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The Other Shoe By: Mark Morgan on 4/23/2000; 11:04 PM Ah, the joys of a well-deserved reputation for being a crank. Unfortunately, although some people were apparently unconvinced of the sincerity of my last post, I shall not go off on Easter. Easter family get togethers, on the other hand, are an entirely different matter. A place where reasonable people can disagree without dinner getting cold. The above is how I like to think of discussion groups. I get teased, some, for the ruthlessness of logic I try to bring to a discussion. Where's your evidence? What's your claim? Let's examine that claim! Let's see that evidence! Then I throw links at people until they threaten to come across the phone lines and strangle me in person. No, not really. That's the thing about a well-moderated forum (see the boards over at Nitpicker Central Bulletin Brash Reflections for an instructive example). Asynchronous, semi-anonymous communication, with a firm moderator's hand, can lead to valuable discussion even between those of wildly different views. Because you're not in the same room with the lout. As opposed to, say, Easter dinner. There came a time tonight when all I could do was get up and go outside and play with the children. People know how I feel about things. I don't go jousting my personal windmills in front of people who violently disagree with me. This does not stop others. Put down the remote and back away from the dinosaur show. So we're watching A Walk With Dinosaurs when a member of the home audience decided to just plain go off about how those scientists don't know anything. Millions of years! They don't know. They're all a bunch of geekazoids who don't know anything. The rant managed to take in geologic ages, computer re-creations, Mt. St. Helen, and Hawaii before I escaped to the sandbox. Now I'm just as bad as anyone else for going off on my rants. Lord knows. But I try not to go off in the presence of people I know really don't agree with me. I try to show some minimal amount of politeness. I really do. Good grief. All the scientists are wrong, in exactly the same way. Okay, this is really an excuse to be offended by the logic at hand. His real gripe is evolution, the whole "descended from monkeys" thing (common ancestry, sorry, pick up your nice departing gift on the way out the door). For evolution to be as wrong as some Creationists want it to be, scientists in just about every field of work would have to be wrong. Physicists think they understand things well enough to date things using radiometric dating. They'd have to be wrong. Geologists think they understand the way the Earth well enough to date rocks by the arrangement of their layers. They'd have to be wrong. Biologists think they understand genetic structure well enough to show how species are related. They'd have to be wrong. The evidence for evolution comes from thousands of different fields, with countless pieces of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: spieces evolve. For evolution to be wrong--not just in the details, mind you, but utterly wrong--every single scientist generating this evidence would have to be wrong. All in exactly the same direction. So I went out and played in the sandbox. I mean, for Pete's sake, it's Easter. Family is more important than getting in a foolish argument. Dinner might get cold!
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