Tuesday, August 30, 2011

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -- Thedosius Dobzhansky

This blog has 82 posts about the evidence for evolution.

Occasionally an evolution denier will visit this blog. Do they ever read and try to understand these 82 posts? No. Never once. They are not interested in scientific evidence. They are here only to show off their very bad reasons for denying reality. Sometimes they are polite but usually they are assholes. Always they demonstrate their total ignorance of what they're complaining about.

They could fix their problem. All they have to do is study the bloody evidence, if not here then somewhere else. On the internet there are thousands of websites that explain the facts of evolutionary biology and they are easy to find with google. But the science deniers are not interested.

Why do Christian assholes and Muslim terrorists prefer magical intelligent design creationism instead of the strongest basic fact of science? There can be only one possible explanation. They're just plain stupid.

The University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne wrote Why Evolution is True which is, in my opinion, the best book about evolution for non-scientists. The book has so many examples of powerful evidence for evolution even experienced biologists would benefit from it. Another important thing about Why Evolution is True is there's nothing tedious in it. The entire book is interesting and easy to read. If you buy only one book about evolution this should be the book you own.

In Why Evolution is True Jerry Coyne asked five good questions about some facts of nature in the section called Palimpsests in Embryos (pages 73 thru 80).

Why do different vertebrates, which wind up looking very different from one another, all begin development looking like a fish embryo?

Why do mammals form their heads and faces from the very same embryonic structures that become the gills of fish?

Why do vertebrate embryos go through such a contorted sequence of changes in the circulatory system?

Why don't human embryos, or lizard embryos, begin development with their adult circulatory systems already in place, rather than making a lot of changes in what developed earlier?

Why does our sequence of development mimic the order of our ancestors (fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal)?

Only evolution can answer these questions. The professional evolution deniers ignore these questions and the amateur evolution deniers have never heard of these questions.

These questions are about facts of nature. Established facts. How to explain these facts? Did the dead Jeebus wave his magic wand to make it look like evolution is true? Or is evolution how the world works?

2 comments:

  1. Cool.
    I was looking for a new book to read and now I have it. I have heard of Coyne before of course, but now I am putting him on my must read list.

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