Thinking about the time National Geographic posed the question: Was Darwin Wrong?

Bentendo24 · May 31, 2020

Today I was thinking back to about the mid 2000s. I was a young Jehovah's Witness and I was starting to question my belief in the religion. Little threads that kept me attached to it were starting to break, and the big one was about to be torn to shreds.

Jehovah's Witnesses stand firm that evolution is not real. It is a large part of the religion, so much so that during the time I was a member they had a recurring feature in their bi weekly magazine the Awake that asked the question "was it designed?" (Or something like that) that talked about amazing features of animals and how things like the suction cups of the octopus couldn't have just come about by chance.

My brother had secretly started leaving the faith and would try to convince me that evolution was real, but I had none of it. Eventually I would start to research it, and a pit grew in my stomach when certain aspects of evolution started to make more sense than what I was being taught. It was a several year process that sent me spiraling into a depression. And I do mean years.

There is one moment during this time I will never forget. An issue of National Geographic came in the mail and it posed this question on the cover: Was Darwin Wrong? It actually got me excited, as I anticipated a truly in depth dive into the possibility that evolution was not the answer (I was ignorant at the time, give me a break). In what was probably the biggest gut punch of my life, this is what I came across when I opened the magazine up to find the article:

I can't say for sure if reading this article was what made me switch, but it was definitely the defining moment for me. Several years later I would leave the faith for good and never look back. To this day this image pops up in my head, and I'm sure a lot of people were amused by the trolling but for me it practically changed my life.

For former creationists, what was it that made you start questioning things?

sphagnum · May 31, 2020

I switched immediately after one lesson in my 9th grade biology class.

WillyFive · May 31, 2020

Loved this article.

Rhomega · May 31, 2020

So it's clickbait before clickbati.

spam musubi · May 31, 2020

they basically leveraged betteridge's law of headlines

zoggy · May 31, 2020

I give it a year or two before the creationists come back in a big way and it's a national debate again because Americans are so fucking dumb

Inugami · May 31, 2020

sphagnum said:
I switched immediately after one lesson in my 9th grade biology class.

Ironic because my 9th grade biology teacher went out on a limb every chance she got to say things like "but how do we know how long a day is to God?" And other similar nature... Gotta love public schools I guess.

skeezx · May 31, 2020

i remember that issue but not opening it up to a resounding NO

that's kind of hilarious really

Polioliolio · May 31, 2020

Haha that's great, the giant, NO.

Dennis8K · May 31, 2020

The Mother of All Clickbait Articles.

Also, a great troll 🤣

Serif · May 31, 2020

http://howdovaccinescauseautism.com/

Same energy.

Bentendo24 · May 31, 2020

zoggy said:
I give it a year or two before the creationists come back in a big way and it's a national debate again because Americans are so fucking dumb

I think about this all of the time. I wish I had a better grasp on how Americans view the subject now that it's not talked about as much as it was say 10+ years ago

Septimus Prime · May 31, 2020

For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

Snagret · May 31, 2020

Ex-Jehova's Witness as well OP. I remember my first exposure to an actual in-depth alternative (compared to what I had been raised to believe) take on science was getying ahold of a copy of The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan when I was about 16. I had so many questions in my head I was afraid to articulate even in my own brain, they were just locked away as vague "feelings" that I was terrified to confront. Reading that book felt like opening my eyes and seeing the world for the first time, it almost single-handedly deprogrammed all the brainwashing and gaslighting I'd been experiencing my entire life. If I remember correctly I think I just saw it sitting on a shelf at a used book store and decided to give it a try, had no idea what I was getting into lol

RedVejigante · May 31, 2020

Learning more about science and realizing how many of the creationists arguments I had grown up with were ultimately self defeating and/or false caused me to eventually reject my hardcore creationist upbringing. I was brought up as a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis kid, actually went and saw him in a live conference as a child. He was my Bill Nye. Having all his dishonest bullshit fall apart around me was one of the most ideologically traumatic yet liberating experiences I've ever had.

BowieZ · May 31, 2020

yep, i remember this, and it's stuck with me ever since

Lord Fanny · May 31, 2020

I read a book several years ago called The Secret Anarchy of Science, and I remember there was a few chapters that were actually dedicated to some new discovers and theories that said maybe Darwin was actually pretty wrong. Not in the actual idea behind evolution, but the way in which species evolved. Apparently, they got a lot of pushback from the science community, but eventually some came around to their theories. I have an audiobook of it, but that's been probably 7 or so years ago, so I have no idea where that research went as of today. I know that's not what this is about, though, more nuanced and all lol

zoggy said:
I give it a year or two before the creationists come back in a big way and it's a national debate again because Americans are so fucking dumb

I mean, it never stopped being in American lol. Especially in the South. When I was in High School, none of my science or biology teachers would teach evolution and big bang theory. We'd just watch movies on the days we were supposed to cover those. That's been a few years now, but I imagine those places are the same. Creationists have never gone away in America.

WedgeX · May 31, 2020

I appreciate the giant bold "no."

sphagnum · May 31, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

Some form of intelligent design, probably.

Jam · May 31, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

E V O L U T I O N
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How Many Creationists Are There in America?

A new survey shows the number can vary considerably depending how you ask questions about evolution

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Bentendo24 · May 31, 2020

sphagnum said:
Apparently somewhere between 18 and 31% (depending on how the question is asked) believe in creationism, at least according to this.

How Many Creationists Are There in America?

A new survey shows the number can vary considerably depending how you ask questions about evolution

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Honestly I would have imagined much more. Even the upper end is much lower than what I imagined the lower end to be

RedVejigante · May 31, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

Well, from my personal experience, creationists reject the notion that time will produce something drastically different from its predecessor. They try to make a false distinction between what they call "macro" and "micro" evolution. So they may acknowledge that, for instance, finches may have incremental changes over time, but they claim that they will never change to be anything other than a bird. It's part of what brought about the crocoduck nonsense. They throughly reject transitional fossils and claim that animals will always remain within their "kind".

Septimus Prime · May 31, 2020

RedVejigante said:
Well, from my personal experience, creationists reject the notion that time will produce something drastically different from its predecessor. They try to make a false distinction between what they call "macro" and "micro" evolution. So they may acknowledge that, for instance, finches may have incremental changes over time, but they claim that they will never change to be anything other than a bird. It's part of what brought about the crocoduck nonsense. They throughly reject transitional fossils and claim that animals will always remain within their "kind".

"God can do literally anything! Oh, no, wait, He can't do that."

Evolved1 · May 31, 2020

Snagret said:
Ex-Jehova's Witness as well OP. I remember my first exposure to an actual in-depth alternative (compared to what I had been raised to believe) take on science was getying ahold of a copy of The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan when I was about 16. I had so many questions in my head I was afraid to articulate even in my own brain, they were just locked away as vague "feelings" that I was terrified to confront. Reading that book felt like opening my eyes and seeing the world for the first time, it almost single-handedly deprogrammed all the brainwashing and gaslighting I'd been experiencing my entire life. If I remember correctly I think I just saw it sitting on a shelf at a used book store and decided to give it a try, had no idea what I was getting into lol

That was an important book for me. My background was born again christians, not JW, but they're similar in their intelligent design approach. By the time I read DHW I was already a nonbeliever, but it helped me put some things in order, and really practice a specific type of critical thinking and appreciation of science I've maintained to this day.

RedVejigante · May 31, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
"God can do literally anything! Oh, no, wait, He can't do that."

Yeah, it's literally this. God did the most complicated, needlessly obtuse thing possible to give you the greatest reasons to doubt his existence so as to provide you the largest chance of burning in hell for eternity. It's pretty silly.

Snagret · May 31, 2020

Bentendo24 said:
Gah, "I had so many questions in my head I was afraid to articulate even in my own brain, they were just locked away as vague "feelings" that I was terrified to confront."

Yes. Absolutely yes. I've never been able to articulate this constant feeling that I had during my teenage years better than this.

Fear was a constant theme for me growing up. Which is ironic because they were so adamant that they didn't have fear based messaging because they didn't teach that hell was real. But what was real was the very real pain of losing my friends and family for leaving. My brother was told by my aunt and grandma that they would never talk to him again if he left. Just awful

Oh yeah, I mean nothing is scarier than the apocalypse and they drill it into your head over and over again lol. I had nightmares about the end of the world pretty much from the age where I was old enough to understand what they were talking about to the age where I stopped believing. That plus the pervasive subtle threat of excommunication from your loved ones and community if you stray, they really anchor you with fear like a ball and chain.

Good on you for making it out OP, it's absolutely not an easy journey. I felt like I had to pick between my family and my sanity. I'm happy with the choice I made and life is ultimately better on the other side, but my family is a textbook example of how "The Truth" can totally fracture the relationship between people on the inside and their loved ones who decide to leave.

It really does speak to the importance of scientific voices in our society though. Authors like Carl Sagan and publications like NatGeo are critical, it's amazing how one article or one book can change (or save) someone's life.

N.Domixis · May 31, 2020

Coricus · May 31, 2020

zoggy said:
I give it a year or two before the creationists come back in a big way and it's a national debate again because Americans are so fucking dumb

Technically Creationism and evolution can coexist, and there are definitely plenty of Christians that happily accept the existence of both.

Funny enough, I first learned this in my childhood because I loved dinosaurs and a lot of Christian materials on dinosaurs get really pissy about how only Creationism as the type of thought process Jehovah's Witnesses and Fundies use (AKA Young Earth Creationism) is real and that the thought process that the first verses of Genesis were metaphorical and that God created the earth through billions of years of natural progression prior to Biblical times (AKA Old Earth Creationism) is Blasphemous and Wrong and people who think that are Not Real Christians.

While I've remained a Christian into my adulthood, I started gradually shaking off the Young Earth Creationism angle in the privacy of my own mind because it's such a silly sticking point. I keep quiet about it because I know full well if I say much about it in front of my parents or any other Christians with their mindset or stricter I'm going to get utterly chewed out for it.

Deleted member 60295 · May 31, 2020

Bentendo24 said:
For former creationists, what was it that made you start questioning things?

I honestly can't remember, but what made me ultimately ditch it, a full two or three years before ditching christianity entirely, was because I ended up in a bible study with a whole bunch of christians who were also engineers and rocket scientists. (yeah, for real.) When i told them I didn't think I could be a creationist anymore, they all told me that they'd already come to the same conclusion a long while ago.

jay · May 31, 2020

I was raised with much religion, so that's a huge caveat, but I still always had some inherent assumption all life was related. How do you see a tiger and not know it's a cat?

Bentendo24 · May 31, 2020

jay said:
I was raised with much religion, so that's a huge caveat, but I still always had some inherent assumption all life was related. How do you see a tiger and not know it's a cat?

My dad believes that breeds are a thing but that it doesn't mean that they're separate species. He fully believes that enough micro changes can occur that result in the differences between house cats and tigers, but that they can never change so much that they become different species (neglecting the fact that they ARE different species). He says a pug and a Labrador are both dogs even though they look different. I try and tell him that those differences are the result of just thousands of years of artificial selection, now imagine what natural selection can do over billions of years of those types of changes. He doesn't see my point, and I sometimes wonder if there's an easy way to explain to him that he's on the right path with accepting that species can change, but wondering what I can do to get him to see that those changes over a long time can end up with something completely different

supernormal · May 31, 2020

I was raised catholic but honestly, I don't know if I ever truly believed past being a toddler. I was VERY into science as a kid, and I learned early on that things don't just happen out of thin air, there were intricate explanations to all sorts of things in the natural world. If it didn't hold up to scrutiny then I probably didn't believe it. My first doubts came about at maybe 6-7 when I questioned why praying every night felt like a chore and why the times that I didn't pray, nothing different really happened.

Then I learned about babies, and Santa being fake, and immediately the story of god had more in common with that than anything in a science book. Also the rejection I had from so many people as a little kid, just because I had some questions pushed me further away. These were supposed to be "good" people? None of this made any sense.

jay · May 31, 2020

Bentendo24 said:
My dad believes that breeds are a thing but that it doesn't mean that they're separate species. He fully believes that enough micro changes can occur that result in the differences between house cats and tigers, but that they can never change so much that they become different species (neglecting the fact that they ARE different species). He says a pug and a Labrador are both dogs even though they look different. I try and tell him that those differences are the result of just thousands of years of artificial selection, now imagine what natural selection can do over billions of years of those types of changes. He doesn't see my point, and I sometimes wonder if there's an easy way to explain to him that he's on the right path with accepting that species can change, but wondering what I can do to get him to see that those changes over a long time can end up with something completely different

Could you explain that house cats and tigers cannot create viable offspring and therefore are not the same species? Exact definitions of species and even life are not 100% agreed upon so I could see it being someone he could dodge. Your point is entirely reasonable and correct, though. Without the belief god won't allow species to separate, there would be nothing stopping micro changes from leading to huge drift over long periods. But then you also open up a debate about the age of the planet...

ibyea · May 31, 2020

That is one hell of a clickbait article lmao.

My turn came because I read a biology blog called Pharyngula.

Psittacus · May 31, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

An overly complex model

mbpm · May 31, 2020

I remember this. It was pretty funny

Weltall Zero · Jun 1, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

Yeah, this comes up from time to time. I call this particular faith "The weird and nonsensical mess that theist biologists convince themselves of to quell their own roaring cognitive dissonance".

Inugami · Jun 1, 2020

jay said:
I was raised with much religion, so that's a huge caveat, but I still always had some inherent assumption all life was related. How do you see a tiger and not know it's a cat?

Just a lazy game dev reusing the same models and animations.

KimiNewt · Jun 1, 2020

I was brought up religion but I never really was a "creationist". I was in a Jewish Orthodox school and I remember one time in one of the teachers was talking about the story of Genesis.

She was saying that while the story says that all the creatures were created in one week, it's possible that what the bible calls one week or a day isn't what we call a week or a day and it's a significantly longer period of time.
That made me think "huh, we don't just have to blindly whatever's written there".

I rapidly lost my faith over the next few years (tbh I can't quite remember how/why), and the thing that brought me completely over the edge to be a complete atheist was reading a book about evolution in the 10th grade. I was already interested in it and biology, but I found this very good book in Hebrew (which I never found again) which detailed the process.

From then on, I was hooked. It wasn't even the fact that god was clearly not needed at all-- it was just a beautiful and incredibly interesting process. I spent that year reading everything that library had on evolution (starting from The Selfish Gene), and then started reading and buying books online (my Wikipedia edit history from 09-10 is full of articles about prehistoric animals). The next year I enrolled in university during highschool as a Biology major (though it eventually transformed into biology-chemistry and then to chemistry-- I just couldn't handle the memorisation in biology and I craved the more mathematical basis for theories).

So thanks, lady in fifth grade. Maybe thanks to you I now have a greater understanding of the world and extinct amphibians.

WyLD iNk · Jun 1, 2020

Ugh, I fight almost daily with young Earth creationists (and science denialists in general) on both Facebook and YouTube. The amount of dissonance and willing ignorance takes its toll on me. I can only repeat certain things, explain certain things in great detail, and correct certain misunderstandings so many times in such short order before my mental fortitude wears thin and I take a break for a day or two.

It's really nice to see that some people wake up to what the facts are. Thanks to every one of you in this thread who slipped out of your indoctrination. It may not seem like much, but knowing that the effort of those of us to educate isn't a lost cause.

While I was raised Lutheran and believed in a god until age 14 myself, evolution was never contested in my family because we bred and boarded Arabian horses, and had quite a lot of other assorted livestock on our large family ranch. It was just something that unquestionably existed because we could exploit it for desired traits in the bloodlines of the horses.

It has become something of fascination to me as I got older. My father began immersing himself in right wing propaganda more in the late 80s, and had fully adopted the religious right's victim complex as early as Clinton's first term. So while he now spouts Trumpisms and partakes of many of the conspiratorial trappings of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly (both of whom he practically worships), he just can't quite bring himself to abandon the fact that evolution - as a means of inherent genetic modification through common descent - does actually exist. He manages to avoid total cognitive dissonance by suggesting that evolution has "holes in it", but it's a start.

Though I do not expect him to come around. Not in his advanced age, anyway. He's dead inside the next 10 years for certain. Still, I continue to try to explain evolution to deniers. If I can save just one person from a reality denying indoctrination, I've done well. You guys demonstrate that education DOES work.

Kittens McMittens · Jun 1, 2020

In the UK we have Christian services in primary school, so we basically had to do prayers and stuff in assemblies. I felt kind of put out by all this because being a nerd I had heard about big bang cosmology, so I knew there was strong evidence that ~13bn years ago the universe was a very small point.

So, I decided to read the Bible at around age 7 and see if it said anything worthwhile. I made it through Genesis and a bit past before I figured it was a less imaginative fantasy than The Hobbit, which I had also read by that point.

Never really looked back.

TheAndyMan · Jun 1, 2020

This was never a problem for me, because I was never very religious. Going to Church was just about seeing other people, not worship itself.

The problem is that people's source of authority is a 2000 yr old book, not the latest science.

Penny Royal · Jun 1, 2020

Coricus said:
Technically Creationism and evolution can coexist, and there are definitely plenty of Christians that happily accept the existence of both

Which is how the Anglican and Catholic churches have both accommodated evolution into their overall structure of belief, just the same way the Papacy eventually came round to the idea of a heliocentric solar system.

Oh, and for anyone having the speciation argument, I recommend the slightly old, but wonderful book 'Your Inner Fish' which is all about that exact subject.

Jegriva · Jun 1, 2020

Before the internet I never knew that creationism was a thing. Or the supposed conflict "science/faith", since many science teachers I've had were priests or nuns.

"Happy" Catholic Europe, I guess.

Necron · Jun 1, 2020

Remember this one too.

Is National Geographic still worth subscribing to?

Aurongel · Jun 1, 2020

Septimus Prime said:
For the sake of argument, let's say God personally designs every organism there was, is, and ever will be. And let's say He designs every organism to be unique but only slightly different from its parents such that the aggregation of these changes over a long time will produce a being that's very different compared to its predecessor many generations ago. What would we call that?

That would be a thesis lacking any and all falsifiability and therefore has no place in a discussion of a deterministic process like evolution.

I've debated this frequently with folks back in my ultra religious home town, their logic always breaks down when you start explaining the steps of validating a scientific theory and WHY it's important to form arguments that are observable and falsifiable.

Drowner · Jun 1, 2020

My mom was heavily into non-traditional Christian churches (like speaking tongues and falling on the ground from the Holy Ghost or w/e, also single songs that went on for what seemed like hours). I guess I just believed what I was told at church camps about Earth being only x years old b/c it was all I was told. Then around age 9 my parents divorced and I started public school where they taught science which seemed reasonable enough. and my dad started telling me how my my mom was wrong about things, and he let me read Harry Potter and play Pokémon at his house so that probably inclined me to believe him. over more years of schooling I realized Creationism was delusional nonsense. it was still just me believing what I was taught, but at least now there were actually arguments and presented evidence instead of "This is how things are b/c I am saying it"

Thinking about the time National Geographic posed the question: Was Darwin Wrong?

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