GLOBAL WARMING, EVOLUTION AND OTHER BASIC RULES OF SCIENCE NOT UNDERSTOOD BY THE GENERAL PUBLIC

A comment on my article about the 14 signs of fascism contained an odd thread of logic that is still bothering me weeks after having read it. In it, the person liked most of it except when I brought up evolution as a fact. He said he didn't believe in evolution and, most surprisingly, wasn't a fundamentalist religious nutter but felt the science didn't add up. Unfortunately for him, there is plenty of science out there that refutes it but as radical theories pop up all the time, a gullible public eats it up as fact simply because they don't know any better. If I walked in to a garage and started spouting nonsense on how to fix my car, the mechanic would look at me as if I was five. That's how I feel when someone starts telling me how evolution is just a theory and there is no evidence to prove it.

A recent poll by the YouGov pollsters showed a majority of Americans believe that God was responsible for their creation rather than random chance. This is from CBS DC:."that 62 percent of Americans believe God helped create humans. Thirty-seven percent of those thought God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years while 25 percent believe human beings evolved from lesser life forms over millions of years but God guided the process. Only 21 percent believe that God did not play a part in human evolution."

"Forty percent of those polled believe that intelligent design – the belief that God created the universe – should be taught in public schools, while 32 percent opposed such teachings. Twenty-nine percent of Americans were not sure if creationism should be taught."

"The poll also found that those who say God played no part in human evolution rose from 13 percent in 2004 to 21 percent in 2013, an 8 percent increase."

First off, anyone who believes that man formed in the last 10,000 year is an idiot. Fossil records show an evolutionary process millions of years old, chromosome 2 indicated a fusion between ape and man genes in our distant past and genetic links between us and chimpanzees have been thoroughly documented. I have no problem with the suggestion that God may have helped evolution along but in no way did he beam down to earth to tinker with monkeys. Here's the thing about proof. Evolution has tons, creationism has near zero. Which is more believable?

And don't get me started on the Earth being less than 6000 year old because that is provable nonsense. I can show anyone on the planet a mathematical formula that will calculate the age of the Earth within  a few hundred million years. This formula is not in question and cannot be debated. Two plus two equals four no matter how you slice it. Math is God.

And then there is the global warming deniers which seem to be increasing thanks to the smear campaigns being thrown at us by Big Oil, Natural Gas and Coal companies. We keep hearing from some moron that global warming has stopped over the past fifteen years and we should forget about the nonsense being given to us by "warming Nazi's hell bent on establishing a green fascist state." The only problem with that statement is that it is only partially true. Warming trends have indeed slowed. But temperatures were already high to begin with and have stayed there. The reason the Earth hasn't been getting hotter is that the oceans have been trapping the heat for us. This is causing fish stocks to fall even further and coral bleaching to accelerate. Eventually, the oceans won't be able to trap any more heat and then the world may be set on broil. Methane could be released in huge numbers setting up a runway effect where our atmosphere may more resemble Venus than Earth. Yet recent polls show a declining interest in global warming, having been convinced by polluters that none of it is actually occurring. Statistics show a troubling trend toward mass extinction and like always we are sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring the problem.

Overpopulation is real and dangerous. But we have the Catholic Church against abortion and birth control which is going to be the end of us all with that philosophy. With fishing stocks off the East Coast disappearing, many fisherman are going to lose their jobs. And while they may be fighting to keep them, we really shouldn't. The alternative is the fish all disappear and the world starves to death. Which is more important: a job or your life? That shouldn't be that big a choice but we seem to have to be making it all the time.

The world is burning and no one seems to care. Everyone has their heads stuck in their Ipad and no one is watching how bad things are getting. We need to start having rational discussions about these things, but some blowhard always ruins it for the rest of us. Until intelligent conversation can be had, nothing will ever get fixed and we will continue to devolve ourselves right back into the sea from which we came.