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Once, we were tempted to laugh this kind of thing off as a peculiarly American phenomenon. Teachers in Britain and Europe now face the same problems, partly because of American influence, but more significantly because of the growing Islamic presence in the classroom – abetted by the official commitment to ‘multiculturalism’ and the terror of being thought racist.
More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we – and by implication all of life – were created by God within the last 10,000 years.
Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable.
Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.
And, by the way, there is a distressingly long list of people who have been wrongly convicted on eye-witness testimony and subsequently freed – sometimes after many years – because of new evidence from DNA. In Texas alone, thirty-five condemned people have been exonerated since DNA evidence became admissible in court. And that’s just the ones who are still alive.
Nowadays it is no longer possible to dispute the fact of evolution itself – it has graduated to become a theorum or obviously supported fact – but it could still (just) be doubted that natural selection is its major driving force.
Plants have an energy economy and, as with any economy, trade-offs may favour different options under different circumstances. That’s an important lesson in evolution, by the way.
For the flower, insect pollination represents a huge advance in economy over the wasteful scattergun of wind pollination.
