I'm pretty sure that, if you check my History of Ireland journal, when Henry the Optical Illusion, King of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, Wales, Scotland, The Isle of Man, One Little Island Just North of the Hebrides, The Rock of Gibraltar, Most of Africa Except for Ninety-Eight Percent of It And Anywhere He Damn Well Pleases (normally known as Henry the III) invaded England, his soldiers were armed with mangoes which they viciously attacked the Irish with. We had only Potatoes to fight back with and you know what they say - Mangoes where the gang goes, Spud are for duds.

To demonstrate his complete contempt of the Irish, in 1132 Henry actually appointed a large Mango as Governor General of Ireland. Its policies were something of a disaster, and its parliament was completely rotten.

We Irish do not forget.

#DownWithMangoes
Brilliant! :clap: :laughing:
#DownWithMangoes
Yeah well as they're part of the animal kingdom... not sure they're much fun though.

Wouldn't "To boldly go where no mangoes before" be a better pun?

#MangoMicks

At least they didn't think it was thong theory :)

By the way, cool to have a physicist on board! I occasionally pretend like I know anything about physics. This is gonna sound stupid, but you'd be surprised at how often creationists bring up that evolution and the various molecules and so on that are shaped by that are a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy).. and so while trying to refute those kinds of arguments, I kinda wish I'd taken a course or three. Biology had maths and chemistry, but not much physics.

lmao that's a new one to me. If you come across any nice specimens of discussions on the topic do share them; I'd actually be interested in seeing what kind of misguided thought acrobatics they use to come up with their arguments

Edit: this got me thinking and I suppose they base their argument on the fact that they've heard that entropy will eventually cause the universe to be an atom soup that is the same everywhere? Which makes them think new DNA combinations violate entropy? In that case what they don't understand is that entropy tends towards randomness, but that's not necessarily sameness. To use an example that I've been working on, if you align molecules they're all pointing in the same direction, but the randomness is reduced, so it comes at an entropy cost. The analogy with our genes is shaky at best anyway, but even if we viewed all the world's genes as a communal DNA soup, enforcing that everyone has the same DNA is actually less random and goes against the entropy principle

Like any good biologist should, I've tried to fight Darwin's good fight, battling ignorance and teaching people about evolutionary theory online. I've done it in various places. The last place I did it regularly was quora. The place is ripe with religious nuts. Someone can ask an innocent question about some aspect about evolution and you can be sure to find religious idiots invading comments. They really hound any discussion on the subject.

A few classics that I see again and again:

• Conceding that sure, evolution happens on the MICRO-level, but not on the macro-level (micro/macro-evolution isn't really a thing)
• Evolution is just a theory
• Evolution would break the second law of thermodynamics
• There's no fossil evidence. Where is it?!
• There's no evidence of a species turning into a different species
• That something as complex as the eye could not have evolved due to irreducible complexity (thoroughly refuted many times and long ago)

I got a little burnt out, so I haven't been doing it as much lately (came here instead). However, next time I find one of these idiots, I'll give you a nudge :)

Why seek out people who have mental disabilities in order to have arguments with them?
(yeah, I know: irony!)

Sadly, even if you don't want to, you'll probably find yourself having arguments just because loud idiots show up any time something relating to evolution is discussed.

Empirically based knowledge seems to be on a downwards trend in general. I saw the Q-anon documentary on HBO. It's scary how lies, myth and conspiracy theory just seem to spread like a wildfire, especially in the US. So many people don't know what's real anymore.

Yeah I've had several COVID hoax conversations with people at work and I'm almost waiting for COVID to kick that store in the balls just so I get to be right.

... and what if they worked in the dollar store? Is it really that impossible to memorize everything in that store cost only $1?