Evolution is real and the world is actually round.

I have friends of many religious back grounds and many more that are atheist or agnostic.  I have my own personal beliefs that I feel do not fit in anywhere and really I don't feel anyone needs to have them inflicted on them.  What really gets my goat though, is when people use their beliefs to 'justify' trashing science.  It also irks me when people use their religion to OK their behaviour.  I will talk more about that later.

But first why have I started this particular blog?   I came across an image on a social networking site that I regularly use.  It was posted on a page that I regularly receive updates and images of wildlife and sometimes domestic animals in many different guises. The image that was loaded yesterday was this:

My word, rather than this image getting the reaction it deserved such as 'damned right' (in my opinion), it had reactions such as 'language!', 'it would be okay if it didn't contain that awful word', 'this is disgusting, you should remove it' and the worst of all 'if evolution exists why haven't we evolved anymore, because we didn't in the first place'.  WHAT???!!!!  This provoked me to respond and point out that we have been changing over time, but I guess this moron expected us to all have grown two more limbs and have the ability to teleport across time and space just by rubbing our left ear, by now.

How can people seriously question the science of this?  Why do some people think that other species evolve but we don't?  Where is the sense in that?  I know plenty of religious people who can reason evolution and see that their religions, or in particular their books, are not necessarily all fact.  How can they be if they are written by different people.  Take for example the Last Supper.... wasn't the accounts of this all slightly different, because if even that event did take place we are dealing with human perception of said event. How I perceive something isn't necessarily the truth or how another would perceive it.   Just because a book said the world was created in such and such time does not make that book true.  Just because JK Rowling said there was a magical game of quiditch does not mean I am about to try and fly on a broom stick out of my bedroom window in the hope that I can make the team.

What worries me most about this thinking, and in particular when faced with the picture above, is most people are more worried about bad language, or that you know, us scientists are lying to the masses about evolution.  They don't see the message, they concentrate on the wrong things.  We HAVE FUCKED UP.  No doubt about it.  We are still doing so!  Until we get our heads out of the sand and stop worrying about trivial inane nonsense then we will continue to do so.  What is really sad is that above post was indeed removed.  People felt more strongly about the word 'fucked' than they did the actual message.

When people start to recognise that there is evolution at work, that when we intervene in a bad way like habitat destruction just so we can have those nice little homes or those big fat juicy heart attacks on a plate bugers, that 'God' isn't going to just wave a magic wand and it won't just be okay; only when we start to recognise this will progress be made.  That we are and have responsibility to protect.  We need to move on from the line of thinking that the planet is indeed flat and that we can do as we please; as a born again Christian once told me 'I can be as much of a jerk as I want and it's okay 'cause god will forgive me.'  We can't be jerks anymore, we have to be responsible for our actions and be grown up about it.  We have to accept that evolution is indeed part of our life and stop trying to pretend that Santa Clause hid the bones in the earth as some big trick to play on us.