… there then comes along Christine O’Donnell.

What bugs me about people like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell is not that they wear their religion on their sleeves, but that they voice their non-scientific beliefs as if they were truth and science fact as if it were false. O’Donnell, on Bill Maher’s former show “Politically Incorrect,” said that “evolution is a myth” and if evolution were true “why aren’t monkeys still evolving into humans” today. Both of these statements show me that she knows nothing about evolution or even scientific theory.

To say that evolution is a myth is a laugh. As most fundamentalists do, she is ignoring science in favor of belief and is confusing “belief” with “knowledge.” She actually has it backwards; religion is the myth, not evolution. Every culture has created myths about the gods and we wouldn’t consider those myths to be true today. From the perspective of a religious believer, all other religions are myth. They all can’t be right and, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins, I am just going one religion further than most religious believers in saying that all religion is myth. Can anyone even prove the existence of God? No one can. That is the reason why it is called faith and not a sure knowledge.

Evolution, on the other-hand, is nothing like that. I can hear fundamentalists saying, “Wait, evolution is just a theory,” which shows me that they do not know the scientific meaning of the word. “Theory” does not mean “idea.” For that scientists would use the words “hypothesis” and “construct.” For a theory, one must be able to make predictions that produce results. For example, scientists know very little about what gravitation is and therefore gravitational theory describes the observational behavior of gravitation. We can make accurate predictions based on the acceleration rate of a falling object, we can make orbit calculations, etc. The same is true with evolutionary theory. Scientists are able to make accurate predictions about evolution, such as where in the strata an intermediate species fossil should be found. The idea of a god doesn’t qualify as a theory or even a very good hypothesis and is merely a construct. God is an idea created by humans and the stories about him are myths. Scientists do not make up stories about evolution and call it fact. Evolutionary theory is based on sound scientific evidence and fact, unlike the pseudoscience of Henry Morris and Michael Behe.

Also, once-and-for-all, HUMANS DID NOT EVOLVE FROM MODERN MONKEYS. It would be impossible for humans to evolve from monkeys today, Christine, because humans never have. They are our cousin species, not our ancestors. Humans evolved in parallel on different branches. We have a common ancestor, which I would image would be very different from modern monkeys. Chimpanzees branched off this common ancestor about 5-7 million years. Pick up Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins if you are interested in knowning the slightest bit about human evolution.

Some people argue “Does that it matter whether a politician believes that evolution is a myth?” It most certainly does. If a politician is going build policy based on religious beliefs rather than science, we are in for a world of hurt, from environmental and educational policy to policies concerning human rights.