"Teach the Controversy!" Facepalm*

[Asmodee]

To be honest, while you may speak boldly and confidently; I think your premises, that you are not only unqualified, but incapable of understanding these things, makes everything else you are saying moot.   Thus as long as you hold to this, it is going to be a very short conversation.  

Don't get me wrong; there are a number of places, where I must rely on the information given by the experts.  I'm not going to be extracting and examining the make up of chromsome 2.  I wouldn't have the first clue on where to begin.  But that doesn't mean that I cannot take the information and explanations, to evaluate an inference from that info.  If one is not willing to give reason for why I should believe their claim, then I don't feel inclined to follow them.

I never suggested anyone was "incapable" of understanding.  But how do you "know" when you truly understand something instead of just "thinking" you understand it?  When you are well versed in that thing.  In this case, a PhD in genetics to "know" that I understand genetics.  AT THE VERY LEAST to believe I understood it I would need to be able to read AND FULLY UNDERSTAND published research.  Not dumbed down web pages, not people explaining it to the masses, the direct research.

So yes, that VERY MUCH DOES mean that you cannot take the information and explanations to evaluate an inference from that info because you DO NOT HAVE the "info", you have the very tiny portions of it given you by someone else when they gave you their opinion on its meaning.  You're talking about making an "informed judgement" based on being only marginally "informed".  Imagine your boss gave a kid a beginner's book on electronics and, when he finished it, your job.  That is what you're talking about.  Would you believe that kid qualified to take your job?  You most certainly would not.  What if he became your boss?  Would you think his opinion as relevant as your own?  Again, you most certainly would not.  And what if it wasn't a beginner's book at all, he just read some web pages about electronics, most of which disagree wholeheartedly with electrical theory and the science you know to work?  THIS is what you are claiming makes one qualified to form an opinion.

The problem with you asking for one to "give reason" for why you should believe them is extensive.  Anti-evolutionists, climate change deniers, Holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, Bigfoot hunters, UFO hunters, ghost hunters...all have plausible sounding "reasons" for their beliefs, depending on what you already know about the subject.  But scientists, they don't.  They don't have good reasons because you wouldn't understand them.  You may read a few web pages here and there or an introductory book into this and that and think the science is pretty straight forward, but it's not.  They use words you don't know, they use words you do know, but that don't mean what you think they mean.  They use math that uses symbols instead of digits.

Take E=MC2.  Pretty easy, right?  Everybody knows that one.  Energy = Mass times the Speed of Light squared!  Now use it to calculate the average energy of a soda can.  Um...E is energy...so, is that in joules?  M is mass!  So, do I use grams, then?  Ounces?  Was science on the metric system when Einstein came up with this?  C2 is the speed of light!  That's an easy one!...how do I multiply something by "186,000 MP second"?  Or do I have to convert it to KM second?  Is it per second?  Do I just take it times 186,000?  I would think the "MP second" part does something to that...

And maybe you do know how to calculate it, but the point is the same.  Even the parts of science that make sense, that we think we understand we often really don't have a clue about.  You are making an inference on incomplete information, making that inference pointless when compared to the inferences made by the people with complete information.  If you really think that you can read "genetics for dummies" and then go tell geneticists how wrong they are about something, that's dumb.  And that is what you are suggesting, that you can learn on your own all you need to know to decide that the experts are wrong and it just doesn't work that way.

[The Grand Nudger]

Bringing this back down to earth and out of the hallowed halls of academic arcana.......you don't need a phd to either observe or understand evolution.  You don't need to know -anything- about modern synth, or any component of modern synth.  The people who came up with the notions, as a point of fact, could have never gone to school to learn them.  No one was teaching them, no one knew about them....they didn't have sequencers or electron microscopes.....they didn't have a robust working knowledge..even of basic biology.

The attempt to place it -into- arcanum, particularly by the religious, is just an excuse to mount an argument from incredulity, the kind of argument that RR here worships at a veritable altar...despite it being something that doesn;t require belief in, or belief in the statements or observations of others.

Go grow a garden.  What you see, is evolution.  Hell, don;t grow a garden, just take a field survey of the weeds in your yard. There won't be a single impenetrable mystery of evolution not laid bare, by staring at a patch of dirt with seeds in it. That;s how simple the whole thing is, from the perspective of a layperson, interested only in determining it;s veracity for himself, and not assigning exacting and excruciating terms to each and every variable. Gregor Mendel figured out the basics of genetics with fucking peas. Darwin figured out NS by staring at bird beaks. If a person can't handle that, all on their own, any talk of understanding something more complicated is moot point....phd or not.