This is one of best explanations for why it's ridiculous to say "evolution is just a theory". The evolution deniers of Idiot America do not understand because they're uneducated morons. This was at the Dover trial in 2005.

Q. Dr. Miller, isn't evolution just a theory?

A. Evolution is just a theory, in the same way that the atomic theory of matter is just a theory, the Copernican theory of the solar system is just a theory, or the germ theory of disease is just a theory. But theories, as I emphasized earlier, are not hunches, they're not unproven speculation. Theories are systems of explanations which are strongly supported by factual observations and which explain whole sets of facts and experimental results.

Q. And how do you distinguish, say, a theory from a fact?

A. A fact is a repeatable, verifiable observation or a result. So, for example, in the earlier demonstratives I showed, it is a fact that there is an altered initiator sequence on the beta-globin pseudogene. It's also a fact that there are five working copies of this gene on Chromosome Number 11. All of these are facts. We can test them, we can verify them, we can put them together.

But facts by themselves don't tell us a whole lot. A very famous biologist once said that without theories to tie them together, biology is just stamp collecting. And what they meant by that was that the production of isolated individual facts is unimportant unless you can tie all those facts together in an explanatory framework, and what a theory is is just such a mechanism.

So evolutionary theory takes the sorts of facts that I have pointed out in the last few slides that the Court has looked at and ties them into a coherent whole by common explanation, for example, by the hypothesis of common descent.

Q. So the term "theory" has a particular meaning within science distinct from everyday usage?

A. Absolutely. And when we're out on the street and we say, I have a theory on what the best way to drive to Pittsburgh is given the traffic or I have a theory on whether or not it's going to rain this afternoon, we mean, in ordinary conversation, a hunch, speculation, a guess.

When we say "theory" in science, we mean a broad, overarching, explanatory explanation that's very strongly supported by fact and by factual evidence and that ties all of this together in an explanatory framework that helps us make testable predictions and testable hypotheses. And if it doesn't do that, it's not a scientific theory.

Q. And is your understanding of theory and fact, as those terms are used in science, reflected by the scientific community?

A. Oh, I think it's fair to say that the understanding that I've expressed here in the Court today is exactly the understanding possessed by the members of the scientific community elsewhere.

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There is a lot of interesting stuff about evolution at this website:

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 1 (September 26), AM Session, Part 2

15 years ago. The Dover Trial. Christian assholes were trying to throw out the teaching of evolution. Christians are scum. There was a trial. The assholes for Jeebus lost. This is what Ken Miller said about human Chromosome 2. I never met a Christian who wasn't a stupid fucking asshole.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day1am2.html

Q. Could you give us another example?

A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.

We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.

Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?

Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.

Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.

Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.

Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.

And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.

Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.

And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.

Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.

And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.

And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.

Somebody with the internet name "Nixelplix" copied & pasted lots of evolution stuff from this blog and that's a good thing. That's what this blog is for.

https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/creationish-vs-evolutionism-be-polite.1046605/page-23

https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/creationish-vs-evolutionism-be-polite.1046605/page-24

To get this one I had to write down an entire Ken Miller speech which before could only be listened to:

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I believe in evolution. In America that's a controversial statement. More than half of us reject the theory of evolution, and for some, it's not only wrong, but the source of nearly everything that's wrong with society today. But to a biologist like me evolution isn't politics or sociology. It's a scientific idea. And it might just be the best scientific idea ever.

Darwin's great insight was that the living world today holds the key to our biological past. The fact that he worked in an age before genetics, before the discovery of radioactivity, before the identification of even a single pre-human fossil, makes his work that much more remarkable. Darwin didn't know about the gene, but today we trace the ways in which genes themselves produce evolutionary change. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but today we follow the course of evolution thru our own DNA and the story is unmistakable. Like everything else on this planet, we evolved.

The objections often raised against evolution, like the age of the earth, or their so called gaps in the fossil record, are remarkably easy to answer. And I've done that many times, in books and lectures and twice, even in a federal court. But the evidence isn't what really bothers most Americans about evolution. What bugs them is that evolution says something they just don't want to hear. Namely, that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it, or more accurately, we emerged with it. To them that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, our existence is without purpose, meaning, or value. My concern for those who hold that view, isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology, it's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet, and even this beautiful little state, from the deep forests of Hope Valley to the rich aquatic life of Narragansett Bay.

Understanding that doesn't demean human life, it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.

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Ken Miller, when he's not defending the established truth of evolution, is a Catholic.

Real Catholics have to believe in the magical resurrection of the Magic Jeebus Man. Believing that bullshit requires extreme stupidity, so it would be impossible for Miller to believe any of it, and I don't think he ever talked about it.

I think he pretends to be a Catholic because it helps him sell books. If he really believes in a Magic Man, then he believes in a god fairy who never had to wave its magic wand.

It would be impossible for an honest person who isn't insane to accept evolution and still think there's a magical creature hiding somewhere in the universe.

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The 2 links I provided are worth looking at.

At least one wimpy atheist complained about people who ridicule religious fucktards, as if everyone should suck up to extreme stupidity. I have zero respect for wimps.

Google Search by voice: YouTube - Human Chromosome Two

This is one of many smoking-gun-evidences for evolution. If an evolution denier (someone who believes in magical creationism) watched these 3 videos, then he or she would have to admit we share an ancestor with chimpanzees, unless the person is too fucking dense to understand anything.

"The phases through which chromosomes replicate, divide, shuffle, and recombine are imperfect, as DNA is subject to random mutations. Mutations do not always produce harmful outcomes. In fact, many mutations are thought to be neutral, and some even give rise to beneficial traits. To corroborate Darwin's theory, scientists would need to find a valid explanation for why a chromosome pair is missing in humans that is present in apes."

Chromosome 2 - What separates chimps from humans?

Ken Miller Human Chromosome 2 Genome

Ken Miller on Human Evolution

Also, I recommend Google search - human chromosome 2

Also, I recommend this post in this blog at December 4, 2010 - Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q

From a June 26, 2007 New York Times science article: Why the "soul" fantasy is fucking ridiculous.

This New York Times article is about the moronic "soul" fantasy and why it isn't real.

Near the end of the article, there is, unfortunately, some dishonest bullshit from Ken Miller who either pretends to be a Catholic fucktard to sell his god-soaked books, or he is fucking insane. Take your pick.

Miller is a brilliant biologist but he disgraces his profession. I have zero tolerance for anyone who thinks or pretends a Magic Man is real. This is the 21st century FFS.

SCIENCE

Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force

By CORNELIA DEAN

JUNE 26, 2007

In 1950, in a letter to bishops, Pope Pius XII took up the issue of evolution. The Roman Catholic Church does not necessarily object to the study of evolution as far as it relates to physical traits, he wrote in the encyclical, Humani Generis. But he added, “Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”

Pope John Paul II made much the same point in 1996, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an advisory group to the Vatican. Although he noted that in the intervening years evolution had become “more than a hypothesis,” he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was “incompatible with the truth about man.”

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers, particularly in the United States, the findings show the error, even wickedness, of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious faith, which he has likened to a disease. And among evolutionary psychologists, religious faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits that contribute to survival and reproduction.

Nevertheless, the idea of a divinely inspired soul will not be put aside. To cite just one example, when 10 Republican presidential candidates were asked at a debate last month if there was anyone among them who did not believe in evolution, 3 raised their hands. One of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, explained later in an op-ed article in this newspaper that he did not reject all evolutionary theory. But he added, “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.”

That is the nub of the issue, according to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul. Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, she writes in her book “Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?” (Cambridge, 2006). Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their “strategic location” in creation.

Another theologian who has written widely on the issue, John F. Haught of Georgetown University, said in an interview that “for many Americans the only way to preserve the discontinuity that’s implied in the notion of a soul, a distinct soul, is to deny evolution,” which he said was “unfortunate.”

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth.

For Dr. Murphy and Dr. Haught, though, people make a mistake when they assume that people can be “ensouled” only if other creatures are soulless.

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes — or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

Therefore, she writes, it is “faulty” reasoning to want to distinguish people from the rest of creation. She and Dr. Haught cite the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian who, Dr. Haught said, “spoke of a vegetative and animal soul along with the human soul.”

Dr. Haught, who testified for the American Civil Liberties Union when it successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in the science classrooms of Dover, Pa., said, “The way I look at it, instead of eliminating the notion of a human soul in order to make us humans fit seamlessly into the rest of nature, it’s wiser to recognize that there is something analogous to soul in all living beings.”

Does this mean, say, that Australopithecus afarensis, the proto-human famously exemplified by the fossil skeleton known as Lucy, had a soul? He paused and then said: “I think so, yes. I think all of our hominid ancestors were ensouled in some way, but that does not rule out the possibility that as evolution continues, the shape of the soul can vary just as it does from individual to individual.”

Will this idea catch on? “It’s not something you hear in the suburban pulpit,” said Dr. Haught, a Roman Catholic whose book “God After Darwin” (Westview Press, 2000) is being reissued this year. “This is out of vogue in the modern world because the philosopher Descartes made such a distinction between mind and matter. He placed the whole animal world on the side of matter, which is essentially mindless.”

Dr. Haught said it could be difficult to discuss the soul and evolution because it was one of many issues in which philosophical thinking was not keeping up with fast-moving science. “The theology itself is still in process,” he said.

For scientists who are people of faith, like Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, asking about the science of the soul is pointless, in a way, because it is not a subject science can address. “It is not physical and investigateable in the world of science,” he said.

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

Dr. Miller, who also testified in the Dover case, said he spoke often at college campuses and elsewhere and was regularly asked, “What do you say as a scientist about the soul?” His answer, he said, is always the same: “As a scientist, I have nothing to say about the soul. It’s not a scientific idea.”

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Ken Miller, molecular biologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, gave this speech several years ago. It's about evolution.

I believe in evolution. In America that's a controversial statement. More than half of us reject the theory of evolution, and for some, it's not only wrong, but the source of nearly everything that's wrong with society today. But to a biologist like me evolution isn't politics or sociology. It's a scientific idea. And it might just be the best scientific idea ever.

Darwin's great insight was that the living world today holds the key to our biological past. The fact that he worked in an age before genetics, before the discovery of radioactivity, before the identification of even a single pre-human fossil, makes his work that much more remarkable. Darwin didn't know about the gene, but today we trace the ways in which genes themselves produce evolutionary change. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but today we follow the course of evolution thru our own DNA and the story is unmistakable. Like everything else on this planet, we evolved.

The objections often raised against evolution, like the age of the earth, or their so called gaps in the fossil record, are remarkably easy to answer. And I've done that many times, in books and lectures and twice, even in a federal court. But the evidence isn't what really bothers most Americans about evolution. What bugs them is that evolution says something they just don't want to hear. Namely, that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it, or more accurately, we emerged with it. To them that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, our existence is without purpose, meaning, or value. My concern for those who hold that view, isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology, it's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet, and even this beautiful little state, from the deep forests of Hope Valley to the rich aquatic life of Narragansett Bay.

Understanding that doesn't demean human life, it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.

Ken Miller at the 2005 Dover Trial explains why Human Chromosome Two is "lead-pipe evidence" that shows we share an ancestor with chimpanzee apes. I showed this to some Christian creationist fucktards, and of course they refused to understand. Zero effort to learn anything. Stupid can't be fixed. Here it is. It's very interesting.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day1am2.html

Q. Could you give us another example?

A. Sure, I'm very happy to. The next slide, this is another test of the evolutionary hypothesis of common ancestry.

We have, as I'm sure most people know, 46 chromosomes in our human cells. That means we have 23 pairs of chromosomes because you get 23 from mom and you get 23 from dad, so we've all got 46 total. We've got 23 pairs.

Now, there's no possibility that that common ancestry which would have had 48 chromosomes because the other three species have 48, there's no possibility the chromosome could have just got lost or thrown away. The chromosome has so much genetic information on it that the loss of a whole chromosome would probably be fatal. So that's not a hypothesis. Now, the curious thing about the great apes is they have more. They have, as you can see from the slide, 48 chromosomes, which means they have 24 pairs. Now, what that means, Mr. Walczak, is that you and I, in a sense, are missing a chromosome, we're missing a pair of chromosomes. And the question is, if evolution is right about this common ancestry idea, where did the chromosome go?

Therefore, evolution makes a testable prediction, and that is, somewhere in the human genome we've got to be able to find a human chromosome that actually shows the point at which two of these common ancestors were pasted together. We ought to be able to find a piece of Scotch tape holding together two chromosomes so that our 24 pairs -- one of them was pasted together to form just 23. And if we can't find that, then the hypothesis of common ancestry is wrong and evolution is mistaken.

Go to the next slide. Now, the prediction is even better than that. And the reason for that is chromosomes themselves have little genetic markers in their middles and on their ends. They have DNA sequences, which I've highlighted in here, called telomeres that exist on the edges of the chromosomes.

Then they have special DNA sequences at the center called centromeres, which I've highlighted in red. Centromeres are really important because that's where the chromosomes are separated when a cell divides. If you don't have a centromere, you're in really big trouble.

Now, if one of our chromosomes, as evolution predicts, really was formed by the fusion of two chromosomes, what we should find is in that human chromosome, we should find those telomere sequences which belong at the ends, but we should find them in the middle. Sort of like the seam at which you've glued two things together, it should still be there.

And we should also find that there are two centromeres, one of which has, perhaps, been inactivated in order to make it convenient to separate this when a cell divides. That's a prediction. And if we can't find it in our genome, then evolution is in trouble.

Next slide. Well, lo and behold, the answer is in Chromosome Number 2. This is a paper that -- this is a facsimile of a paper that was published in the British journal Nature in 2004. It's a multi-authored paper. The first author is Hillier, and other authors are listed as et al. And it's entitled, The Generation and Annotation of the DNA Sequences of Human Chromosomes 2 and 4.

And what this paper shows very clearly is that all of the marks of the fusion of those chromosomes predicted by common descent and evolution, all those marks are present on human Chromosome Number 2.

Would you advance the slide. And I put this up to remind the Court of what that prediction is. We should find telomeres at the fusion point of one of our chromosomes, we should have an inactivated centromere and we should have another one that still works.

And you'll note -- this is some scientific jargon from the paper, but I will read part of it. Quote, Chromosome 2 is unique to the human lineage of evolution having emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. The precise fusion site has been located, the reference then says exactly there, where our analysis confirmed the presence of multiple telomere, subtelomeric duplications. So those are right there.

And then, secondly, during the formation of human chromosome 2, one of the two centromeres became inactivated, and the exact point of that inactivation is pointed out, and the chromosome that is inactivated in us -- excuse me, the centromere that is inactivated in us turns out to correspond to primate Chromosome Number 13.

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.

Ken Miller is a Catholic fucktard but he knows a few things about evolution. This is a speech he gave in Rhode Island a few years ago.

I believe in evolution. In America that's a controversial statement. More than half of us reject the theory of evolution, and for some, it's not only wrong, but the source of nearly everything that's wrong with society today. But to a biologist like me evolution isn't politics or sociology. It's a scientific idea. And it might just be the best scientific idea ever.

Darwin's great insight was that the living world today holds the key to our biological past. The fact that he worked in an age before genetics, before the discovery of radioactivity, before the identification of even a single pre-human fossil, makes his work that much more remarkable. Darwin didn't know about the gene, but today we trace the ways in which genes themselves produce evolutionary change. Darwin didn't know about DNA, but today we follow the course of evolution thru our own DNA and the story is unmistakable. Like everything else on this planet, we evolved.

The objections often raised against evolution, like the age of the earth, or their so called gaps in the fossil record, are remarkably easy to answer. And I've done that many times, in books and lectures and twice, even in a federal court. But the evidence isn't what really bothers most Americans about evolution. What bugs them is that evolution says something they just don't want to hear. Namely, that we not only live in a natural world, but we are part of it, we emerged from it, or more accurately, we emerged with it. To them that means we are just animals. Our lives are an accident, our existence is without purpose, meaning, or value. My concern for those who hold that view, isn't just that they are wrong on science, wrong about the nature of the evidence, and mistaken on a fundamental point of biology, it's that they are missing something grand and beautiful and personally enriching.

Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet, and even this beautiful little state, from the deep forests of Hope Valley to the rich aquatic life of Narragansett Bay.

Understanding that doesn't demean human life, it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is grandeur in this view of life. And indeed there is.

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.

-- Ken Miller, biology professor at Brown University

Some quotes from Richard Feynman, Richard Dawkins, Ken Miller, Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, Sean B. Carroll, Jerry Coyne, Sam Harris, Isaac Asimov, Charles Darwin, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, PZ Myers, Emmett F. Fields, David Horton, Bill Maher, Stephen Jay Gould, and some other people.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair

I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too local, too provincial. The earth, he came to the earth, one of the aspects of god came to the earth mind you, and look at what's out there. It isn't in proportion.
-- Richard Feyman

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

From the movie: You killed god sir. You have killed god.

THEORY: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
-- National Academy of Sciences

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins

For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.
-- The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Evolution by Sean B. Carroll

Even without fossils, we have evidence of human evolution from comparative anatomy, embryology, our vestigial traits, and even biogeography. We've learned of our fishlike embryos, our dead genes, our transitory fetal coat of hair, and our poor design, all testifying to our origins. The fossil record is really the icing on the cake.
-- Jerry Coyne

Religion is a cruel hoax sustained by miracles, fear, superstition and ignorance. Evolution is a science sustained by proven facts. Take your pick.
-- Dean Carson

The first thing to notice is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.
-- Sam Harris

Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
-- J.B.S. Haldane

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov

Should Creationism be taught in public schools?

Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial….My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.
-- Mike Gravel, former Democratic United States Senator from Alaska, who served two terms from 1969 to 1981, and a former candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
-- Jerry Coyne

Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
-- New York Times

Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part. It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
-- New York Times

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. This chapter is about how we know the ages of rocks and the fossils embedded in them. It presents evidence that the timescale on which life has operated on this planet is measured not in thousands of years but in thousands of millions of years.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

ID creationism adherents believe in ID creationism because they haven't considered, or don't want to consider, the possibility that they're just retarded. Well, it's time for them to consider it.
-- Mike Toreno

It takes nothing more than a child of a few years to understand the incompatibility of understanding how the world works as opposed to essentially Santa Claus type thinking. It is a matter of honesty to admit that someone being raised from the dead is not a belief compatible with what we know of in science or that the myriad of religious beliefs from around the world are simply not square with the scientific knowledge of the day. It is rank dishonesty to pretend that science and religion are compatible while trying to backdoor tons of material as 'outside' the realm of science.
-- KevinB

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement's critics, and there's something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It's clear that you have a cadre of attack dogs that do this work for you, and some of them seem unconstrained by standards of integrity. I can't state this strongly enough: the Discovery Institute is a dangerous cancer on the Christian intellect, both because of its unyielding commitment to dishonesty and because of its creepy mission to undermine science itself. I'd like to see you do better, but I have no such hope for your institute. It needs to be destroyed, and I will do what I can to bring that about.
http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2010/06/open-letter-to-stephen-meyer.html

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
-- Stephen Hawking

But, as Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.’” I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing. For a parent to ignore 150 years of solid science, feeding their children lies based on theology, is to deprive those children of the wonder of the universe—a wonder based on truth rather than medieval superstition. It kills off the part of a child that most needs nurturing: her sense of wonder, and all the possibilities of life that are opened up by that wonder. How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information? Generation after generation of ignorance and religious dogmatism, all perpetuated by religously based home-schooling.
-- Jerry Coyne http://tinyurl.com/yclezr6

Humans aren't high on the evolutionary scale…there is no evolutionary scale. We aren't the pinnacle of anything.
-- PZ Myers

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche.
-- Jeremy Niven

It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is they are opposing.
-- Richard Dawkins

The field of molecular biology provides the most detailed and convincing evidence available for biological evolution. In its unveiling of the nature of DNA and the workings of organisms at the level of enzymes and other protein molecules, it has shown that these molecules hold information about an organism’s ancestry. This has made it possible to reconstruct evolutionary events that were previously unknown and to confirm and adjust the view of events already known. The precision with which these events can be reconstructed is one reason the evidence from molecular biology is so compelling.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

Chance alone cannot explain the marvelous fit between individuals and their environment. And it doesn't. True, the raw materials for evolution--the variations between individuals--are indeed produced by chance mutations. These mutations occur willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are good or bad for the individual. But it is the filtering of that variation by natural selection that produces adaptations, and natural selection is manifestly not random. It is a powerful molding force, accumulating genes that have a greater chance of being passed on to others, and in so doing making individuals even better able to cope with their environment. It is, then, the unique combination of mutation and selection--chance and lawfulness--that tells us how organisms become adapted.
-- Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. ... This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honored and practiced by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
-- Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man, 1871

If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis is completely wrong.
-- Jerry Coyne

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents, and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word 'evolution' systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into 'change over time'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
-- Emmett F. Fields

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and mantenees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips ... continue the list as long as long as desired. That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.
-- The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Your comments are evidence yet again, though it isn't needed, that religions only survive because of the invincible ignorance of their practitioners. Not just ignorance of biology, and physics, and geology, and cosmology, but ignorance of history, and of anthropology, and sociology and psychology. An ignorance that enables the individual member at one particluar time and place to imagine that they, uniquely, have the truth, and that all of the other billions of humans who live now, and lived in the past, didn't. What extraordinary arrogance and ignorance. Encouraged, indeed demanded, by the leaders of every religious cult, for various motives that have nothing to do with any supposed reality of an imaginary second life. And everything to do with power, and wealth, and misogyny, and xenophobia.
-- David Horton

Over the past quarter-century, poll after poll has revealed that nearly half of all Americans flatly reject evolution, many clinging to the ancient superstition that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago, complete with all existing species. But as Richard Dawkins shows in his splendid new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the theory of evolution is supported by at least as much evidence as is the germ theory of disease--heaps of it, and from many areas of biology. So why is it contemptible to reject germ theory but socially acceptable to reject evolutionary theory?

One answer is religion. Unlike germ theory, the idea of evolution strikes at the heart of human ego, suggesting that we were not the special object of God's attention but were made by the same blind and mindless process of natural selection that also built ferns, fish and rabbits. Another answer is ignorance: most Americans are simply unaware of the multifarious evidence that makes evolution more than "just a theory," and don't even realize that a scientific theory is far more than idle speculation.
-- Jerry Coyne

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.
-- Theodosius Dobzhansky

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
-- Michael Shermer

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins http://tinyurl.com/l4n2ar

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins

I should love to have everybody taught about evolution from a fairly early age, because it is so important, so exciting. It answers so many questions and mysteries; it solves so many problems. Until you know about it, you're wandering around on this Earth looking at trees and birds and flowers, not knowing why any of them is there. Evolution is the answer to that riddle, so you're not really a whole person if you don't know where you come from and why you exist. And it's not difficult. It's not like relativity, it's not like quantum theory – it's something teachable to fairly young children.
-- Richard Dawkins

Darwin anticipated problems with his theory. Modern science has
answered them. Evolution by Natural Selection has been triumphantly
vindicated as fact.
-- Richard Dawkins

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

In October 2008 a group of about sixty American high-school teachers met at the Center for Science Education of Emory University, in Atlanta. Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention. One teacher reported that students 'burst into tears' when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed 'No!' when he began talking about evolution in class. Another reported that pupils demanded to know why they had to learn about evolution, given that it was 'only a theory'. Yet another teacher described how 'churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

Now, nearly 150 years later, we can see. We no longer look at Nature's diversity "as a savage looks at a ship." From the new DNA record, the evidence of the workings of the evolutionary process abounds. But many people--a great many--either do not see what scientists see, or do not believe what scientists have concluded.

I have borrowed the title of this chapter from the wonderful book Seeing and Believing by Richard Panek, about the invention of the telescope and how it changed our perception of the sky and our place in the universe. Like Darwin, Galileo's observations and ideas were rejected by authorities who had no use for new evidence or ideas. But, eventually, the observable evidence overwhelmed ideological resistance. For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.

With the facts on evolution's side, how can this doubt and denial persist, or even be growing, here at the outset of the twenty-first century?
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.
-- Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences - Department Position on Evolution and "Intelligent Design"

Evolution is both a scientific fact and a scientific theory. Evolution is a fact in the sense that life has changed through time. In nature today, the characteristics of species are changing, and new species are arising. The fossil record is the primary factual evidence for evolution in times past, and evolution is well documented by further evidence from other scientific disciplines, including comparative anatomy, biogeography, genetics, molecular biology, and studies of viral and bacterial diseases. Evolution is also a theory – an explanation for the observed changes in life through Earth history that has been tested numerous times and repeatedly confirmed.
-- Paleontological Society

While modern biologists constantly study and deliberate the patterns, mechanisms, and pace of evolution, they agree that all living things share common ancestors. The fossil record and the diversity of extant organisms, combined with modern techniques of molecular biology, taxonomy, and geology, provide exhaustive examples of and powerful evidence for current evolutionary theory. Genetic variation, natural selection, speciation, and extinction are well-established components of modern evolutionary theory. Explanations are constantly modified and refined as warranted by new scientific evidence that accumulates over time, which demonstrates the integrity and validity of the field. Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process.
-- National Association of Biology Teachers

It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science ... In summary, the [school board's] disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text [Of Pandas and People] as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.
-- Judge Jones' decision in the 2005 Dover trial

Fortunately, there is, however, an altogether new way of deciphering species' relationships. It also relies on DNA, but rather than being based on the degree of sequence similarity, it looks for the presence and absence of certain landmarks in specific places in species DNA. These landmarks are produced by accidental insertions of junk DNA sequences near genes. Particular chunks of junk DNA, call long interspersed elements (LINES) and short interspersed elements (SINES), are very easy to detect. Once a SINE or LINE is inserted, there is no active mechanism for removing it. The insertion of these elements marks a gene in a species, and is then inherited by all species descended from it. They are really perfect tracers of genealogy. These insertion events are very rare; therefore, their presence in the same place in the DNA of two species can be explained only by the species sharing a common ancestor. The inheritance of variable markers in DNA is the same principle applied to paternity testing in humans. By surveying the distribution of a number of elements that arose at different times in different ancestors, biologists have sufficient forensic evidence to determine species' kinship beyond any doubt.
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

My point here is that there is an incredible amount of evidence for evolution, far more than any one person can digest, and that it is a vital field, still growing and still producing new results. All those papers don't get published unless they contain some new observation, a new experiment, a new test of the idea…and evolution has weathered them all.
-- PZ Myers

The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions being made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it's wonderful when someone says "I'm willing Lord, to do whatever you want me to do". But since there are no actual gods talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and recognize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the millions of their fellow followers.
-- Bill Maher

Q. So what you're testifying here is that modern genetics and molecular biology actually support evolutionary theory?

A. They support it in great detail. And the closer that we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

An essential element in the teaching of science is the encouragement of students and teachers to critically appraise the evidence for notions being taught as science. The Society states unequivocally that the dogmatic teaching of notions such as Creationism within a science curriculum stifles the development of critical thinking patterns in the developing mind and seriously compromises the best interests of objective public education. This could eventually hamper the advancement of science and technology as students take their places as leaders of future generations.
— Geological Society of Australia

The Hominidae (anglicized hominids, also known as great apes) form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzee, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. -- Wikipedia

"Yet Darwin looked beyond the obvious, suggesting--and supporting with copious evidence--two ideas that forever dispelled the idea of deliberate design. Those ideas were evolution and natural selection. He was not the first to think of evolution--several before him, including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, floated the idea that life had evolved. But Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science."
-- Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
-- Stephen Jay Gould

The most interesting fact of science: Human apes and the other great apes share an ancient common ancestor.

Currently a professor of biology and the Royce Family Professor for Teaching Excellence at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Dr. Miller in the video explains by DNA analysis how science now testably confirms that human beings and other great apes (e.g, gorillas and chimpanzees) share an ancient common ancestor. Apes today still have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans, instead of 24 ostensibly have 23, including one fused pair.

Dr. Miller argues that for evolutionary theory to hold true, humans could not have “lost” a pair of chromosomes during their evolution. And we didn’t — the “lost” pair is still there but fused together.

“It’s there. It’s testable,” Miller says in the video. “It confirms the prediction of evolution.”

Dr. Ken Miller talks about the relationship between Homo sapiens and the other primates. He discusses a recent finding of the Human Genome Project which identifies the exact point of fusion of two primate chromosomes that resulted in human chromosome #2.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

For much more information about this interesting evidence for evolution see Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q

I recommend what I wrote on December 4, 2010.

darwinkilledgod.blogspot.com - Human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2p & 2q

What I wrote on December 9, 2010 about creationist fucktards. I recommend it. Just click the link.

Creationists, I'm here to help you.

Several tons of quotes from numerous scientists, other people, books, and websites.

In addition to the quotes on this post please see Some quotes from the National Academy of Sciences and please see Some stuff I stole from Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair

I can't believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large because they seem to be too simple, too local, too provincial. The earth, he came to the earth, one of the aspects of god came to the earth mind you, and look at what's out there. It isn't in proportion.
-- Richard Feyman

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

There is probably no other notion in any field of science that has been as extensively tested and as thoroughly corroborated as the evolutionary origin of living organisms.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

From the movie: You killed god sir. You have killed god.

THEORY: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.
-- National Academy of Sciences

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins

For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.
-- The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Evolution by Sean B. Carroll

Even without fossils, we have evidence of human evolution from comparative anatomy, embryology, our vestigial traits, and even biogeography. We've learned of our fishlike embryos, our dead genes, our transitory fetal coat of hair, and our poor design, all testifying to our origins. The fossil record is really the icing on the cake.
-- Jerry Coyne

Religion is a cruel hoax sustained by miracles, fear, superstition and ignorance. Evolution is a science sustained by proven facts. Take your pick.
-- Dean Carson

The first thing to notice is that Mooney and Kirshenbaum are confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying problem; the problem is faith itself—conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas occluded by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.
-- Sam Harris

Scientific education and religious education are incompatible. The clergy have ceased to interfere with education at the advanced state, with which I am directly concerned, but they have still got control of that of children. This means that the children have to learn about Adam and Noah instead of about Evolution; about David who killed Goliath, instead of Koch who killed cholera; about Christ's ascent into heaven instead of Montgolfier's and Wright's. Worse than that, they are taught that it is a virtue to accept statements without adequate evidence, which leaves them a prey to quacks of every kind in later life, and makes it very difficult for them to accept the methods of thought which are successful in science.
-- J.B.S. Haldane

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov

Should Creationism be taught in public schools?

Oh God, no. Oh, Jesus. We thought we had made a big advance with the Scopes monkey trial….My God, evolution is a fact, and if these people are disturbed by being the descendants of monkeys and fishes, they’ve got a mental problem. We can’t afford the psychiatric bill for them. That ends the story as far as I’m concerned.
-- Mike Gravel, former Democratic United States Senator from Alaska, who served two terms from 1969 to 1981, and a former candidate in the 2008 presidential election.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin

If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that what conquers our ignorance is research, not giving up and attributing our ignorance to the miraculous work of a creator.
-- Jerry Coyne

Science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance.
-- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Darwin knew a lot of biology: more than any of his contemporaries, more than a surprising number of his successors. From prolonged thought and study, he was able to intuit how evolution worked without having access to all the subsequent scientific knowledge that others required to be convinced of natural selection. He had the objectivity to put aside criteria with powerful emotional resonance, like the conviction that evolution should be purposeful. As a result, he saw deep into the strange workings of the evolutionary mechanism, an insight not really exceeded until a century after his great work of synthesis.
-- New York Times

Darwin’s theory of evolution has become the bedrock of modern biology. But for most of the theory’s existence since 1859, even biologists have ignored or vigorously opposed it, in whole or in part. It is a testament to Darwin’s extraordinary insight that it took almost a century for biologists to understand the essential correctness of his views.
-- New York Times

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well. This chapter is about how we know the ages of rocks and the fossils embedded in them. It presents evidence that the timescale on which life has operated on this planet is measured not in thousands of years but in thousands of millions of years.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

ID creationism adherents believe in ID creationism because they haven't considered, or don't want to consider, the possibility that they're just retarded. Well, it's time for them to consider it.
-- Mike Toreno

It takes nothing more than a child of a few years to understand the incompatibility of understanding how the world works as opposed to essentially Santa Claus type thinking. It is a matter of honesty to admit that someone being raised from the dead is not a belief compatible with what we know of in science or that the myriad of religious beliefs from around the world are simply not square with the scientific knowledge of the day. It is rank dishonesty to pretend that science and religion are compatible while trying to backdoor tons of material as 'outside' the realm of science.
-- KevinB

To accept evolution isn't just to acknowledge the obvious, that the evidence behind it is overwhelming. It is to open one's eyes to the endless beauty that life has generated and continues to produce. It is to become a knowing participant in the truest sense, in the living world of which we are all a part.
-- Ken Miller

Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement's critics, and there's something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It's clear that you have a cadre of attack dogs that do this work for you, and some of them seem unconstrained by standards of integrity. I can't state this strongly enough: the Discovery Institute is a dangerous cancer on the Christian intellect, both because of its unyielding commitment to dishonesty and because of its creepy mission to undermine science itself. I'd like to see you do better, but I have no such hope for your institute. It needs to be destroyed, and I will do what I can to bring that about.
http://sfmatheson.blogspot.com/2010/06/open-letter-to-stephen-meyer.html

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.
-- Stephen Hawking

But, as Lovan noted in his piece, “83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children ‘religious or moral instruction.’” I weep for those children. For many of them are simply being brainwashed by their parents. Yes, that’s what it is—brainwashing. For a parent to ignore 150 years of solid science, feeding their children lies based on theology, is to deprive those children of the wonder of the universe—a wonder based on truth rather than medieval superstition. It kills off the part of a child that most needs nurturing: her sense of wonder, and all the possibilities of life that are opened up by that wonder. How many budding biologists have been stifled by their parents’ willful ignorance of science, and on their insistence that the Bible is the real source of biological information? Generation after generation of ignorance and religious dogmatism, all perpetuated by religously based home-schooling.
-- Jerry Coyne http://tinyurl.com/yclezr6

Humans aren't high on the evolutionary scale…there is no evolutionary scale. We aren't the pinnacle of anything.
-- PZ Myers

You know, there’s this pervasive idea in biology that I think is wrong. It goes: we humans are at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, and as you get up that tree, brain size must get bigger. But a fly is just as evolved as a human. It’s just evolved to a different niche.
-- Jeremy Niven

It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is they are opposing.
-- Richard Dawkins

The field of molecular biology provides the most detailed and convincing evidence available for biological evolution. In its unveiling of the nature of DNA and the workings of organisms at the level of enzymes and other protein molecules, it has shown that these molecules hold information about an organism’s ancestry. This has made it possible to reconstruct evolutionary events that were previously unknown and to confirm and adjust the view of events already known. The precision with which these events can be reconstructed is one reason the evidence from molecular biology is so compelling.
-- Encyclopedia Britannica

Chance alone cannot explain the marvelous fit between individuals and their environment. And it doesn't. True, the raw materials for evolution--the variations between individuals--are indeed produced by chance mutations. These mutations occur willy-nilly, regardless of whether they are good or bad for the individual. But it is the filtering of that variation by natural selectionthat produces adaptations, and natural selection is manifestly notrandom. It is a powerful molding force, accumulating genes that have a greater chance of being passed on to others, and in so doing making individuals even better able to cope with their environment. It is, then, the unique combination of mutation and selection--chance and lawfulness--that tells us how organisms become adapted.
-- Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. ... This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honored and practiced by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in public opinion.
-- Charles Darwin; The Descent of Man, 1871

If anything is absolutely, rock-bottom true, it’s that life evolved, beginning about 4 billion years ago, and that the creation myth of Genesis is completely wrong.
-- Jerry Coyne

The plight of many science teachers today is not less dire. When they attempt to expound the central and guiding principle of biology; when they honestly place the living world in its historical context -- which means evolution; when they explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with loss of their jobs. At the very least their time is wasted at every turn. They are likely to receive menacing letters from parents, and have to endure the sarcastic smirks and close-folded arms of brainwashed children. They are supplied with state-approved textbooks that have had the word 'evolution' systematically expunged, or bowdlerized into 'change over time'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

The Theologian is an owl, sitting on an old dead branch in the tree of human knowledge, and hooting the same old hoots that have been hooted for hundreds and thousands of years, but he has never given a hoot for progress.
-- Emmett F. Fields

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and mantenees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips ... continue the list as long as long as desired. That didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it. No reputable scientist disputes it, and no unbiased reader will close the book doubting it.
-- The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

Your comments are evidence yet again, though it isn't needed, that religions only survive because of the invincible ignorance of their practitioners. Not just ignorance of biology, and physics, and geology, and cosmology, but ignorance of history, and of anthropology, and sociology and psychology. An ignorance that enables the individual member at one particluar time and place to imagine that they, uniquely, have the truth, and that all of the other billions of humans who live now, and lived in the past, didn't. What extraordinary arrogance and ignorance. Encouraged, indeed demanded, by the leaders of every religious cult, for various motives that have nothing to do with any supposed reality of an imaginary second life. And everything to do with power, and wealth, and misogyny, and xenophobia.
-- David Horton

Over the past quarter-century, poll after poll has revealed that nearly half of all Americans flatly reject evolution, many clinging to the ancient superstition that the earth was created only 6,000 years ago, complete with all existing species. But as Richard Dawkins shows in his splendid new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, the theory of evolution is supported by at least as much evidence as is the germ theory of disease--heaps of it, and from many areas of biology. So why is it contemptible to reject germ theory but socially acceptable to reject evolutionary theory?

One answer is religion. Unlike germ theory, the idea of evolution strikes at the heart of human ego, suggesting that we were not the special object of God's attention but were made by the same blind and mindless process of natural selection that also built ferns, fish and rabbits. Another answer is ignorance: most Americans are simply unaware of the multifarious evidence that makes evolution more than "just a theory," and don't even realize that a scientific theory is far more than idle speculation.
-- Jerry Coyne

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.
-- Theodosius Dobzhansky

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.
-- Michael Shermer

Evolution is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip.
-- Richard Dawkins http://tinyurl.com/l4n2ar

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins

I should love to have everybody taught about evolution from a fairly early age, because it is so important, so exciting. It answers so many questions and mysteries; it solves so many problems. Until you know about it, you're wandering around on this Earth looking at trees and birds and flowers, not knowing why any of them is there. Evolution is the answer to that riddle, so you're not really a whole person if you don't know where you come from and why you exist. And it's not difficult. It's not like relativity, it's not like quantum theory – it's something teachable to fairly young children.
-- Richard Dawkins

Darwin anticipated problems with his theory. Modern science has
answered them. Evolution by Natural Selection has been triumphantly
vindicated as fact.
-- Richard Dawkins

So the case is closed in a most beautiful way, and that is, the prediction of evolution of common ancestry is fulfilled by that lead-pipe evidence that you see here in terms of tying everything together, that our chromosome formed by the fusion from our common ancestor is Chromosome Number 2. Evolution has made a testable prediction and has passed.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

In October 2008 a group of about sixty American high-school teachers met at the Center for Science Education of Emory University, in Atlanta. Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention. One teacher reported that students 'burst into tears' when told they would be studying evolution. Another teacher described how students repeatedly screamed 'No!' when he began talking about evolution in class. Another reported that pupils demanded to know why they had to learn about evolution, given that it was 'only a theory'. Yet another teacher described how 'churches train students to come to school with specific questions to ask to sabotage my lessons'.
-- "The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence for Evolution" by Richard Dawkins

Now, nearly 150 years later, we can see. We no longer look at Nature's diversity "as a savage looks at a ship." From the new DNA record, the evidence of the workings of the evolutionary process abounds. But many people--a great many--either do not see what scientists see, or do not believe what scientists have concluded.

I have borrowed the title of this chapter from the wonderful book Seeing and Believing by Richard Panek, about the invention of the telescope and how it changed our perception of the sky and our place in the universe. Like Darwin, Galileo's observations and ideas were rejected by authorities who had no use for new evidence or ideas. But, eventually, the observable evidence overwhelmed ideological resistance. For all of those who do see the overwhelming evidence of natural selection and life's descent from ancestors, and the immense span of time over which the story of life unfolded, it is, to put it mildly, baffling how so many still do not. It is absolutely astonishing and often infuriating that some take it so far as to deny the immense foundation of evidence and to slander all the human achievement that foundation represents.

With the facts on evolution's side, how can this doubt and denial persist, or even be growing, here at the outset of the twenty-first century?
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

The faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences is committed to the highest standards of scientific integrity and academic function. This commitment carries with it unwavering support for academic freedom and the free exchange of ideas. It also demands the utmost respect for the scientific method, integrity in the conduct of research, and recognition that the validity of any scientific model comes only as a result of rational hypothesis testing, sound experimentation, and findings that can be replicated by others.

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.
-- Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences - Department Position on Evolution and "Intelligent Design"

Evolution is both a scientific fact and a scientific theory. Evolution is a fact in the sense that life has changed through time. In nature today, the characteristics of species are changing, and new species are arising. The fossil record is the primary factual evidence for evolution in times past, and evolution is well documented by further evidence from other scientific disciplines, including comparative anatomy, biogeography, genetics, molecular biology, and studies of viral and bacterial diseases. Evolution is also a theory – an explanation for the observed changes in life through Earth history that has been tested numerous times and repeatedly confirmed.
-- Paleontological Society

While modern biologists constantly study and deliberate the patterns, mechanisms, and pace of evolution, they agree that all living things share common ancestors. The fossil record and the diversity of extant organisms, combined with modern techniques of molecular biology, taxonomy, and geology, provide exhaustive examples of and powerful evidence for current evolutionary theory. Genetic variation, natural selection, speciation, and extinction are well-established components of modern evolutionary theory. Explanations are constantly modified and refined as warranted by new scientific evidence that accumulates over time, which demonstrates the integrity and validity of the field. Scientists have firmly established evolution as an important natural process.
-- National Association of Biology Teachers

It is our view that a reasonable, objective observer would, after reviewing both the voluminous record in this case, and our narrative, reach the inescapable conclusion that ID is an interesting theological argument, but that it is not science ... In summary, the [school board's] disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, causes students to doubt its validity without scientific justification, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text [Of Pandas and People] as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere.
-- Judge Jones' decision in the 2005 Dover trial

Fortunately, there is, however, an altogether new way of deciphering species' relationships. It also relies on DNA, but rather than being based on the degree of sequence similarity, it looks for the presence and absence of certain landmarks in specific places in species DNA. These landmarks are produced by accidental insertions of junk DNA sequences near genes. Particular chunks of junk DNA, call long interspersed elements (LINES) and short interspersed elements (SINES), are very easy to detect. Once a SINE or LINE is inserted, there is no active mechanism for removing it. The insertion of these elements marks a gene in a species, and is then inherited by all species descended from it. They are really perfect tracers of genealogy. These insertion events are very rare; therefore, their presence in the same place in the DNA of two species can be explained only by the species sharing a common ancestor. The inheritance of variable markers in DNA is the same principle applied to paternity testing in humans. By surveying the distribution of a number of elements that arose at different times in different ancestors, biologists have sufficient forensic evidence to determine species' kinship beyond any doubt.
-- "The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution" by Sean B. Carroll

My point here is that there is anincredible amount of evidence for evolution, far more than any one person can digest, and that it is a vital field, still growing and still producing new results. All those papers don't get published unless they contain some new observation, a new experiment, a new test of the idea…and evolution has weathered them all.
-- PZ Myers

The plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge in having key decisions being made by religious people, by irrationalists, by those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are our intellectual slave holders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don't have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it's wonderful when someone says "I'm willing Lord, to do whatever you want me to do". But since there are no actual gods talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas.

This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and recognize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price.

If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, violence and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a mafia wife for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the millions of their fellow followers.
-- Bill Maher

Q. So what you're testifying here is that modern genetics and molecular biology actually support evolutionary theory?

A. They support it in great detail. And the closer that we can get to looking at the details of the human genome, the more powerful the evidence has become.
-- Ken Miller at the Dover trial http://tinyurl.com/2llumn

An essential element in the teaching of science is the encouragement of students and teachers to critically appraise the evidence for notions being taught as science. The Society states unequivocally that the dogmatic teaching of notions such as Creationism within a science curriculum stifles the development of critical thinking patterns in the developing mind and seriously compromises the best interests of objective public education. This could eventually hamper the advancement of science and technology as students take their places as leaders of future generations.
— Geological Society of Australia

The Hominidae (anglicized hominids, also known as great apes) form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzee, gorillas, humans, and orangutans. -- Wikipedia

"Yet Darwin looked beyond the obvious, suggesting--and supporting with copious evidence--two ideas that forever dispelled the idea of deliberate design. Those ideas were evolution and natural selection. He was not the first to think of evolution--several before him, including his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, floated the idea that life had evolved. But Darwin was the first to use data from nature to convince people that evolution is true, and his idea of natural selection was truly novel. It testifies to his genius that the concept of natural theology, accepted by most educated Westerners before 1859, was vanquished within only a few years by a single five-hundred-page book. On the Origin of Species turned the mysteries of life's diversity from mythology into genuine science."
-- Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne.

Creation science has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false. What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?
-- Stephen Jay Gould