I’ve been looking at (the honestly alarming numbers of) young-earth creationist books also, which makes me furious. But also it’s so interesting the specific ways they’re wrong about science and how those reflect the average person’s misunderstandings of science. But also these people had a lot of influence on the USA education system and weaseled their way into convincing a large area of the world that there was a “debate” between evolution and creationism, and probably they’re the REASON for a lot of misunderstandings about science, particularly evolution
With misinformation, there is a zone beyond the realm of incorrect ideas that can be remedied with correct ones, where the very words being used to discuss a concept are being so thoroughly misused that you cannot address anything the other person is saying without journeying deep into the malformed version of reality they have constructed. You would need to teach the equivalent of several college-level courses to pull them from the abyss they’ve got themselves into.
The cruel difficulty of this situation is that you will never be prepared for this person’s questions because before you can coherently answer them, you must first process what they have said and work out what on earth it means to them, archaeologically excavating and reconstructing their alternate version of the universe in order to understand how that universe differs from the real one and how to translate reality into a form they can understand.
Inevitably, when you stammer and scrabble for footing on the shifting sands of their pseudoscientific sand castle, they will interpret this as evidence that they have deftly outsmarted your trickery and deception with Facts and Logic, and if you happen to be a science educator or scientist, they will post a video to YouTube of the whole exchange with the caption “Evolutionist arguments DESTROYED by one simple question!”
This is how I feel about this page.
Sir. The reason there are no “transitional forms” in the fossil record, is that there is no such thing as a transitional form. Every organism fits into a category because we create categories to describe organisms that we find. We made the categories up. There is no difference between organisms “within” categories and organisms “between” those categories because all organisms are evolving constantly. Everything is a transitional form between the thing it descended from and the thing it evolved into.
