Evolution Survey

Here is the Gallup Poll For the number of American adults who believe in evolution.

41% believe "creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years" is true and "evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life" is false,

28% believe evolution is true and creationism is false, and

24% believe both creationism and evolution are "probably" or "definitely" true.


Seems a little off that so many people go against the evidence. It's even what is taught to you in school. Imagine how bad it could get if we were teaching Creationism as fact.
This seems like a good place to tell why somethings are found in your text books and not others.
The most obvious argument is evolution. As opposed to popular belief there is plenty of evidence to support it. Fossil records show the subtle change over time of certain species. Some species just go extinct and do continue to evolve, Dinosaurs for instance. But small mammals that survived do have fossil records that show the slow, very slow, millions of years, changes that lead to all the mammal life we see today. We won't find every fossil of every species ever to have walked the planet. Over 99% of species that have ever lived are extinct, and there are many many species we still haven't discovered that we still share the planet with.
Another big discovery in evolution is genetics. The way you get some traits from your mom, and some from your dad. If some of the traits made you more likely to be able to survive better than someone else, then eventually the better equipped will survive to breed and then pass on the better traits. That flowed nicely into evolution, it really is that simple. Sometimes there will be a mutation in the DNA that may give you a whole new trait.

Hypothetical Scenario: Lets pretend you are an early fish in the ocean, completely senseless, no sight, smell, hearing, touch, nothing. If there was a mutation in your DNA that gave you an eye, you would have an advantage over the rest of your own species. You mate and some of your kids have the eye, too. They mate with more fish with no eyes, so their genes are passed. Your other kids were eaten because they didn't see a bigger fish coming, so they don't pass the "No-Eye" gene. Soon the fish with eyes dominate and the Eyeless fish die out.
I know the eye didn't just come to be as complex as an eye now, it evolved over time. And the terminology isn't completely accurate, I just thought I'd make it simplified. That shows how one species evolved. Evolution within one species is called Micro Evolution, and most people accept this. (We can see this in different breeds of dogs.)

How do to species come from one. A very common misconception is that new species evolve from to different species mating, like an owl and a dog to form the new species owl dog. As neat as that would be, that's not quite how it works. The arrival of a new species isn't instantaneous.
Go back to the fish scenario.back to no senses. They live in a pond, and say some are swimming on one side, and some the other, and a big something falls in the middle and completely blocks them off from one another, or the lake lowers and there was a tall land bridge in the middle. Either way, the fish are separated, both with no senses. The fish on the left side of the mutation were they eventually evolve into "eye fish". Halfway there...
MEANWHILE ON THE OTHER SIDE. First you should know that the mutations are completely random. Saying that, let's say that the fish in the second side of the pools are never introduced to the Eye Gene, they will never have eyes. Maybe theses fish developed ears, the same way as the eyes in the other fish. So the second side went from the first "nothing fish", to the"ear fish."
After so long the fish will lose the ability to breed with fish on the other side, even if they are reunited. So now you have fish with ears, and fish with eyes, two species of fish. There are other ways it happens, and my example was very simple, but when this happens over million and millions of years, you get a lot of variety. Mutations aren't the only way for genetic variation, but anything more would be to complicated to get into, unless someone wants to hear it.

That is the very tip of the iceberg for the evidence of Evolution, Micro and Macro. In order to be put into a text book it has to have plenty of evidence, so let's look at the evidence for creationism.

It's in the bible.

Wow. Uhh...touche creationist. The problem with using that as evidence is it was just written by men in the first century and earlier. They say they heard God, but they could have just thought that. There is no evidence showing the bible is accurate, so using a question to answer a question, or to highly unlikely, "if"s.

That is why evolution makes it into the books and not Creationism. All the textbooks still question origin of the first life, whether it was molecules that had energy added to them to become "alive." The likely idea is the build blocks of like, Carbs, Proteins, Lipids, Nucleic Acids, happened to come in contact. Maybe instructions on the Nucleic acids lead to a single cell organism. Maybe it happened on Earth, maybe somewhere in space. Maybe it was a higher power.

I don't care if you think it is God, many scientist are looking for that answer. I don't know which one is right, I pick the one that sounds the most logical based on what I know. But if you believe in God, please acknowledge evolution. It is a theory, like gravity, like the Theory of Relativity. Theory in science doesn't mean "Guess", That's hypothesis. Theory, have no evidence against them or they can't be theories.

41% is way too many people to be flat out wrong.