Truth about: Science, #002

If there is one thing I still remember quite vividly from my days at school, it's the reluctance of people to understand the foundations of tools they make use of every single day: from mathematics to chemistry and biology to linguistics, one can only wonder how we use all these mobile phones and personal computers without paying the least attention to grasping the most basic principles that make them work.

Having to admit that I am a bit of a geek, my greatest wish is that humanity will reach the enlightened state of the Homo universalis, where we would devote immense amounts of time in an attempt to put as much and diverse knowledge in our heads.

One can only observe how that might still take a while.

I say that not out of some moral or intellectual high ground; nay, it's the very result of observation: the very people who reject truly understanding science and, yet more chilling, even some great scientists fall easy pray to their immediate reactions, laid out for them by some paradoxical dogma or another.

Science is, of course, a very misunderstood field: despite what so many people have strived for, most of us are not sufficiently educated in its nuances and, in fact, fail miserably when it comes to comprehending simple principles. The education of people in evolution has suffered the most from it.

It is imperative that people understand the basic facts that make a scientific theory up instead of a hypothesis or, even worse, an assumption;a scientific theory must:

1. have explanatory power,
2. have predictive power,
3. and be falsifiable.

When Charles Darwin first presented his case, he was not the first person to advocate the concept of evolution; some people somehow still stick to Lamarckian notions of evolutionary advanced creatures conveniently developing organs, whereas others commonly make pseudoscientific claims as to what a "kind" is, but the truth is that evolution explains the thousands upon thousands of different life forms that have been found on this single planet, has provided the foundation to predict the nature of many viri as well as how isolating a species in different conditions that the norm can lead to the formation of a new species (speciation), which has been observed, and allows for its falsification in many ways, including: "Fossil rabbits in the pre-Cambrian." - a notion which Creationists commonly fight back, even though they are the ones to provide the inspiration for this wondrous comeback made by biologist J. B. S. Haldane. The purported counter of the Cambrian explosion has also been shown to be a bit of a red herring, as the supposedly miniscule amount of time it took for all these species to crop up actually a huge span of time.

Where does that put natural selection, then, when people still commonly believe that the first step in hypothesizing evolution would be observing it? Clearly, these people don't understand that observing evolution would not simply be evidence, but absolute and incontroversible proof. The demand to observe evolution, then, is either ignorant or dishonest: a strawman raise by the equivocation of observation to immediately observable lab studies; and even that is not enough, it seems, for even tests run in a laboratory won't convince many theists.

The problem, I expect, lies in acceptance of a number of notions: there's no Darwinism or Evolutionism; petty term-coinage doesn't make such statements true no matter how much people wish it did. Evolution has been observed and people should get out of their shells and look at the truth as objectively as possible - as hiding from it only turns the common people into Murlocks; and we don't ever want to assume the role of the Eloi, no matter what some preachers suggest. There is no greater ideal in the minds of most of us than raising the consciousness of all humans alike; and it's most revealing how Christians, Muslims, and Jews spread "the good news," but we are supposedly being dogmatic, evangelical, fundamentalist, polemic preachers who mean to impose our "religion" on others...

There is a saying in Greece: "He avoids [the subject] like the Devil does incense!" Frankly, how can we prevent these people from avoiding evolution like the Devil does incense?