30-Mar-2012, 12:36 PM
I think people that deny evolution usually accept the validity of genetics, given how important and useful it is to modern science. They also accept the validity of the notion that traits are heritable, and that over time traits that give improved fitness become dominant due to natural selection, and possibly even that mutations can create entirely new phenotype, and that separated populations will diverge genetically due to genetic drift.
What they deny is the "long-term" effect that these things have, that over a large enough timespan, these changes can cause new species to form, and that the billions of years that life has been known to exist on Earth is a long enough time for the complexity of modern lifeforms and their equally complex interrelationships to have formed from very simplistic organisms, themselves formed from a stew of chemicals in the ancient oceans. Why they express disbelief of this when they accept so much else of modern science, despite the fact that evolution is a central tenet of biology underpinning so much of what we know, seems to me to come from a tendency to see humanity as singled out, and apart from the rest of life on Earth. This hubris is at least partly due to religion, and can be seen as part of a general mistrust of science which has been shown to have grown significantly over the last 30 years amongst conservatives, particularly the religious.
The worst effect that this could have with regards to evolution is that fewer people get involved in biology and the state of science suffers in the countries where these beliefs are common, whereas with climate change it could prevent concerted global action before the point that we can no longer prevent the worst disaster of the coming decades from happening. This point will probably occur before the effects of climate change are no longer able to be ignored.
What they deny is the "long-term" effect that these things have, that over a large enough timespan, these changes can cause new species to form, and that the billions of years that life has been known to exist on Earth is a long enough time for the complexity of modern lifeforms and their equally complex interrelationships to have formed from very simplistic organisms, themselves formed from a stew of chemicals in the ancient oceans. Why they express disbelief of this when they accept so much else of modern science, despite the fact that evolution is a central tenet of biology underpinning so much of what we know, seems to me to come from a tendency to see humanity as singled out, and apart from the rest of life on Earth. This hubris is at least partly due to religion, and can be seen as part of a general mistrust of science which has been shown to have grown significantly over the last 30 years amongst conservatives, particularly the religious.
The worst effect that this could have with regards to evolution is that fewer people get involved in biology and the state of science suffers in the countries where these beliefs are common, whereas with climate change it could prevent concerted global action before the point that we can no longer prevent the worst disaster of the coming decades from happening. This point will probably occur before the effects of climate change are no longer able to be ignored.