From Friends – rather sumarises the stupidity of the current Intellegant Design debate in America!
Ross: Some of these fossils are over 200m years old
Feebee: OK, look, before you start I’m not denying evolution, I’m just saying it’s one of the possibilities
Ross: It’s the only possibility Feebee
Feebee: Ok Ross, could you just open your mind like this much? Now, wasn’t there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed the earth was flat? And up until like 50 years ago you all thought the atom was the smallest thing until you like split it open and this whole mess of crap came out. Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can’t admit that there’s a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?
There’s the slight problem that there’s a great deal of empirical evidence to suggest that the evolutionary theory is closer to the truth than the idea that all species were set in stone 6,000 years ago.
Also, if we follow Occam’s Razor, then fossils dated to 2 million years old by a reliable scientific method probably are 2 million years old – other, more complex explanations can be eliminated.
But I agree that there’s an arrogance in academia – we mock the ideas of yesterday and tend to think the current theory is unquestionably right. Which is just the wrong attitude to take, whatever discipline you’re studying.
I do think she has a point 🙂