Clarissa's Blog

I don’t get the Theory of Evolution. It makes no sense to me. And don’t think I haven’t tried. I read books and articles, spoke to people who do get it.

And yet, the monkey objection (if there was evolution, then how come there are still monkeys around?) makes a lot of sense to me. I’m not trying to be facetious. I really feel this way.

However, I’m lucid enough to recognize that the reason why I don’t get evolution is my own intellectual limitation. If people who have dedicated their lives to the study of evolution say that there is no better explanation available to us right now, then I have no reason to believe that my monkey objection makes more sense than their years of research and scholarship.

I know that if started to bring up the monkey objection in conversations with evolutionary biologists I would sound just like the ignoramuses who triumphantly announce to me that literary criticism is “not real scholarship because anybody can just argue whatever they feel like.”

If only more people were prepared to recognize that there is a slight possibility that their “monkey objections” to a variety of fields of research are only based on their profound ignorance of the fields of study in question.