I keep wanting to make a post about Young-Earth Creationism but it is incredibly hard to summarize because it turns out that taking the Bible as a 100% literal description of scientific fact breaks things you wouldn't even think of.

It's the ideology that gets worse the longer you look. On the surface it's "lol evolution isn't real because god created everything" but when you investigate how this world of theirs actually works you get hit with "there is no consistent speed of light," "tigers and housecats are the same species and could interbreed," Noah's flood creating craters on the moon, wasps are literally, MORALLY evil, ongoing denial that any dinosaurs had feathers???, insistence that every carnivore can be vegan, plants not being alive, the whole incest thing, 

Evolution is literally the most well supported theory in science to date and yet creationists are allowed to just. say whatever. and apparently they get published in nature now.

this is why it's a delusion, for the record. evolution at this point is an observable fact - we all saw it happen (COVID19 evolution, the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria, etc) and we have extensive evidence of how it happened in the past (we have the complete evolutionary sequence for both first dinosaur -> bird and hoofed mammal -> whale, among others).

I do not use that word lightly and I use it here because it is the accurate term.

sincerely, a paleontologist who had psychotic symptoms in childhood and I shouldn't have to add that to be taken seriously bc its a breach of my gd damned privacy

🤬

How to tell someone you know nothing about evolution without saying you know nothing about evolution (2/?)

"Whales never walked on land. It's not possible for whales to have evolved! An animal couldn't survive while having limbs that are partly for land and partly for water."

a) We know for a fact that whales used to be landbound because they have an earbone that isn't found on any other animal, meaning we can trace whale evolution by checking if that bone is present in the fossil.

This is the earliest-known animal with the bone that only cetaceans have:

b) Here's Rodhocetus, an early whale:

Its paws still looked like paws for land but would have been too weak to hold its weight out of water.

Just found out that the judge that ruled that creationism was religion, not science, and thus couldn’t be taught as an alternative to evolution in school received so many death threats he needed around the clock US Marshall protection for him and his family.

Because remember kids, if someone doesn’t accept your religion of loving everyone, kill them.

Thoughts on creationist?

I'm going to assume you mean "Creationism".

Now, this might make some of my colleagues in the anthropology sphere upset......but I literally don't care about the existence of Creationists. If someone believes that the Earth is only 6000 years old, or that evolution isn't real, etc, it's really none of my business what they believe. Every culture is entitled to their origin stories, and as long as they're not hurting anyone with their beliefs, it's not my place to try and suppress them.

I believe that the Earth is far old than 6000 years old and that evolution is real. I believe that the universe started from the collision of hydrogen atoms, and that it took millions and billions of years for the Earth to become what it is today. But I also believe that the entity that started everything, that put this process into action and continues to allow the universe to exist- is G-d. For me, learning about science makes me believe in G-d more.

But...there are those that don't believe in a G-d, or don't believe the universe is as old as science says it is. And that's okay. I'm not going to tell Creationists that they're wrong anymore than I'm not going to go to other cultures and say that their creation stories are wrong. As an anthropologist, I respect all cultures and I exist to study and empower them, not to put them down or try to change them.

Now, just like I don't mock Creationist beliefs, I don't believe Creationists should mock mine. I believe we should be able to coexist without science alienating Creationists and without Creationists demonizing science. Ultimately, Truth is relative, and we should be able to respect other people's Truths and expect for our Truths to be respected in return.

I don't seek to make everyone in the world believe in the same things I do, and I hope to live in a world where that is the norm, not the exception.

Judaism's rule against proselytizing for me extends to proselytizing about Western science. I don't do it.

Do you need more proof that Republicans are becoming even more homophobic by the week?

Whenever you hear somebody thinking of sitting out the election or ruminating about wasting a vote on some automatic loser third party, remind them of the insidious evil which the Republican Party has become.

MAGA Mike Johnson is now the highest ranking Republican in the US. He received every single vote of GOP House members, including the alleged moderates, to become House Speaker.

15 Not-Fun Facts About Speaker Mike Johnson

1. He masterminded Trump’s election coup. 2. He's the least-experienced House Speaker in 140 years. 3. He worked for the conservative legal group behind the case that ended Roe v. Wade. 4. He wants to ban abortion nationwide. 5. He blamed abortion for school shootings. 6. He also blamed abortion for Social Security and Medicare cuts. 7. He blamed mass shootings on the teaching of evolution. 8. He fought to make taxpayers fund a Noah’s Ark theme park. 9. He fought to ban same-sex marriage in Louisiana. 10. He led an anti-gay campus movement. 11. He wrote a lot of homophobic op-eds. 12. He introduced a national version of Florida's "Don’t Say Gay" bill. 13. He was an advocate for "covenant marriage," which makes it harder to divorce. 14. He blamed post-Katrina looting on America turning away from God. 15. He doesn't believe in the separation of church and state.

^^^ click the link to New York Magazine just above the list for details.

The 2024 election pits the 17th century against the 21st century. Republicans don't accept any of that newfangled thinking from The Enlightenment.

Just because you don't understand something or you find the implications distasteful that doesn't make it false. Reality is not obliged to make sense to you.

I hear a lot of people from outside the US express surprise at the fact that over 40% of US people believe in a young earth and creationist ideologies overall (including the idea that evolution is a fallacy) and that creationism is even taught in secular schools in some places in the country. Thanks for participating!

one of the weirdest things that, like, creationist wackjobs will say about evolution is that it's "unfalsifiable" or "untestable"

i mean, one, we found evolution through preexisting evidence, that's like trying to disprove a geologist saying that a rock is igneous since they didn't experiment to see if it's igneous, they pointed out that they got the rock out of an ancient lava flow

and secondly, it'd probably be really easy to have an experiment proving it? it'd just take a while

so, imagine you got a big ol population of fruit-eating birds, and cut it in half, one for control, the other for the experiment

so, what you're gonna do to the experimental group is slowly replace the fruits that the birds eat with harder and harder foods, first tougher fruits, then slowly phase in some nuts

the birds' beaks should adapt to the change in food after some generations, and the control birds, still eating fruit, shouldn't change

like, this is how the finches happened, just naturally instead of through humans

https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fpspi0000391

This is an excellent paper that shows disbelief in evolution correlates with bigoted and hateful attitudes. I feel very vindicated in this.

Understanding the world leads to understanding each other. Evolution isn't something to believe: it is something that has and continues to happen. You either acknowledge reality, or you don't.

We are all connected. This planet is one system, and we are all linked together. The end.

Q: You call them The Great Demotions, all of these thoughts which we have so cherished. Well, guess what? The universe doesn't revolve around the Earth. And guess what? The Earth isn't the only world out there. Are we still clinging to any conceits? Such as those which led to the Great Demotions over the past centuries?

Carl Sagan: Well, you would think we should be over it. But we still are battling, at least in the United States, the conceit that humans are separate from the rest of nature. That an unbridgeable gap separates humans from the other plants and animals. That we are the particular beneficiaries of the concern of the creator of the universe, more than any of the 10 million other species of plants and animals on the Earth. When, in fact, all of our vaunted uniqueness turns out to be shared. with other animals, especially with chimpanzees, our closest relatives with whom we share 99.6% of our hereditary material.

Another area in which the demotion is being fought is the idea that there are no other planets beyond those in our own solar system. But in the last 15 years, the most marvelous set of findings has occurred in which it now appears that planets are an ordinary, probably inevitable accompaniment of star formation, and that almost every young star, like the Sun in the early stages of formation, is surrounded by this flat disc of gas and dust over which the planets were formed. And we now have the first bona fide real planetary system around a very unlikely object, a particular pulsar called 1257 plus 12. And the technology is just about to reach out and find whatever planetary systems there are nearby.

[ Note: As of September 2023, there are 5514 confirmed exoplanets in 4107 planetary systems. ]

And a third one is the idea that even if there are an enormous number of planets, only ours has life and intelligence. And there the story is open. We send spacecraft to other planets like Mars to see if there are any simple forms of life. We use radio telescopes to see if messages are being sent to us by civilizations on planets of other stars. So far, although there've been some very curious, tantalizing findings in both of those approaches, we have found nothing definitive, unambiguous evidence for extraterrestrial life. And the debate is still open.

In our ignorance, the geocentrists still find hope.

==

When their methods are so unreliable, hope is all they have.

New Zealand's new PM is a creationist, an ultra-conservative, ultra-right Christian who believes the world is 6000 years old.

Another WTF is wrong with people? moment...