Misconceptions About Evolution!

About Me!
Heyheyhey. I’m Melissa, and this is my student nat blog about evolution. I’m a junior this year at Olathe North High school. I really like this student nat class, because I love animals a lot. I want to be a vet. :]. I like to talk really loud and exaggerate stories. Yep, that'd be it!


Misconceptions About Evolution!
Ever since 1859, evolution has been a very controversial subject. Many people have strong views and opinions about how much they believe, or don’t believe in it. There are many common misconceptions about evolution. A few of them are that evolution has never been observed, there are no transitional fossils, that it is only a theory, and that this theory states that everything happens by random chance.

The first misconception that I will talk about is that evolution has never been observed. Evolution is defined as a change in the gene pool of a population over time. An example of this is insects becoming resistant to pesticides. New species developing due to evolution has been observed both in a laboratory, and in the wild. Even without these direct observations, evolution has been observed. Evolution has predicted what people would expect to see in the fossil records, and the predictions have been verified many times. From the people I asked, this was one of the greatest misconceptions.

The second misconception that I will talk about is that there have been no transitional fossils. This is very untrue, because many have. A transitional fossil is defined as a fossil that looks like it's from an organism intermediate between two lineages, (meaning it has some characteristics of lineage A, some characteristics of lineage B, and probably some characteristics part way between the two). These fossils occur between species, orders, ECT. Most people don’t believe that there are transitional fossils because they like to put things into categories, like dogs or cats. What people don’t realize is that most of those animals are mixes of two, like the Archaeopteryx, which is part bird, and part reptile monster!

The third misconception is that everything happens by random chance. While chance does play a large role in evolution when dealing with mutations, it completely ignores the natural selection part, because selection is the opposite of chance. Mutations are what allow organisms to choose the best organism. When an organisms enviornment changes,

The fourth misconception is that evolution is only a theory, that it has never been proven. Calling it a theory, strictly speaking, is true, because the word 'theory' has different meanings. Scientists say that nothing in the real world has ever been proven. We deal with certainty by how much evidence we have, and evolution has a lot of evidence. It is supported through a wide range of observations. Many believe that the only way to prove evolution wrong is to prove that the evidence saying that it is is wrong.

I believe that people will always question evolution, no matter what evidence, or non-evidence comes out. I asked a few people if they believed, or didn’t believe in evolution, and the numbers were about even. I think that this subject will be split down the middle between the people that do, and don’t believe in evolution for a long time. :].




SOME PICHAS!
This is Charles Darwin!



This is where Charles Darwin lived!



This is what 98.2 % of people think of when they think of evolution!




This is a common misconception of the evolution of a fish!



These are some crazy friends arguing about evolution!




LINKS!
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/misconceps/index.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/bindon/Evolution_misconceptions/misconceptions.htm