Last Straw

John Tim­mer writ­ing for Ars Tech­nica:

If sci­ent­ists had to pick one area of sci­ence that’s most fre­quently mis­un­der­stood, evol­u­tion would prob­ably win the vote. It’s not simply the sea of mis­in­form­a­tion avail­able on the Inter­net (although that clearly doesn’t help); it also seems that a lot of people who accept the sci­entific evid­ence don’t fully appre­ci­ate some aspects of evol­u­tion­ary the­ory. It’s one thing to remem­ber a few examples of the com­pel­ling evid­ence we have for evol­u­tion; it’s another thing entirely to appre­ci­ate the fea­tures of the pro­cess that make it so incred­ibly power­ful but, at the same time, hide many of its actions from our com­mon experience.