Friday, 13 June 2008

UNinquisitive Inquisition

Today's Bizarro is brought to you by the Kansas Board of Education.

Cartoonists have long explored various renditions of the "fish walking out of the sea" and other evolution motifs, and I'm no exception. There is just so much you can do and say with this subject.

I'm not entirely sure what this one is saying, but I think it might be about how some people can't believe we evolved from single-cell organisms because they are trying to see the entire picture at once. They imagine a fish got legs one morning, walked out of the ocean, bought a suit, and showed up at the office that afternoon.

Richard Dawkins uses a good metaphor in his book, "The God Delusion," saying that if you stood at the bottom of a huge, sheer cliff, you could not imagine how a person could possibly get up to the top without help. But if you go around the other side and walk up the slow incline to the top, it's quite easy. (If I've got the wrong book here, somebody let me know.)

Evolution vs. Creationism is sort of a favorite subject of mine, both in Bizarro and in my personal life. I love documentaries about the subject and have read a number of books about it, both scientific and political. I believe in being polite and diplomatic, but I admit I find it very difficult not to be condescending to supposedly well-educated people who believe in creationism in the face of so much evidence of the relative accuracy of Darwin's theory. It's as though they were born a thousand years too late.

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