They Argue So Much Because The Stakes Are So Low
Published in
1 min readJul 29, 2022
I’ve recently found myself wanting to explain evolution to the many strangers who don’t get it, so I started writing.
The general public, it seems, thinks the Theory of Evolution is a lot less legitimate than it really is. We’ve got evidence in spades, and it makes a lot of useful predictions.
The irony, in my opinion, is that as flimsy as people think evolution is, people also believe that “species” is a well-defined, even immutable, concept. Darwin wrote in 1859, in On The Origin of Species:
No one definition has satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.
Like a lot of that book, this quote holds up today.
