What Beleiving Evolution Means

Knowledge of evolution can affect the way you view different areas of life, but it wasn’t always as widely accepted (even though it is still not entirely accepted). For the past sixty years, biological beliefs, such as evolution, have been hot

topics from both a political and religious perspective. It has raised controversy in the religious world and has not made things easy in the political world. However radical these ideas used to seem, they are getting much more support in both the political and religious worlds.

According to Biologists, there is no such thing a race. They believe that race from human to human (even organism to organism) does not exist. At first this is an interesting thought. People are generally raised to believe that there are different races in the world, while their origins are differing. This statement is slightly true, excluding the different races. Biologists refer to DNA to prove their point on this subject. The only differences between one “race” to another “race” are a few different genotypes and phenotypes. A genotype is a combination of genes, and a combination of genotypes will result in a Trait (a phenotype is any Trait). Between the differences in phenotypes (which could range anywhere from skin color to health issues) and the cultures in which one grows up in creates the different variety of humans in this world. However, different cultures have definitely had problems with the relatively new idea of evolution.

Evolution, in comparison to religion, is a very new subject. There were a few scientists that were before their times and helped build the foundation of beliefs for evolution. However, evolution has only started to raise questions about the validity of the ideas and the controversial ideas behind it for about sixty years. When it came to the religion vs. science question for me, even when I was young, I always leaned toward science. Even though I was raised Jewish, had a Bar-Mitzvah and was part of a youth group for most of high school. All the proof I needed to start believing in science and more particularly evolution began with fossils. I thought they poked a huge hole in the religion idea being millions of years old, when the religious world is only 7,000 years or so old. Then the similarities between species, such as apes and humans, were too perfect to even consider another way. This drove me to believe that evolution was no accident.

The truths behind evolution seem to be overwhelming, for me, and it would seem illogical to not include evolution as the main reason for why people are who they are. The knowledge of evolution has definitely influenced my perspective on the world both politically and religiously.