Rational Answers to Stupid Questions (eBook)

Part 1:
Evolution

I used to think, “If we came from chimps, why are there still chimps?” was the only argument against evolution. How naive I was. Evolution is by far the most contested scientific fact that I deal with on a regular basis. While I hear many of the same claims repeatedly, there are innumerable reasons people come up with for why evolution can’t be true.

Why evolution? For one, people take offense to the idea that they are no more special than some wild animal. Science tells us that, evolutionarily speaking, chimps are more like us than they are like gorillas. But that seems absurd. I see the chimpanzee and the gorilla in the zoo or on TV, and they seem far more like each other than the chimps seem to be like me. I think this is because we over-emphasize the cultural aspects of what makes us human and disregard the biological aspects of what makes us primates.

Another reason is it’s personally insulting to their religion. Religious ideas can be dangerous because they are identity-defining. To entertain the idea that Adam and Eve never existed is to not only accept that you’ve wasted your life believing in something, but it would mean destroying a part of you. People will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve these kinds of ideas. As a reference, just think of almost every war that ever happened. I’m sympathetic to this. I’m a science advocate, not an atheist evangelist. When people say, “I’m a Christian, but I believe in evolution,” I don’t ask them why or try to debate them. I only say I’m glad we agree on the science.

Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” I care about what’s true, and biology is not a throwaway or unnecessary science. Think of how much misery our ancestors suffered from lack of a basic understanding of disease. Think of the catastrophic famines ushered in by hare-brained anti-evolutionary and pseudoscientific agricultural policies in Stalin’s Russia. We must take evolution seriously because it’s part of biology, and the baby will get thrown out with the bath water if we capitulate to anti-evolutionary sentiments. Yes, I am making a slippery slope argument.

You’ll have to excuse me for the shift in tone, but this idea worries me the most. I can’t imagine living in a country where political leaders think the Earth is flat or the Sun orbits a stationary spherical Earth. But I do live in a country where half of the right-wing electorate and a third of the general public thinks evolution is false1. Not a single Republican candidate running for President in 2016 would claim they think evolution is true. Several proudly declared unequivocally that they do not believe in evolution (including Ben Carson, a brain surgeon), while others did not comment. Jeb Bush was the possible exception, but it’s hard to tell. Hurray.

I promise this is not a political book. I only bring this up because the consequences of Congress, which writes laws, being full of anti-science gargoyles are severe.

Evolution fascinates me because it is, on the one hand, elegant and simple. On the other hand, it is as complex as life itself. Some of the answers are simple, while others are challenging. Likewise, some of the arguments are incredibly stupid, while others are interesting.

Enjoy.

If humans come from apes,
why are there still apes?

There are many reasons why this question is terrible. Ironically, there is a way in which it’s a good question for reasons that the kind of person who asks would be totally oblivious to.

Problem number one–we are apes. Even if there were no other apes, we still are apes, so the idea of them being unable to exist is dead on arrival. I have had hilarious debates with people who tell me humans are not apes or animals. But these same people never disagree that we are mammals. A mammal is a type of animal! Much how the word “mammal” refers to a group of many species, the word “ape” also refers to multiple species. It means any tailless primate of the superfamily Hominoidea and includes chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, and human beings. So even if other apes ceased to exist, we (an ape) would still exist.

I don’t know what people even mean when they ask this question, and I don’t think they do either. Whenever I reply with, “Why wouldn’t there be?” they have nothing more to add.

This question has different versions, such as “If humans come from monkeys” and “If humans come from chimps.” If we came from chimpanzees, you might expect there not to be chimpanzees (although we will see how that’s not always the case), so that is a fair point. But nobody who knows anything about evolution proposes that we come from chimpanzees. We are related to chimpanzees. Ask yourself, are you related to your cousin? Yes? So, did you come from your cousin? Of course not. You and your cousin come from your grandparents. Chimpanzees and humans are the direct descendants of some other primate that went extinct long ago.

But even if we were the descendants of chimpanzees, why would that mean they can’t exist? Dogs are the direct descendants of wolves. Once two populations are separated and no longer exchange genetic information, one population will diverge, eventually becoming a different species. One does not need to go extinct.

The illustration The March of Progress by Rudolph Zallinger causes much confusion. The linear progression of the very chimp-like earliest hominid up through Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and then to us implies that evolution works like Pokémon. It implies that it is the destiny of knuckle-walking primates to become humans. That’s not how it works. In reality, the most primitive primate in the illustration is related to many different hominids who coexisted. Homo erectus, Neanderthals, the Denisovans, us, and probably several other species of humans all lived simultaneously. Rather than us being direct descendants of Neanderthals, we all are (or were) the descendants of that first hominin. It should be noted that Lucy, and even earlier hominins like Ardipithecus, were not knuckle-walkers.

Now here’s how the question is almost reasonable. It implies that if humans evolved, then what we evolved from shouldn’t exist. Guess what? It doesn’t! The famous Lucy specimen, scientific name Australopithecus afarensis, went extinct long before we showed up, and we came from Lucy. This isn’t perfect because we are confident Homo sapiens did evolve directly from Homo heidelbergensis, and we may have coexisted2. Again, that is possible because of how evolution actually works. Two populations become separated, and then if one remains in the same area, it will have the same selective pressures, but the other will not. So the population that migrates can speciate. Just like we did.

Timeline of human migration out of Africa. Image by Urutseg,
courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Direct ancestors and cousins of modern Homo sapiens. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The original Lucy specimen (Australopithecus afarensis). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The March of Progress by Rudolph Zallinger. Courtesy On Verticality.

If evolution is true, why aren’t other animals
turning into humans?

Once again, this question has so many problems. How can so few words imply so many mistakes? This question assumes an element of orthogenesis. Orthogenesis is the idea that organisms evolve because of a mysterious force. Orthogenesis begins with the assumption that human beings are the pinnacle, the apotheosis of evolution. This is a teleological argument for evolution. Once again, the person asking the question is practically guaranteed to have no idea this is the implication. The idea that evolution is supposed to end up creating upright walking primates who build SR-71 Blackbirds and twerk (among other things) is nothing but a species-centric bias created by those very same twerking primates.

Evolution does not work in a linear or predetermined way. The future has not happened yet, and there is no conscious force that is aware of what will happen and manipulates the present to achieve the predetermined future state.

Humans and other animals have evolved in different environments. The selective pressures in two areas, not that far apart, can produce dramatically different characteristics. At present, humans have conquered the Earth, but we have been relegated to a much smaller range for most our species’ existence. Humans evolved in Africa because that was the only place humans could have evolved. But we evolved in a specific region of Africa. Meanwhile, our close relatives (Neanderthals and Denisovans) evolved into something similar in other areas near us.

This question also implies that there is such a thing as the “best” way to exist. That argument immediately falls apart when you look literally anywhere. In any environment, you will find multitudes of...