Albertans Didn't Evolve?
New rules buried in a proposed amendment to Alberta’s human rights legislation that extends rights to homosexuals would require schools to notify parents in advance of “subject matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation.” Parents can then ask for their child to be excluded from the discussion. As to whether or not the theory of evolution by natural selection falls under the category of religion, Alberta’s law-makers can’t seem to decide.
The debate has, however, brought many fundamental religious folks out of the wood work, all decrying their own evolution and promising to indoctrinate their children with the same. There seems to be a huge lack of understanding of what the theory of evolution is, on both sides of the fence. One proponent who’s words I read accused Albertans of “never passing the Neanderthal stage” – it needs to be noted that Neanderthals were but a single branch of Homo, not some “stage” that modern Homo Sapiens “passed”. I also noted an opponent of evolution state that his incredulous stance was based on a lack of evidence for first life, and a lack of evidence for the matter before the big bang – this one is quite bad given that the theory of evolution deals with neither the big bang theory nor the field of abiogenesis.
In all seriousness, and given the fact that evolution (that is, change over time) has built everything you see around you, you people need to educate yourselves. Stop fearing what is, it’s both unbecoming an intelligent human being and embarrassing and limiting for those of us who have taken the time to become knowledgeable about things so very important to who we are. Religious people: lose the religion, it’s holding you back. Anti-religious people: be sure you know what you’re talking about before you start bashing people for their beliefs. You make people like me look badly when all I really want is to help people to understand the elegance and simplicity of Darwin’s theory.
A final note to those “just a theory” folks: the gaps are in the knowledge only – evolution occurs, evolution by natural selection created you, and evolution will continue on, as it must, whether you “believe in it” or not. The theory is a body of knowledge about a given phenomenon based on empirical evidence. The theory of gravity includes the mathematics needed to describe what gravity does but, whether we call it the theory of gravity or the law of downpulledness, the phenomenon occurs.
Evolution is simply change over time. I agree with every creationist here that we simply do not know how life began, and that’s a bummer. I’ll even allow that whatever god you believe in could have been that life-giver (though I’d counter that, given that every single phenomenon we observe is proving to be relatively easy to explain in natural terms, this is less then likely) but the fact of change over a vast amount of time on life, including speciation by means by geological separation, etc, simply happens. We see it throughout time in the fossil record and even observe it in real time in some cases (influenza viruses are a timely example).
I personally don’t understand the objection other then to assume that long periods of bad ideas being crammed into people’s minds from a young age continue to corrupt their logic in the long-term. Of all of the scientific models and theories, the theory of evolution by natural selection is the easiest to understand – it’s nothing but change over time with mutations in genes leading to one or another thing being preferred over another due to natural selection.
