“If Evolution is True, Why Are There Still Monkeys?”

This “question” is often a mild source of frustration for me, which can, on occasion manifest into episodes of chronic rage and indiscriminate violence, but not entirely for the reasons you may imagine.

It’s not the complete lack of understanding in regards to common ancestry and evolution that gets my sacrificial goat; it’s the Incomprehensible levels of arrogance that the question alone indicates.

Now, this may come as a surprise to some, but I’m not actually a scientist. No, honestly.

I would consider myself someone with an average level of academic ability. This is why I find it useful to defer the shortcomings of my own knowledge to experts who endeavour to seek the truth, via credible and robust methods of observation, study and testing. I believe this makes it possible to consider myself informed. This to me seems a reasonable method of learning what…is.

I do think it’s important to have patience with people when such ignorance is a result of naivety or lack of education, but unfortunately, this question never takes the form of a sincere desire to learn the answer. It is void of all inquisitiveness. In fact, it’s not even intended as a question. It’s a smirking premature declaration of victory by the poser. They believe, in one act of intellectual superiority, they have destroyed Darwin and flipped scientific understanding on its head. That’s some feat. Bravo!

It’s this extraordinarily high regard for ones own intellect that I find mind-blowing, especially given the subject matter of the question. In fact, you don’t even need to understand the theory of evolution (which they don’t) to deduce that you must be mistaken in your questions premise, or at the least, short of a few key pieces of key information.

Let’s have a look at some things you must assume about yourself/knowledge to even put forward this question, or perhaps should have considered before asking it:

  • YOU, believer of ancient texts have stumbled across a mammoth oversight which will change the global understanding of complex life within the developed world. Your expertise on this topic negates the wealth of information contained within the fossil record, later validated by contemporary biological methods and decades of scientific investigation. The research you undertook during your study is astounding, detailed and thorough, using complex language, not written in any way by Crayon.
  • Your investigation is soon to be detailed in the game changing, scientific, peer-reviewed journal titled “Darwin Shmarwin – There’s still monkeys!”.
  • Well done. YOU are smarter than an evolutionary biologist. Instead of wasting years of their life furthering understanding through critical analysis, all they needed to do was pick up the phone, and enlighten themselves in no more time than it takes for you to dribble the words “there still be monkeys!”
  • Your years of casually ignoring facts, and employing the tried and tested method of taking your information “on faith” is obviously a more worthy process of discerning questions of this nature. Your ideas are evidently far too complex for the mere scientist to fathom by themselves.  With all those books in your house, where will you find room on your shelf for that Nobel Prize? I wonder.
  • The majority of the scientific community are undoubtedly engaged in mass conspiracy to deny the truth. In fact, they’re just making it up as they go along. You don’t even need to fact check evolution and discover if there is any truth in it, or if your question is a valid one. Why would you? There are still monkeys for gods sake! Check mate scientist! Their huge misunderstanding could have been so easily avoided if just one of those morons raised a hand during playtime (I assume scientist have play time) and used their big voice to say “Yes, all that does seem fairly spot on, but have you noticed there are still monkeys? ”

I wonder why that has never happened. It seems so obvious now you have mentioned it. What a glaring over-sight. How embarrassing. It’s as if the question isn’t valid or something.

Odd.

An honest and sincere iteration of this question would be “A minimum of rational thought has led me to conclude I have misunderstood the theory of evolution, as I am not sure why there are still monkeys, yet the experts, globally accept we evolved. What am I missing?”

You’d still be ignorant, but not wilfully, and far less of a gigantic clot.

GS

17 comments

What do you think? Leave some comments!