One problem many people have accepting evolution is that on the face of it, it seems to make no sense. It runs quite counter to the way the world as we see it does. Razib at Gene Expression looks at some aspects of evolutionary theory that run counter to all our intuitive sense.
...consider the idea that evolution is not happening because we don't observe it in our own lifetimes. <snip> Consider the time scales that evolution operates over.... <snip>
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beyond the problem of the extent of change as a function of time, there is the essentialist paradigm which demands a particular conception of species difference contemporaneously. Unlike "genus" and other taxonomical categories species is more than a human semantic conjuring, they do seem to exist. But, contra the wisdom of the Creationists, and human common sense, it is not clear that species are always cut & dried in terms of how one delineates one "kind" from another. <snip> Evolution as a model is a scientific paradigm scaffolded by all sorts of peculiar realities, contingencies and theoretical constructs, as a fact it works over inhuman timescales and the underlying processes are not always intuitive. Human beings evolved to process an analog world of information, but we are a shaped on the most fundamental level by a discrete information storage medium and replicative process. I believe this is why random genetic drift often surprises people, it is a process that occurs due to imperfect discrete sampling of the previous generation of alleles, while human beings conceive of our replication as an analog process where we recreate the whole. <snip> Human life for the past 100,000 years has not been a controlled experiment rigged to elucidate general scientific principles and the abstract laws of the universe, rather, it has been a sloppy mess and a struggle to reproduce. The biases we have been given by evolution or our proximate day to day experience as human beings are useful. If we spent time considering that Newtonian Mechanics is fundamentally a faulty aproximation, that the world around is 99.999999% vacuum, that does nothing for our life and nothing for our reproductive possibilities.
Most important of all, and something that applies far beyond evolution:
Science is hard, science is abnormal, and beware the bewitchment of "common sense." Qasars and quarks, random genetic drift and DNA, such things are difficult to grasp with common sense precisely because their sensory reality is excluded from our universe, not only do we not have direct experience as individuals our species' minds have never been shaped by the patterns and rules which emerge out of their interlocking dance with the rest of the reality. Evolution is the father of this situation, it has equipped us to recognize faces, to keep track of social relationships and fall forward in a controlled fashion without thought. But, evolution could not shape us to understand itself, because it works over millennia, and there is no fitness advantage is conceiving of possibilities deep into the future when the concerns of the present loom large. Perhaps this is another argument against "species" selection, as a species that could "understand" evolution on a communal level might have been able to game the system, enter into new niches, escape overspecialization that might make them vulnerable to reccurent catastrophic events. Ultimately the issue is not evolution, it is the profound complexity and technicality of the scientific disciplines in the modern world, and the lack of fluency with them that is the norm among lay persons. Evolutionary theory is also problematic because it intersects with the deeply emotional issue of human origins, and when emotion confronts rationality the wisdom of the crowds is not pretty. For the past few hundred years technological change has given science breathing room, the ability to take the population foward over new horizons and into strange lands, but who knows what the future holds?
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