A friend of a friend of mine recently confessed that she doesn't accept the theory of evolution because, "if people evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" Sigh. The sad thing is, this was in Canada.
I was having dinner with a friend of mine recently and started talking about evolution. The first thing that he said was, "Darwin said that we evolved from chimpanzees, but now scientists are finding out that he was wrong, we evolved from sea creatures."
What stunned me about this was that he'd made this exact statement before, and I'd taken pains to explain to him that our common ancestor with chimpanzees was probably something somewhat similar to chimpanzees, but that it's also true that we have far more distance ancestors that lived in the oceans.
Anyway, I explained it again. Then he innocently asked, "If we evolved from chimpanzees, the reason that there are still chimpanzees must be that they stopped evolving."
I look at this as one step better than the creationist's monkey question, because he at least seems to want to know.
So again I had to patiently explain that chimpanzees have evolved since our common ancestor as well, and that, as I'd said before, our common ancestor was not a chimpanzee.
After that he said, "Well, I guess Darwin was wrong then."
"huh?"
"Because he said we evolved from chimpanzees."
"No, he didn't."
"Yes, he did."
repeat five times.
"Look, I've read
The Origin of Species. He never said we evolved from chimpanzees. Darwin understood what I just told you."
"Oh. Okay."
I wonder if I'm going to have to have this same discussion again a month from now.
Later, I got him to read this (
http://articles.animalconcerns.org/ar-voices/archive/mind_gap.html) essay by Richard Dawkins, hoping to see what he thought about the points raised. He became completely fixated on saying, "It's impossible to have a half-human, half-chimpanzee."
I need new friends.
