effrenati/anthropology

This article describes an amazing find. "The skull of the Dikika baby, a 3.3 million-year-old infant discovered by Ethiopian paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged. The find is the most complete ancient infant and arguably the best fossil of its species, Australopithecus afarensis, ever found." The skeleton will be able to tell us more about the evolution of humans.

However, the negative mark on this fascinating page is the link to the forum from this article. I went there with an expectation that I would see exclamations of wonder at the amazing scientific find. Instead, I found people making ignorant comments such as, "It looks like a monkey to me....It is a monkey!" I take this opportunity to jump on my soap box about willful ignorance, especially around science, and, within that realm, about evolution in particular. The vast majority of people who out and out reject evolution have no real idea what evolution means. Admittedly, schools fail to do a good job of explaining it, but most people choose not to learn more due to religious dogma that tells them they "didn't come from apes." We did not "come from apes", but rather, apes and humans have a common ancestor. Why this is such a fearful or repugnant idea, I still don't understand, for though it helps us to understand our past, it does not prescribe our future.