Here's supposed Republican senate material Todd Akin talking about evolution (or, rather, not talking about it), in the process once again proving that he is indeed
a perfect representative of his party.
I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other. That’s one of those things. We can talk about theology and all of those other things but I’m basically concerned about, you’ve got a choice between Claire McCaskill and myself. My job is to make the thing there. If we want to do theoretical stuff, we can do that, but I think I better stay on topic.
Got that? Evolution is not science at all, because Todd Akin doesn't think millions of years of fossil records are enough to prove it. At least, not to the point where it could take precedent over, say, blind theological faith in that stuff not happening.
I think what we have here is a case of scientific illiteracy. I don't mean "Todd Akin does not know the science," I mean the more basic kind, where there are a great many Americans who do not understand the concept of "evidence," or "proof," or any of the other things that separate knowing a thing from simply declaring any other possibility to be equally true. You can prove that chickens lay eggs because you can observe a chicken doing it, but there are people who will tell you that it is equally likely that an alien race stopped time, lifted up the chicken, put an egg under the chicken and started time back up again because you cannot "prove" that version did not happen. Again, it is a case of conveniently finding God at the exact boundaries of your own personal knowledge, and then pinning those boundaries as the only God-fearing ones possible. The boundaries chosen are always peculiar ones—I have never known anyone to argue that a pocket calculator adds numbers together because God Did It, for example—but nearly always seem to exist in whatever little nooks might suggest that humans are a part of nature, and not a divine special case set apart from all the rest. Perhaps evolution does exist in dogs and cats and monkeys, many of the less ardent anti-evolutionists will tell you, but not that last link between them and us. That link is the one never to be acknowledged.
What was I going on about? Ah, right, that Todd Akin is an imbecile. And that he doesn't know how science works, but I suppose we knew both of those things already. First he declares that "legitimately" raped women can't get pregnant because of some pseudoscience he apparently read on the internet somewhere, and now he declares that all of evolutionary science is merely a "theology" because he says so. A real poster child for modern conservatism, that one.