Top misconceptions of Theory of Evolution you had to deal with

[The Valkyrie]

I don't see them as misconceptions any longer.

I call them deliberately lies and ignorance. There's more than enough evidence and sources now for anyone with an open mind to see the information for themselves.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Natural selection doesn;t just work on our genetic inheritence, it also selects among behaviors...which can be out of the blue, learned, or enforced at a social level.

Hmmm... only genes can be passed on through natural selection, which is one of the reasons why I don't have a lot of stock in the tenured university authorities who insist that human behavior is so plastic that the Homo Sapiens infant is born with absolutely no proclivity to do anything other than suck at Mama's tit. There's plenty enough plasticity, but it's not all that plastic! This is an example of why I believe "Social Science" deserves to have its right to the "Science" part revoked.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

I'm not sure that this was ever floated as being an observation, or that such a gene existed...simply describing a superficially counterintuitive scenario, and how known mechanisms could play out in in creating such a scenario.

Human males, gay or straight, don't have a habit of killing off other males offspring in order to replace them with their own.

They don't now. Do chimp males kill each other in a contest for their females? If not, maybe they did 4 mya, and they still do kill for the position of Alpha Male. But the utility of having gays in the family may not have been so much a question of ape killing ape, nor so with early humans - gays are just as good at helping care for the young and protecting them against predators, and can be trusted not to have eyes for Brother's wives. Conversely, wives don't get to use gays to cheat on the family patriarch.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

My favorite: A hurricane never produced a Boeing from a pile of scrap-metal - Checkmate!

[Jenny A]

The oddest notion I've bumped into was Randy Carson's idea that evolution was wrong because it's a morally inferior process to creation. Because, you know, nothing immoral or amoral ever happens.

[Cecelia]

My favorite: A hurricane never produced a Boeing from a pile of scrap-metal - Checkmate!

The funny thing is: If it ever DID happen, they'd say god did it, and it was proof of god.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

My favorite: A hurricane never produced a Boeing from a pile of scrap-metal - Checkmate!

The funny thing is: If it ever DID happen, they'd say god did it, and it was proof of god.

One may have an IQ of 69, and a very limited vocabulary, but the word "goddidit" still gets you a long way.

[Anomalocaris]

The funny thing is: If it ever DID happen, they'd say god did it, and it was proof of god.

One may have an IQ of 69, and a very limited vocabulary, but the word "goddidit" still gets you a long way.

Yes, if your IQ is 69.

[AFTT47]

I don't see them as misconceptions any longer.

I call them deliberately lies and ignorance.  There's more than enough evidence and sources now for anyone with an open mind to see the information for themselves.

You may be horrified (I sure am) to know that there are many physicians in the US who deny evolution. It blows my mind that someone can complete an undergraduate program in the biological sciences and then medical school while denying evolution. It's like an auto mechanic denying the existence of spark plugs. But we have plenty of them. Our own Republican fool, Dr. Ben Carson was an accomplished neurosurgeon and an evolution denier. We have a shortage of physicians so we can't afford to screen out creationist idiots.

[The Grand Nudger]

Natural selection doesn;t just work on our genetic inheritence, it also selects among behaviors...which can be out of the blue, learned, or enforced at a social level.

Hmmm... only genes can be passed on through natural selection, which is one of the reasons why I don't have a lot of stock in the tenured university authorities who insist that human behavior is so plastic that the Homo Sapiens infant is born with absolutely no proclivity to do anything other than suck at Mama's tit. There's plenty enough plasticity, but it's not all that plastic! This is an example of why I believe "Social Science" deserves to have its right to the "Science" part revoked.

It's sex that passes on genes, not natural selection.  The behaviors we teach our children, regardless of any genetic disposition, are passed from parent to child; and are thus heritable.  There's no "american gene" and yet there is a heritable american culture.  We refer to this larger collection of traits as a phenotype.  We tend to see behaviors as having a genetic component (for example, our learned behaviors are inextricably linked with the genes associated with our "learning apparatus") but there's no requirement that they be in order to be acted upon by natural selection.   

Consider this, all other things beings equal, which portion of the human population do you think would become over-represented in time....the portion which teaches their children to look twice before crossing the street, or the portion which does not?  There is no clear cut indicator in the genotype for this behavioral difference, this is not to say that there couldn't be, but it is a difference in phenotype regardless...... it is also an efficient cause for changes in the genotype all the same.  Unrelated variations in the genotype would piggyback on this variation in phenotype, even if it turned out that there was, in actuality, no genetic marker for the behavior upon which individuals were selected.

As regards men killing their mates previous children -any wondering on those counts would be lost on me (and I'm not sure that chimps are really that great an example to point to in any case..we're not chimps, never have been, never will be)- I only brought it up to show that the statements were -clearly- a thought experiment, and not an observation regarding known human behavior.  I doubt Dawkins is or was under the impression that people did that, when he made those statements.  Rather, describing a situation in which the relationships involved in natural selection would or could favor homosexuality.  If he did or does think that absurd non-behavior explains homosexuality, particularly in the present supposing there -was- a "what if" moment that we did engage in that in the past, then he's a fucking nutball.