Now this kills me: how vociferous the religious right (fundamentalist christians, ultra-orthodox, however said) is with their hatred of evolution. This is one of those aspects of America that embarrasses me to no end:
all of these court fights,
stacking of school boards with creationists,
their propogandizing on the air waves,
and especically this fabrication of "creationism science".
And how this makes America look on the international scale.
They whine such a pathetic litany: how evolution is just a theory, how it violates the law of thermodynamics, how creationism "science" deserves equal time in schools as an alternative to evolution.

Hey, get a grip.

First all: let's review some immutable facts:
• Genes encode our biological information. That's what you literally pass to the next generation.
• Genes possess the equally important function of serving as a template to stamp out the proteins which "build strong bodies", to coin a phrase.

What evolution says:
• Mutations occur over time. Long stretches of time.
• The mutation is utterly random.
• The genes which are passed on are nonrandomly selected.
• The changes brought about in creatures are iterative processes.
• A buildup of enough environmentally appropriate mutations gives rise to new species.

Mutations occur over time. If an animal got the barest fraction of an inch larger with each succeeding generation, it could go from mouse to elephant-sized in 60,000 generations. Meanwhile, you will only be alive for thirty of those generations. Just how much effect do you think you will observe?

The mutation is utterly random. Whatever happens; happens. Who among us has not seem deformed dead animals? The only mutations which are passed along are those which allow the creatures to reach sexual maturity.

They're nonrandomly selected. The environment shapes what happens. The mutation has to make "sense". Imagine a polar bear cub being born which is hairless. Thanks to the one set of conditions--freezing cold and ice, that is one quickly dead cub. Now imagine another polar bear cub born which has black fur. Its mother keeps it alive when it's a cub, but once the bear strikes out on his own; he's dead. No camouflage--no food. No food--no offspring.

It's a process which goes thru iterations. Suppose you have a sentence made of 30 characters. Even when limited to 27 characters, all caps and the space, how long would it take you to guess the proper sequence?
Only 246,416,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to go thru all the sequences and that's at the rate of 1,000,000,000 guesses per second. Better get cracking.
Now suppose you were able to keep a character once it was correctly guessed--the first letter is a "T" and it stays. Only the remaining 29 are guessed in the next iteration. This would be the completely equivalent to the environment shaping the organism thru the passage of generations. It's the all-time iterative process. How long would that take? Rounding off to the nearest whole second, oh, way less than one.

A buildup of enough environmentally appropriate mutations is a stuffy sounding phrase as to why fish have gills since they live in water versus mammals using lungs. It's why and how something as seemingly all-or-nothing as the human eye can be properly explained. (See Climbing Mount Improbable for a lucid explanation on this very subject.)

Genes cause life to fill every niche of our world. There's bacteria living in solid bedrock while tubeworms burst from the ocean floor next to those hot water plumes while we discuss this very subject. It's all genes being passed from one generation to the next. Only the gene transporting vessel differs. We are another carrier "infected" with genes.

That's evolution. Truly a cornerstone of intellectual thought. Darwin slammed one out of the park.

The religious fascists have these indefensible retorts:

How evolution is just a theory. Well, I take umbrage at the use of "just", but yes, it is a theory. It should be taught as one. It just takes one contradicting fact brings the whole theory crashing down. So here it is 150 years later and evolution is still going strong. Where's the toppler?

How it violates the law of thermodynamics. After all, how could species get bigger, more complex, more varied? If that were true, then how come you grew from one cell to the multi-billion celled organism scanning the screen now?

"Creationism science" deserving equal time being taught in schools. Sure, right when preachers expound Darwin from the pulpit. In the meantime, "creationism science" deserves all the discussion in school that its interpretation of facts merits. I don't want to be an evolution fascist. They deserve all the time that their case deserves; which has to be one afternoon in high school biology.

Therefore, if the religion cannot work within the context of evolution; then that sect must be on shaky faith grounds to begin with. After all, nothing in evolution precludes God. He could still be there behind the scenes.

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