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Thank You Jennie,

I certainly appreciate the detail in your response.  It is true that a 
complete understanding of any issue is a mandatory pre-requisite before 
engaging in any debate with someone who is well-prepared.

Jack Cannon

-----Original Message----- 
From: Jennie Dusheck
Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 11:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Creationists as proponents of academic freedom

ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related 
institutions.
*****************************************************************************

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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