Things I Did Recently

Author notes

54 - It Brings Out the Flavor

Inkmonkey

on March 30, 2009

I got into an argument recently about evolution, and the more I talked, the more I realized the person I was arguing with didn't actually understand what evolution was or how evidence for it was presented. It's not a simple concept, to be sure, and the sheer scope of the idea is a lot to wrap your mind around. I mean, it's hard enough to visualize time in decades, centuries, or even millennia. But this is something that takes millions and billions of years. That's Waaaaaaaaaay out our scope of reference. Yet, there are so many people who just outright refuse to accept the idea, attacking one or two key points as though that disproves the whole thing. More importantly, these people usually don't really know anything about evolution aside from maybe that horribly misleading "humans used to be monkeys" thing that gets thrown around.

I'm not exactly innocent in this myself. I haven't really made any effort to understand creationism. Is there more to it than just "God made everything the way it is and that's it?" I guess it's just hard for me to accept certain things. I live in a world where science works; where a lot of the mysteries of the world have been explained. I mean, we still don't know exactly why gravity works, but there are people narrowing it down. It's just kind of hard to experiment with, on account of there's too much gravity around us to be able to do much large-scale testing.

I trust carbon dating, is what I guess I'm getting at. And the fossil record. I mean, sometimes dudes put the skeletons together wrong, but if they notice it later they tend to call them on it and start writing something else in the textbooks. I just find the idea that God created everything as it is right now a little hard to accept when you don't have any horse fossils, but you do have a series of small, horselike fossils that gradually get more horselike the closer they are to the surface. I kind of doubt scientists just make this stuff up. I mean, a LOT of dudes have made stuff up, called it science, and tried to make a quick buck off it, but if they're caught it's not like we keep using their books in school.

Okay, this rant has gone on a bit too long. Let me just finish by saying, if you're going to say there's no such thing as evolution, at least know what evolution is. It's hard to successfully argue against anything that you don't actually know anything about.