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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> My main issue with homeschooling is mostly around the fact that it's generally done so parents can control and limit children's access to well accepted facts (such as evolution, age of the earth, or dinosaurs).

What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs.

So, I really deeply from my heart have a stance of "live and let live" concerning these topics. I might love science, but I am not a missionary or even an inquisitor for the "scientific truth".

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I just have a problem with parents closing doors for their kids. A lot of early education is about kids finding their interests and passions. It's also about making for a well rounded society.

I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed.

Sort of the same reason I'd hate for the kids to never be able to read. Sure, maybe there are jobs and people that live full lives never really needing to read anything. However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.

It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say, but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.

> However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.

> It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say

Spoken - or rather, written - like someone who doesn't read much.

I think there's an argument that not knowing anything about, say, dinosaurs, is probably fine. But "knowing" very wrong things about the age of the earth or evolution being real can lead to people making decisions that are terrible for everyone. Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example. And there's a real cost to society if there's some fraction of society that don't believe climate change could possible be real.

> Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example.

That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution, whose existence is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles.

To my understanding, the offending topic in these evangelical Christian circles rather seems to be whether macroevolution and the formation of species can be suitably explained via undirected small microevolution over an insanely long time.

The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. There's too much evidence for me to believe that evolution doesn't happen, at any scale. Evolution is clearly observable and foundational to biology.

Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are based on older iterations written by ancient people.

> The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense.

It is nonsense through the lens of biology, but it's nonsense that's very ideologically convenient to certain demographics, which (perhaps paradoxically) means that terms to talk about the distinction become useful in some sociopolitical or anthropological contexts. For what it's worth, the very particular term for the religiously-motivated typology that accepts microevolution while rejecting macroevolution is baraminology.

Now I am reminded of the YouTube clickbait I loved, something like, “evolutionists will hate this video.” I thought I would, but in fact I saw a lot of great biology and science and was glad that they were teaching how life can change over time…

> The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense.

Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution?

Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been proposed from biologists, such as Lamarckism or epigenetics (though the mainstream view in biology is these either could not be observed (Lamarckism) or are not considered to be important for macroevolution (epigenetics)).

This "couldn't there exist..." is doing a lot of work that I don't understand.

"Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"

Yes, there could in some alternative universe, but not in this one that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain why you don't notice rocks being attracted to each other.

There could exist some difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," but not in this universe that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain species.

The entire concept was made up by creationists to try to add a patina of science to their deeply-unscientific beliefs. And the problem with an unscientific world view is that science will never change your mind about things, you'll just decide what science to accept and which to not accept.

> "Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"

Something very related is a topic that is seriously discussed among physicists:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics

The problem with the existing theories of gravitation which seem to work quite well on the scale of solar systems is that there does seem to exist evidence that some observed data on the scale of galaxies might not be well-explainable by these theories. See

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ob...

Very recently new evidence for MOND came up:

> https://phys.org/news/2023-08-smoking-gun-evidence-gravity-g...

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051241