of faith.” The more knowledge you have, the less room there is for silly superstitions. Once you understand how things ACTUALLY work, there’s not much room left for make-believe.

If American schools are going to teach creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution, then they might as well teach the “stork theory” as an alternative to sexual reproduction.

Tags: evolution creationism neanderthals education stupid people pet breeding intelligent design religion christian fundamentalism

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.