On Unwarranted Skepticism.
The other day I met a person who doesn’t believe in evolution. This shocked me quite a lot. This is because it is one of the fundamental theories that explain how the world works. It shapes our collective understanding of the world and is proven beyond doubt that it is the correct mechanism of how life has changed over the eons.
What was even more surprising to me was that this denial of what amounts to a basic truth of the world was not made based on any specific evidence or logical argument. It was made from the feeling of general incredulity and that “we cannot possibly have come from monkeys”.
This same person holds a supercomputer that can access the entire of the world’s collective knowledge, and that can triangulate its position using satellites that have been launched into space. That is perhaps just as unlikely a scenario, and yet it is true.
It seems that the more abstract truth is, the more difficult a time people have in accepting it.
And what is even more interesting, is that while most people would not try to attempt many things that require expert knowledge, such as brain surgery or flying a consumer jet, they will not put trust in the scientific community.
