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Comment by siempreb | Hacker News Reader

> Teaching well-established scientific knowledge in schools is essential

Well established? It's simply not proven, period. You should only teach kids what you are 100% sure about, and when you're not than you have to honestly say that it's an assumption. Otherwise it is not teaching but conditioning.

> Evolution wasn't just made up, it was figured out from the evidence, just like gravity, electricity, chemistry, etc.

Gravity, electricity, etc.. are things you can prove, not the evolution of an ape into a human. I have no clue why so many people desire to believe that our ancestors were apes, I think it's rather pathetic, and most likely due to conditioning.

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> Well established? It's simply not proven, period. You should only teach kids what you are 100% sure about

Forget teaching science at all, then. That's not how scientific knowledge works.

Evolution is not "proven". No empirical science theories are ever "proven". But evolution as a theory is pretty much as good as it gets. Yes, some details get reworked from time to time, but the fundamentals are our best bet.

> Gravity, electricity, etc.. are things you can prove

No. How do you "prove" gravity or electricity?

> not the evolution of an ape into a human

Other people have told you multiple times no-one believes apes evolved into humans, so please stop arguing against this strawman. Modern apes and humans share a common ancestor which was neither ape nor human, and the evidence for this is pretty strong.

> Other people have told you multiple times no-one believes apes evolved into humans

You're kidding me? That's what I see with most ape -> human believers, they are 100% sure about things they assume or cannot know. Typical example, thx for that.

Me:

> Other people have told you multiple times no-one believes apes evolved into humans, so please stop arguing against this strawman

You:

> That's what I see with most ape -> human believers

Do you see the problem in this exchange?

> I have no clue why so many people desire to believe that our ancestors were apes

Technically, we are apes, you and me. Hominids, Great apes.

The degree of certainty we have about that and about core concepts of evolution is such that there's simply no room left for an honest discussion. If we look for places to explore alternative ideas, there're: sci-fi, comics and religion.

Gravity is a great example. Newtons and Einstein's models for gravity are now known to be incorrect. There exists no correct,complete, and complete model of how gravity works.

We still teach what we DO know about gravity especially newtons much simpler but incomplete model.

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