Comment by brightball
4 days ago
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
4 days ago
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
Precisely this.
Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
"The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. "
Not accepting it leads to a profoundly WRONG worldview that bleeds into everyday life in many ways.
Such as? I'm honestly and genuinely curious.
Antibiotic resistance
Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance. Farmers who don't understand evolutionary principles might not recognize the importance of rotating pesticides or implementing refuge areas to prevent resistance from developing.
Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
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It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
> It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
Is it though? Any sources to back that?
From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.