Here is an article suggesting that Creationists should be scared of the accelerated human adaptation paper. At first, I would be skeptical, after all, this is microevolution, which Creationists ostensibly accept.1 But the reality is that anti-evolutionary thinking is pretty shallow, most Creationists barely know what they believe aside from the fact that they aren't "descended from monkeys," let alone the details of evolution (aside from canned talking points which they parrot with absolutely no understanding, e.g., "The second law of thermodynamics...."). I bring this up because a friend of mine who is an evangelical Christian student at Pepperdine University IMed me to ask about the acceleration paper. To be short about it his mind was blown away and he was really shocked by the implications and possibility that humans are evolving today at such a rapid rate. Though he's a relatively bright individual he is probably about average in his knowledge of science as far as the typical evangelical goes (he has lately been shifting toward a less literalist interpretation of the Bible). My friend's reaction suggests to me that though Creationists assert that they accept microevolution the model that they are promoting simply results in the inability of many evangelical Christians to comprehend that organisms change over time due to natural selection in the generality. If more Americans lived on farms and saw animal breeding in their day to day life this might not be an issue, but as it is these sorts of biological details have to be imbibed via books in our urban world. And if you reject the academic authorities, well you might never internalize the reality you never experience....
1 - I am one who thinks that the distinction between micro and macro evolution is one of semantic convenience and notation for the most part.
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I imagine they'll also be unhappy with John's discussion of Haldane's dilemma in his Q&A. Oh well.
If you really get into the subject with creationists, they have to admit that either a whole lot of microevolution had to happen in a **very** short time span following the flood. The relatively few "kinds" that were on the ark had to do a whole lot of speciation in order to account for ancient historical records of larger mammals.
yeah, but most creationists don't know this level of detail. just the ones who make it an obsession (very few, perhaps fewer than those obsessed with evolution!).
Creationists don't have scientific beliefs, just contingent strategies for defending their religion against perceived secular goblins. 'Microevolution' is OK when ad hoc-ing how millions of animals fit on Noah's boat, or waving away observed selective effects. But when discussing humans, Creationists scrap this distinction in order to try to gain the antiracist intellectual upperhand. 'Microevolution' suddenly becomes 'evolution' suddenly becomes false. E.g.:
Race theory and eugenics are not accidents, but the logical product of Darwinian thought
Don't paint with too broad a brush, please. Not all Christians reject evolution by any means, and not even all 'evangelicals'.
To expect anyone not educated in the sciences to have a deep understanding of evolution, Christian or not, is expecting too much. I have run into not a few people in other branches of science with a shaky understanding of evolution, but then I don't pretend to follow cosmology at more than a layman's level either.
My own biology training is 20 years in the past, so a lot of the modern genetics is a chore for me to follow. I don't expect others to understand what I don't.
Don't paint with too broad a brush, please. Not all Christians reject evolution by any means, and not even all 'evangelicals'.
what are you talking about? if you read the blog you know that i know the polls very well. don't read between the lines and put sentiments in my mouth, OK? i obviously don't expect typical people to know much science, but if whereof one does not know one must be silent. creationists (a term i specifically used above more than christian) lecture scientists about science all the time. this includes christian scientists like ken miller. i really dislike wasting time responding to comments which address points which i didn't even make.
Well, evolution has always been easy enough to understand for me. I'm still trying to figure out who Cain married.:)
We engineers need special books to understand it, apparently.
Cain was married? I never knew.
Yep, in the book of Jubilees, Cain was cursed, marked by God, and sent to wander the Earth. After he hooks up with is long lost sister, he founded the Kenites. I couldn't remember where I originally eard the story, but it is in Wikipedia.
Really, I was being a little facetious. My point was that I can't understand what is so difficult about understanding evolution, but the holey Bible is taken as fact.
By the way, I recently took my little ones to their first visit to the local natural history museum. As I was introducing my 3 year old to Lucy, a woman declared, "If evolution was real, monkeys would be people by now!"