Quote:
Originally Posted by creekster
So for your average schmuck like me, it is just a belief.
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That's why I'm trying to educate schmucks like you.
But seriously, we do actually "know" a lot. We know that the earth is really, really old, and that life is the result of the natural selection of beneficial mutations in individual organisms. We know that the earth is an oblate spheroid (as opposed to flat or any other shape), and that continents move very slowly through the mechanisms described by plate tectonics. And on and on.
What we don't know is the exact time when humans split from chimps on the evolutionary tree (or more accurately, the evolutionary bush). We have various methods that all independently put it somewhere around 5-7 million years ago, but we don't know. Even if we did find an actual fossil from the first individual of the clade leading to Homo sapiens, there wouldn't be a good way to actually know that we did. We have specimens from that time period, so for all we know we found it already.
Here's the bottom line: When the anti-science crowd emphasizes such obviously trivial facts and uses them to try to discredit all of science, it's dishonest, intellectually bankrupt, and annoying.
Yes, there are scientists that are a little bit too willing to draw strong conclusions. They are in the minority, and do not discredit the mechanisms of science. A proper understanding of what the scientific method is, even in a vacuum, should be enough to conclude that if done right, science is the only way to truly learn anything.