evolution

     You have probably heard of the controversy surrounding the theory of evolution. Some people claim it never happened--that the world was created as it is now. Others claim these are religious fanatics, and attempt to prove to them that God didn't make the world, as an argument for the theory of evolution.  But it gets worse. There are two sets of people arguing even stranger things about evolution--things that seem to be creeping into discussions about other things in ways that are difficult to pin down--until you have heard enough of them.
     One set claims that evolution has stopped--that creatures and other life forms once evolved, but that evolution is no longer going on. This can be found in print going back sixty or seventy years. How anyone pretends to know that evolution has "stopped" isn't mentioned. It may be simply the ego of the author of the theory--who saw no room for improvement after evolution made him. Fact--if evolution exists, it also exists here and now. If creatures evolve over thousands and millions of years, we cannot expect to find evidence of it in a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. To pretend that because we can't "see" evolution that it isn't happening goes beyond spurious to ludicrous. At best it is assertion without proof.
     Another set of people is sure that we are all evolving even as we speak. Learning, work and effort of any kind do not exist in their philosophical system.  Everyone is merely going to sit around and wait to evolve. Some of these have actually claimed that people who can read and write are genetically different from people who cannot read and write. School had nothing to do with it, according to them--no work, no learning--just genes.  We might as well go back to the belief that people who could read and write had supernatural powers.