This one goes out to the commenters

Bowing to popular demand, I'll include a reference to monkeys somewhere in this post, perhaps even within this very sentence!

Actually, once I'm done with spending every stinking moment at work, I'm really anxious to get back to the national zoo and see the golden lion tamarins (not to be confused with tamarinds, which are also delicious, but more of a tropical fruit). As some of you know, the tamarins run wild at the zoo. That is, NOT IN CAGES!!!! That's right, if you can win their trust, they're totally within their rights to come home with you and do your dishes, wreck your curtains, ghostwrite your blog, whatever!

Alas, it'll be a while before I get to go do things again. I'm in charge of a team of . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . interns (sorry) who need to be riding-cropped into doing startuppy stuff. I actually do precious little cropping. I leave that to my direct subordinate. A shout out here to Evan Jones, who does a great job. I doubt he'll ever read this.

Anyway, enough about work.

I read today that Gallup now finds that a majority of Republicans don't believe in evolution. That is, they don't believe we evolved from monkeys. Now, I'll admit that evolution isn't easy to "prove". It's a theory concerning the process by which all the available data like fossil records, genetic records, variation within and among species, etc. came to be. Still, I thought we had this licked. What sensible tennets of education will we stop believing in next? I personally don't understand the quadratic formula very well. I've seen it "proved" before, but I didn't really follow it and I'm not going to let some "numbers" tell me what the square root of a quadratic equation is. Hell no!

Sadly enough, later in the same Gallup questionnaire, they asked respondents how true they thought the following idea might be:

"Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life"

How "advanced" does this guy look, for instance?

It's sad because it shows that even the people asking the questions about evolution don't understand it. As the evolution geek in the crowd, I'll explain: Evolution doesn't create more or less "advanced" forms of life. Advanced is a word with a valuation attached. Bacteria actually outnumber and outmass humans, as do ants. They've also been around longer, so it's hard to see how we're more "advanced" than they are.