Ask HN: Would presenting less evidence for evolution convince more people?

You're not going to convince anybody that evolution is real on the basis of evidence, no matter how much or little, if they've made up their mind they will just dig in further and see your attempt as a personal attack.

And don't forget that for plenty of people DNA is just as much a mystery as god (or even electricity) is.

At this point it is all about belief, loss of face and admitting that you've been duped half a lifetime or more.

People are very stubborn when it comes to holding on to beliefs that are wrong, because they have a very personal stake in it. They would have to rebuild a part of their identity that has that belief as the basis, the stronger the belief, the larger the resistance.

Scientists have this just as much as non-scientists, sometimes they will hold on to a wrong theory until they die.

If someone has a firmly held belief then you can start ramming on them from the outside to change that belief, or you can accept them the way they are and have peace with that.

Why would you want to change another persons belief structures, it really is their problem, not yours, and if they'll change they will have to make that switch by themselves, in the context of life as they see it, which is not something an outsider could ever know or change.

No amount of evidence will convince people. The vast majority are married to what they believe is their origin and trying to convince them otherwise, in my opinion, is a fool's errand. Majority of these conversations aren't based on not having enough facts, or having too many facts.

Also, you should frequent HN's IRC channel. You seem to create a lot of mostly off-topic threads that pose a single question in an attempt to create a discussion and I think your goals will be better suited to the channel.

That's an empirical question. The best book I have found on the DNA evidence for evolution written for a popular audience is Sean Carroll's The Making of the Fittest

http://books.google.com/books?id=tyRWHQAACAAJ&dq=Sean+B+...

Perhaps one could compare changes in opinion after reading Dawkins's book with changes of opinion after reading Carroll's book. On my part, I think the change of opinion from believing young-earth creationism to believing the scientific fact of biological evolution takes assistance in dealing with opinions on religion as well as opinions on science.

After edit: I should note that I'm personally acquainted with people who have gone through the change of opinion being talked about in this thread. Such a change does happen, and it's legitimate to ask how it might happen more often, as having correct beliefs about biological evolution helps people have correct beliefs about other scientific issues (for example, safety and efficacy of vaccines).

Keep in mind that to someone totally untrained in science, "a scientist says" is not that different from "a priest says" in terms of asking them to take something on faith. As level of scientific training increases, this changes somewhat, as we begin to understand that "a scientist says" carries a certain implicit claim as to the experimentation that went into the discovery; but even then, it's important to remember that much of what you and I _know_ about science we know because some authority figure told us. We may have chosen our authority figure wisely, but that's still what it is: do you believe light travels through a vacuum, or through a mysterious lumeniferous aether? Why? Is it because you did an experiment? Can you even explain what the experiment is?

As for me, I learned it in class and read it in a book. A lot of the "convince people of evolution" argumentation is focussing on entirely the wrong level of instruction, because it's asking people who learned one thing in class and read it in a book to instead believe a different thing that someone else learned in class and read in a book. Local evidence is no help either, because it's going to be anecdotal, and a lot of nonscientific arguments (including religious ones) can marshal evidence too. The problem is not convincing creationists to believe in evolution; it's not even convincing believers in one authority to believe in a different authority (which, while solving one immediate problem, just defers and sets up a different one). The problem is in convincing people of the scientific framework in the first place.

So no, DNA wouldn't do it.

I don't think anti-creationism evangelists are fighting the right battle. blahedo basically nailed it in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892757

I would say it like this: creation is a non-scientific issue. It is not, absolutely NOT anti-scientific. Science is to creation as anthropology is to dependency injection. There just isn't any relation.

Allow me to illustrate. If you were God (more specifically, if you had the power to create something from nothing) and you wanted to prepare an awesome dinner for your significant other, what would you do? Would you create a huge cosmic explosion, wait for planets to form, set up the necessary amino acids for life on one of them, wait for life to form, direct the evolution of plants suitable for human consumption, start a garden to grow those plants, grow some produce, harvest it and cook it up? No, you would just snap your fingers and create the dinner. After doing so, any scientist looking at your dinner would conclude that something like the process I described above had occured. There would be absolutely no way for them to know it had been created from nothing as all scientific inquiry would point to a clear natural origin. The ingredients in the dinner would all be identifiable as known plants and animals, so the obvious conclusion would be that they came from those known plants and animals. That the ingredients just popped out of nowhere as you snapped your fingers is not a provable (or disprovable) explanation. It is therefore non-scientific.

It is quite possible that God created the world 2 seconds ago and everything we think we know about history was just pre-embedded in our minds. The situation would be almost exactly analogous to the dinner example I gave above, and science would still conclude the same things about our past. There would be absolutely no way whatsoever to prove or disprove our divine origins.

The situation is exactly the same regardless when God is alleged to have created the universe. Maybe God created the universe 100 years ago, maybe 1000, maybe 10000, maybe there is no God. The point is, these are not questions science can answer and they are not questions any scientist should ever try to answer.

In summary, evolution is as far as we know scientific fact. It certainly could be disproven (otherwise it wouldn't be science), but for now, it is irrefutable fact. It is simultaneously possible that the entire universe was created 2 seconds ago. The universe could have been created with this post already written and me only thinking I had written it myself. If that were the case, evolution would still be an irrefutable fact. It would be wrong, but it would be scientific truth. Science can only answer scientific questions (and can only answer them with scientific answers). It cannot and should not speculate on non-scientific ones.

So as blahedo alluded, evolution will only be accepted as ultimate truth when science is accepted as the ultimate framework. There is no way to "prove" however that science is the ultimate framework. That too is a non-scientific question.

Science can no more prove creation (true or false) than it can prove that the answer to "What is Buddha?" is "Three pounds of flax", and it makes just as little sense to try.