![Consider the Platypus: Evolution through Biology's Most Baffling Beasts by [Sandford, Maggie Ryan]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/4176dtFCM0L.jpg)
At the Minnesota State Fair. And wrote it up at Nature:
I went to the Minnesota State Fair last year wearing a sandwich board. It said, “Ask me anything about evolution.” Proponents of evolution assumed I was a religious zealot. Creationists assumed I was there to mock their beliefs. The biggest challenge in fighting misinformation? Just getting a conversation started.
This public-engagement stunt taught me a crucial lesson: the key to effective science communication isn’t the science. It’s communication.
Maggie Ryan Sandford, “You can’t fight feelings with facts: start with a chat” at Nature, 578, 339 (20 February 2020) | doi: 10.1038/d41586-020-00452-3
But why on earth did she think that such a strategy would ever be an aid to effective communication?
Wasn’t she, at bottom, just trying to put the supposedly stupid mid-Western rubes on display for the supposedly sophisticated Brits? That stuff is wearing thinner all the time though the targeted Brit demographic might be the last to know.
The patronization and self-indulgence are instructive—but then so many science outlets are bowing deeply to the raging Woke as well. So expect much more (and nastier) nonsense to come down the pike than this stuff.
The remarkable thing is that so many fascinating things are happening today in the study of the ancient past. It’s not a good sign for the defenders of “evolution” (Darwinism?) that they can think of nothing better to sponsor than this stuff.
Science writer Sanford is the author of Consider the Platypus: Evolution through Biology’s Most Baffling Beasts.
“The biggest challenge in fighting misinformation? Just getting a conversation started.”
In all fairness, this is the same problem I have. There are only a few of us (relatively speaking) that are at all interested in Evolution-related conversation to begin with.
People are content with being misinformed. It’s better for them to conform to their comfortable culture than it is to discover and hold on to the truth, which might cause them problems.
Andrew
As a fun exercise, let’s start listing questions that people could have asked her. Questions that would have disturbed her (presumably) unassailable belief in her own knowledge of the subject. How about, “Where do all the unique ORFAN genes come from?” Or, “why do evolutionary trees derived from different genes in the same species yield different and incompatible trees?”
Let’s start a collection of such questions to ask Neo-Darwinists. Probably someone has already done this, so if you have a link to such a list, I’d like to see it.
Thanks!
Question: why the stupid dichotomy ‘artificial’ selection/ ‘natural’ selection if they are the same (we humans are natural).
Thanks.
How cute. Oh well, I guess everyone has to learn these basic facts about human nature and people’s beliefs somewhere.
as to this comment from the article:
So following her ‘reasoning’, the further from ‘shared ancestry’ we have with the animal and/or plant then the less we should be able to build muscle, Yet, whey protein and fish are considered excellent body building proteins.
So much for her first claim of shared ancestry. She goes on,
Actually, the fossil record is far more discordant with evolution than she has apparently falsely been led to believe and genomes also reveal something far different than gradual evolution,
as to this comment she made,
LOL, golly gee whiz, no evolution needed if we are already apes. 🙂 Anyways, the supposed evidence for human evolution is highly misleading and when examined closely, reveals that we are definitely NOT ‘apes’:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-texas-m-last-week-theistic-evolutionist-joshua-swamidass-vs-id-proponent-michael-behe/#comment-693556
and
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/at-texas-m-last-week-theistic-evolutionist-joshua-swamidass-vs-id-proponent-michael-behe/#comment-693590
Interestingly, her emphasis on ‘communication’, i.e. ‘speech’, in her article is highly ironic since speech is one of the best proofs against evolution:
In 2014, a group of leading experts in this area of language research, authored a paper in which they stated,,,