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I posted this about half an hour ago, but it has not come through, so 
I am sending again. Hope it doesn't appear twice now.
Jennie Dusheck

At 10:09 AM -0600 3/2/11, Jack W Cannon wrote:
>II am intrigued by the suppositions that a significant percentage of 
>people who accept that evolution happened don't actually understand 
>it.  Of course, there are varying degrees of understanding and I am 
>sure that the average person on the street may not be aware of the 
>evolving beaks of Darwin's finches or that there are finger bones in 
>whale flippers but does that mean that they don't understand the 
>process of evolution?  Could someone extrapolate a little on the 
>distinction between acceptance of evolution and understanding it?

Hi Jack,
I think this would make a good essay, now that you mention it. Here 
is just one example: a good many people think that evolution and 
natural selection are synonymous. They don't (necessarily) have a 
sense of the evolution of life on Earth as being a series of 
historical events independent of mechanism (natural selection and 
other mechanisms).

To repeat myself, people think evolution and natural selection (NS) 
are the same thing. So if a creationist argues that NS doesn't create 
new species and *therefore* evolution didn't happen, listeners cannot 
step back and say, 'but aside from the details of NS, we ALREADY know 
that evolution happened.' Instead, they often accept the argument 
that knowing that dinosaurs evolved from earlier forms is contingent 
on knowing HOW that happened. This is important because explaining 
speciation and adaptive radiation of major groups to a lay audience 
isn't the work of a few sentences. It takes time to lay it all out. 
It's not the kind of thing that gets explained well in a heated 
argument.

Because sincere believers in evolution can't spontaneously come up 
with a short and persuasive argument about how natural selection 
produces major taxonomic groups, they start talking nonsense or 
engaging in ad hominen attacks, which does nothing for the cause of 
educating the public about evolution--or, indeed, sets it back. 
Meanwhile, the creationist looks comparatively cool and rational. I 
have seen this kind of thing happen often.

Lay scientists become just as confused when discussing whether 
evolution is progressive or "random." (Those are not the only 
alternatives, of course.) Also, a common creationist argument is that 
molecular biology has proven that no new information can be added to 
DNA, a factoid* that is often accepted unexamined and which confuses 
everyone and leads to some very strange arguments.

Jennie Dusheck

*Factoid: Having the appearance of being a fact, but not being true.

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