(Image from Pharyngula)

Charles Darwin‘s life and work have contributed in innumerable ways to science and human understanding. It still amazes me that so many people still believe that evolution is a false notion, especially in well-developed nations where people are privileged with education. Evolution has proven itself time and time again, and is the only working scientific theory that can explain how life on earth could be here as it is today, and it does so with lucid accuracy. The world of science accepted it as a fact a long time ago. It’s about as questionable as the theory of the earth rotating around the sun.

Coming from a Latter Day Saint (Mormon) background, it’s frustrating to see so many members act as if they value science (many do so exhaustively), but then brush off evolution as if it was just some separate and mistaken idea. While the leadership of the church has not taken an official stance, they have continued to this day to support and repeat previous positions, which claim that it is nothing more than the “theories of men” (See Mormonism and Evolution). Many church authorities today simply dodge the question, like the late Gordon B. Hinckley, who said “People ask me every now and again if I believe in evolution. I tell them I am not concerned with organic evolution. I do not worry about it. I passed through that argument long ago.”

I’m sorry, but if you don’t accept evolution by now, you are either willingly ignorant, or you don’t understand what science is, or how it functions. You might as well believe that the world is flat, or that babies come from storks. Evolution is not a controversy like Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, Glen Beck, or Ben Stein would have you believe. To get a hint of the ridiculous lengths you would have to go in order to say otherwise, watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Apart from giving us no information of an alternative theory (supposedly this would be Intelligent Design, but this theory isn’t even a theory because it gives science nothing to test), this film uses every form of rhetorical trickery and fallacious logic known to human kind, including but not limited to appeal to emotion, appeal to ignorance, guilt by association, etc. My wife and I literally laughed our way through it.

If you still aren’t sure about evolution, there is a lot of information out there. Just read. Read online articles like Wikipedia’s, or read from scientific journals. Richard Dawkins recently published a book, The Greatest Show On Earth, that focuses on the mass amount of evidence that exists, a short video introduction of which I include below.