Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Out of Asia -NOT- Out of Africa?

tff: "creationist leaders depend on the fact that their followers are intellectually lazy."

da: And you can add to that profoundly and often wilfully ignorant.

tff: The "profoundly" part is a direct consequence of intellectual laziness combined with the "wilfully ignorant" part.

It's an interesting situation - or it would be, if these guys didn't waste so much of people's time.

I recall when I was very young I was very good at basic arithmetic. I could do math much faster in my head than most people could do on a calculator. This was true all the way through HS. I'm very slow now, because I've taken to using a calculator for everything, but there was a time when I could easily multiply 3 digit by 2 digit numbers in my head. Nevertheless, I never actually understood arithmetic. I could do it, but I didn't fully believe it or understand it. It was almost a miracle to me. Much later, in college, when I learned about groups and fields, I felt that I finally was justified in actually believing it.
The thing is, though, in those early years it never occurred to me that all the mathematicians who had ever lived were essentially lying to me or that they were stupid. I just figured that I was not getting it and that if I were patient and persistent that I'd eventually figure it out.

In any case, I realized very early on that I didn't know enough to criticize people who clearly knew more than I did. But this is exactly what creationists are doing - most of them know almost nothing about evolution. Almost all of them LOTS about some strawman version of evolution that their preacher or their parents told them about - almost none of them actually knows anything of consequence on the subject that an actual practicing evoluionary scientist would recognize as a part of the theory. But that's not the weird thing. Everybody's ignorant about something. The weird thing is that these guys INVARIABLY assert that they have "studied evolution" and that they have "researched sufficiently" to come to some conclusions about it - I mean, some of them - many of them - are absolutely convinced that they actually know something about the theory. These people are utterly delusional. And that is interesting in a very weird and disappointing way.