Confronting Friends and Family

[festive1]

Just curious, is Steve your boyfriend?

[thesummerqueen]

Eh? Who's Steve?

[festive1]

A nice blog post by Steve that discusses the answer to this letter:

I'm guessing not

[thesummerqueen]

Oh! Sorry, I just clicked the link from the notification e-mail and didn't pay attention to what thread it came from. Post lunch-food coma. lol.

No no, Steve is NOT my boyfriend, but he is a well-known figure in the skeptic community. I got used to using their first names as most of my friends or acquaintances know who they are.

My boyfriend's name is David.

[Creed of Heresy]

Well then put those sexual tensions to the garden. ;D

[thesummerqueen]

He couldn't handle it,

[Annik]

He couldn't handle it,

She's Foxy Queen-apatra! And she's a whooooole lotta Summer!

[thesummerqueen]

lmao, Annik

[Creed of Heresy]

Alllll summmmmmeeeeerrrr looooonnnnggg-

[Aractus]

So my question is; how far do you go to defend the science behind a theory – such as the theory of evolution- when you know full well that no amount of evidence is ever sufficient to ‘convince’ non-believers to change their outlook?!

Wow, that's a really, really great question!

For a very long time my scientific views were extremely conservative. There were "truths" I wanted to hold on to - as we all know this isn't the way science works. I viewed so much of the industry as stubborn and narrow-minded. I guess one of things that made me realize that science isn't always stubborn about its outlook is when the consensus regarding quasars finally changed. Finally after years and years of wondering why experienced and respected astronomers kept on making excuses for those "problem quasars" and galaxies that had erroneous redshifts, they finally accepted the evidence.

What about life on Mars? The Viking probe went to Mars, the experiment designed by Levin worked perfectly, the result was positive. Let me make this explicit - it produced the exact result that was previously agreed upon would constitute successful detection of life. Despite this, and to Levin's horror, they decided to ignore the evidence completely and state that they had been "unable to detect life"! What horseshit.

What about the Pioneer probes? Drifting off course, and nobody knows why. Every possible explanation was fully explored and disproven - every one. It's the same thing with the mythical extra dark matter that holds galaxies together; it's clear evidence that the theory of general relativity is incomplete, yet nobody wants to admit this.

And then we finally come back to the theory of Evolution. It's a great theory, but all the things we expect to observe we are consistently unable to. The biggest hole in the theory at present, is that it still assumes that DNA grows and improves on its own - that is, apart from the creature that uses the DNA. Amoeba DNA contains 670 Billion base pairs, that's an average growth rate of about 220 new bas pairs per year! So what's the extra 440,000 it has since the time of Christ?