Yopaz said:
I long for the day when people stop confusing random mutation with evolution. It's an extremely minor part of evolution in the big picture. EXTREMELY minor. It's one of the mechanisms that give rise to variation. I can understand that people don't believe in evolution because people who are certain that they understand it but don't explain it wrong and make it sound illogical. I have studied evolutionary biology at a university level. That was when it dawned upon me that I never have understood evolution and I probably never will because it's infinitely more complicated than I imagined.
To be fair, the basic idea and mechanisms of evolution are very simple and intuitive. Living organism give birth to offspring that are slightly different form them -> The difference may be beneficial, neutral or detrimental -> The ones with beneficial traits have a better chance of surviving in their environment and procreate -> Their offspring inherit the beneficial trait, but they are also slightly different from their parents in a beneficial/neutral/detrimental way -> Rinse and repeat -> The small changes add up over time to emphasize the beneficial traits while the detrimental traits die out -> The later generations are becoming different and more adapted to their environment than the first generation was -> Speciation.
Sure, the ways by which it works are complex. Individual variation, mutation, genetic drift, gene-multiplication, cross-breeding, etc. etc. etc. These are all the technical details that everyday people don't really need to concern themselves with. However, the fact that evolution exists and that it is an observable, proven fact that the theory of evolution perfectly describes is really not all that complicated.
The reason why people think it's complicated and why you still hear all those insane, fallacious "proofs" that evolution is wrong is not because the everyday people don't understand it, but because religious apologists (and the politicians they back) don't
want people to understand them. Ken Ham (the founder of the creationist museum who just recently got obliterated by Bill Nye in a debate), Ray Comfort (the man who declared that the banana, a fruit that was bred to the point it didn't even resemble its original in any shape or form, was the proof of god as it is perfectly shaped for human consumption), or Eric Hovind (a demagogue who repeatedly got his arguments picked apart by elementary-schoolers during his "lectures").
These are the people, among others, who still advocate that the earth is young, that evolution and atheism is a religion, that evolution is random chance and is like a hurricane assembling a plane, and it doesn't matter how many times you correct them or disprove their claims. These disingenuous idiots are the reason why America is scientifically illiterate, not the faults of the education system. At least the schools don't misinform you in purpose and present fairy-tales as fact.
So, why do people listen to them instead of scientists? Because they have better PR. Their answers are more reassuring and easier to digest. For example, for me it is complete nonsense to even try to imagine that some unprovable deity created everything from nothing, partly because it's nonsense, and partly because I have read so many other creation stories that I really can't see how one can consider all those fiction but their particular one true. However, for someone who grew up in a religious community, believing that is part of who they are. They don't logically question it. Therefore, for them anything that doesn't involve said god is automatically suspicious and if said thing is complicated, like science, they rather shut it out than try to make sense of it themselves in fear that it would rock their comfortable world-view.
I mean, have you wondered why apologists only attack things like abiogenesis, evolution and the Big Band theory instead of, say, the germ theory that fuels their health-care or the electromagnetic theory that fuels the technology the use every day? They are science, use the same scientific method, and yet no one wants to "teach the controversy" about them or argues against them in public. Why? Because these are not directly against the world-view of these people while evolution and the others are, and this makes them uneasy as it breaks down their convenient little world where believing in an invisible being guarantees eternal bliss for you while all the people you don't like would go and burn in a fiery pit of pain.
And that is where apologists come in, people who use their false analogies and weasel-words and fallacies to "prove" that the scientific viewpoint is wrong, and people eat it all up since they are already used to believing in silly things in the same framework and for them it is still better than trying to get out and understand the scientific method and actually read up on it. It frankly disturbs me and makes me really sad.
