The Globalization of Anti-Evolutionists
Apr. 24th, 2007 02:13 pmThere is a scary story in the current Economist about the globalization of the anti-evolution movement. Ack! There is the Pope, of course, who recently published an anti-evolution book in German. But I hadn't heard of the Muslim cleric Adnan Oktar before. His book is evidently being published in a number of languages and distributed widely.
I am a religious person, but I just don't get why people resist evolution. One of the things in the Economist story was an evangelical Bishop who is trying to stop Richard Leakey from exhibiting the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. The Bishop has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.” I am really comfortable with the idea that I'm related to apes and, for that matter, to all the other living things on this planet. I think it is kind of cool actually, being tied in with the web of life like that.
I am a religious person, but I just don't get why people resist evolution. One of the things in the Economist story was an evangelical Bishop who is trying to stop Richard Leakey from exhibiting the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. The Bishop has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: “I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.” I am really comfortable with the idea that I'm related to apes and, for that matter, to all the other living things on this planet. I think it is kind of cool actually, being tied in with the web of life like that.