Why do so many people think evolution is nonsense?

Post Reply New Topic

Evolution has been demonstrated as real lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of times by science. So why do so many people still think that evolution is a bunch of nonsense?

I've never met anyone personally that thinks evolution is nonsense. Or is this another joke thread with a hidden meaning? I'm not good at reading hidden meanings.

Ignorance and religious indoctrination.

There's quite a large population of Americans that reject evolution and embrace creationism. These people are.. not so bright, IMO.

Not sure why both can't be true tbh. If God(s) created everything, including the building blocks of life, then God(s) created the conditions for evolution to occur and then it did. There, no everyone can be happy.

Because they're die-hard Christians with the unshakable belief that their Sky Daddy is going to send his son down to Earth any day now, and save all the people who don't believe in evolution, have a profound hatred of science and technology, refused to get their covid vaccines, and didn't "choose" to be gay from the apocalypse.

Goldy beat me to it.

OK, I got it now. It's all about religion again? I didn't know that religion and evolution had such a hostile relationship.

Believe it or not, there was a time when people would be put to death for declaring that Earth orbited the sun, instead of agreeing with the church's official geocentric doctrine.

Is the popular story about the Galileo thing entirely correct?
Is this which says that story is not entirely correct, itself correct?


The Galileo Controversy

It is commonly believed that the Catholic Church persecuted Galileo for abandoning the geocentric (earth-at-the-center) view of the solar system for the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view.

The Galileo case, for many anti-Catholics, is thought to prove that the Church abhors science, refuses to abandon outdated teachings, and is not infallible. For Catholics, the episode is often an embarrassment. It shouldn’t be.

This tract provides a brief explanation of what really happened to Galileo.

https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-galileo-controversy

"
... Clinging to Tradition?

Anti-Catholics often cite the Galileo case as an example of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching, and clinging to a “tradition.” They fail to realize that the judges who presided over Galileo’s case were not the only people who held to a geocentric view of the universe. It was the received view among scientists at the time.

Centuries earlier, Aristotle had refuted heliocentrism, and by Galileo’s time, nearly every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus refrained from publishing his heliocentric theory for some time, not out of fear of censure from the Church but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues.

Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentrism. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. It would require more sensitive measuring equipment than was available in Galileo’s day to document the existence of these shifts, given the stars’ great distance. Until then, the available evidence suggested that the stars were fixed in their positions relative to the earth, and, thus, that the earth and the stars were not moving in space—only the sun, moon, and planets were. Most astronomers in that day were not convinced of the great distance of the stars that the Copernican theory required to account for the absence of observable parallax shifts. This is one of the main reasons why the respected astronomer Tycho Brahe refused to adopt Copernicus fully.

Galileo could have safely proposed heliocentrism as a theory or a method to more simply account for the planets’ motions. His problem arose when he stopped proposing it as a scientific theory and began proclaiming it as truth, though there was no conclusive proof of it at the time. Even so, Galileo would not have been in so much trouble if he had chosen to stay within the realm of science and out of the realm of theology.
...
"

See also:

Copernicus and the Church: What the history books don't say
Many believe the heliocentric theory was immediately rejected by the Catholic Church. However, the relationship between the Church and Copernicus is much more complex than popular historical narratives suggest.
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/20 ... -don-t-say

"
... "Yes, he delayed because he feared an adverse reaction — not from Church leaders, but from his fellow scholars. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Copernicus was worried about a hostile reaction from the Church.”

Despite the resistance to Copernican views in the future, the astronomer’s life was one immersed in religion. And while it may be forgotten, it is under the auspices of the Catholic Church that Copernicus made his theories known.
"

So two different species can't have offspring together except for some rare cases..and they turn out to be sterile..due to the mismatch in chromosomes.

So for...lets say monkeys-> humans
a child must have been born with a different number of chromosomes at some point..so who did he have babies with?

I don't get how new species arrive if a mutant child would be incompatible with all living beings due to his number of chromosomes.

God making humans and animals and everything else is more simple to imagine, but is just fantasy. There is no such thing as God, if there was then who created him? And everyone has seen the sun and the moon, and other forms of matter in the universe has been proven by telescopes, but nobody has ever seen God.

The Earth formed very gradually and is still forming today as we speak. But evolution can be tricky to imagine, like how come some animals still look the same after being around for thousands, if not millions, of years, while us humans seemed to have evolved quite drastically just over a few thousand years and we seem to be the only animals on Earth that have formed enough intelligence to build advanced society and take over (well, destroy) the planet.

It's mind-blowing.

Because ... its "evolution". NOT "revolution".

The word "evolution" means "gradual change over time". Not suddenly morphing from horses to zebras over night (that would be "revolution", not evolution). One species gradually evolves into another species over a large expanse of time gradually acquiring genetic changes over many generations. A member of a species doesnt just give birth to a fully evolved member of another species in one generation.

Some time back in time horses and zebras had a common horse-like ancestor. One population ended up living on the bushveld in Africa, the other in the cold steppes of central asia. Gradually over thousands of generations the first population evolved a slightly smaller size, and evolved the right color pattern (black an white stripes) to blend into the local vegitation of the tall grass of the African savannah. The second population got slightly larger (in order to retain heat in the colder northern hemisphere climate), and retained or evolved a generalized gray or brown coat to blend in with dry short grass and other features of the landscape of its own local environment. And you ended up with two different, but related species after a million years. You didnt have a zebra mare give birth to horse colt, or a horse mare give birth to fully evolved zebra. Both kinds of animal just gradually accumulated their respective distinctive traits over time-as the two populations evolved seperately in different locations.

Christians reject systems of ideas that do not allow for the supernatural as part of the picture. Most of the population of the world (including, but not limited to, Christians, Jews, and followers of Mohamed) do believe in the supernatural. Evolution to some seems to fall into that category (though some see it as a natural process governed by, and used by God).

Also, after WWI and WWII some people were so disillusioned by the results of scientific advancement and the industrial revolution (as compared to the promise of science) that they rejected not only war but any ideas that went with it, including the scientist as “philosopher-king”. Science in the form of nuclear bombs but also tanks (powered by metallurgy and internal combustion engines) aircraft and bigger and better guns (powered by knowledge of ballistic motion and chemistry). Millions of people died. If you lived through this you may be forgiven for loosing faith in science as always being good and scientists as always being right.

Interestingly, some people reject religion for exactly the same reason: they feel that the bad things about WWI and WWII were either caused by, (or allowed by) religious people.

The truth is the history attributed to the scientific theory of evolution happened before any of us were around to see it happen.

Alternate explanations have the same challenge.

Either way requires a lot of faith in something beyond one’s own personal experience. Some put their faith in some facts and experiences and “trustworthy witnesses” while others choose other facts and experiences and other “trustworthy witnesses”.

People who accept one side of the argument and reject the other are often choosing based on experience and choosing to trust and reject specific witnesses.

It think that you're a little off target. It IS indeed mind blowing how much are species has changed in culture and in technology since the Paleolithic. And it is indeed scary how much our one species is now able to alter the planet. Like a geologic force.

But that huge cultural change coincided with very LITTLE change in our physical bodies.

Actually humans have NOT changed much in physical appearance in the last 200 thousand years. Thats when modern type humans first appeared in Africa. There were rival human species back then like the Neanderthals and the Denisovians. Both of those extinct types of human look different from us anatomical moderns (of then or now). But even Neanderthals and Denisovians didnt look all of THAT radically different from anatomically modern humans.

Human culture and technology HAS changed at a breakneck spead since the Paleolithic. But our physical bodies have not changed much at all since the Paleolithic.

Ok horses and zebras are a good example. Mountain zebras have 32 chromosomes,horses have 64. That's a huge difference.
So one transitional form must have been born at some point..if evolution is true..how many chromosomes did that one transitional form creature have?
Let's say 62 for arguments sake. So who did this transitional form creature mate with? Noone... because they would have been the only one on the entire earth due to how rare it is for such a creature to exist. 'millions of years' isn't a good answer.

I already explained it above. Your point doesnt change what I said. Despite this common fallacious argument that they fed you in sunday school.

I already said that it was gradual over many generations.

The ancestrial common ancestor population had X number of chromosomes. One day a colt had either X plus one, or X minus one. So it was still able to mate with others of its generation because the change was not radical . But as the populations became isolated from each other the gradual changes accumulated. So a million years later the two isolation populations had changed enough for there to be a radical difference in the number of chromosomes. And other traits that would prevent interbreeding if the two populations were to become intermixed again.