If Animals Evolve, Can Thinking?

Attention: Texas School Board.  Evolution is real.

An article in USA Today (5/4/2010, p. 4D), “Mosquitoes inherit tolerance to DEET” reports that, “When female mosquitoes known to be DEET-insensitive were bred with males whose sensitivity wasn’t known, the proportion of DEET-insensitive mosquitoes went from 13% to more than 50% in just one generation.”

Evolution is often thought of as being very slow and taking thousands or millions of years to produce significant changes, and so it can.  But the above shows that it can be fast as well.  I only wish that thinking could become more rational at the same rate.

Several years ago my wife and I were visiting the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and we overheard a mother telling her little daughter that the dinosaur exhibit was a fun thing to see, but that “… they aren’t actually real, you know.”   Just one more reason to separate religion from politics.