So what is it with Charles Johnson and evolution? He’s like starting a “We Hate Creationists” club. To my knowledge, Charles Johnson does not work in any are of biological sciences. He has never done any scientific work on evolution so instead it’s just something he read about and decided it was really really important for everyone else to believe. Know who else reads something and decides it’s super important for everyone else to believe it?
Religious people.
Science is not a belief system. It is not mindlessly citing facts you’re told. It’s is a process. And either you use that process or you don’t… and if you don’t, there is no shame in it. It’s like we’ve put a morality behind citing specific bits of scientific data. If you went out and said, “I believe the sun revolves around the earth!” that would horrify people, but how many people have ever actually in their lives said to themselves, “I really would have screwed that up if I didn’t know the earth revolves around the sun.” Even a fact as fundamental as that is just trivial knowledge to the vast majority of people; they don’t really know the truth of the matter because they’ve never applied it. If Charles Johnson wants to help the perception of science, he should spend more time explaining why it’s completely irrelevant what he and 99.9% of the public think about evolution. It’s not science until you do something with it (and reading a lot and saying to yourself, “Here’s what I think” doesn’t count, otherwise reading the Harry Potter series and coming up with theories on Dumbledore sexuality would be science).
I, like most people, had inaccurate, out of date science text books in elementary school, and that has had absolutely no ill effect in my adult life because I don’t work in any of those sciences. If I did work in those sciences, I assume I would learn about them in college and the lab and not rely on what I was taught in fifth grade. It would be nice if instead of teaching our kids a bunch of trivia and calling it science there was more focus on the actual process of scientifically evaluating data. How many people even know how to approach the science on Global Warming if they wanted to evaluate it? Most people think you just decide to believe it or you don’t, which is where science is for most people today: A belief system, with an intricate mythology. If we want science to be of value, we need to spend more time helping people distinguishing it from a religion, and hunting down heretics probably won’t help that.
I might as well end this with a nice useless factoid. Ever been told that dinosaurs died out 65.5 million years ago? That is a well known, scientifically inaccurate statement. Scientific consensus is that humans and dinosaurs have lived at the same time within the past few thousand years, much like young-earth creationists claim.*
* Which reminds me: When I say on IMAO that our military requires dinosaurs with rocket launchers, I mean non-avian dinosaurs; the other kind would just be silly.
