$16k? That's...surprisingly not very much. And don't misunderstand me, I don't mean that to minimize what Johnson does, just the opposite. It's just startling to realize that you can bring a pretty good chunk of happiness to a bunch of kids for the same amount a lot of NFL players would drop on bottle service on a…

You: I don't know what you base my not knowing what Schilling said on

The fact that you think they're the same thing says a lot about why you were so eager to defend Schilling (even though you didn't actually know what he said...at all).

I'll take a limited view of reality over mealy-mouthed gobbledygook and a fundamental misunderstanding of what reality is.

Scientists constructing narratives based on scientific research is the basis for a meaningless statement when those narratives are all most people read

I didn't say that!

Oy vey, you just keep digging, don't you? You said that the theory of evolution was a "best guess." I do not dispute that a hypothesis is the first step in the scientific method, but I dispute that "best guess" is a good-faith description of the theory of evolution (or any scientific theory). Such a description…

He obviously doesn't understand the theory very well.

I can make another observation (science!) that he was at worst being curious

"But I guess what most people think of as "science" isn't as much about the scientific method or discovery of knowledge as it is about not questioning or even investigating what science book writers say and calling those who do blasphemers."

"I'll say Schilling was questioning the narrative based on the theory and not the theory itself"

So you don't know what he actually said, but you feel comfortable holding forth at length about where he was coming from, and what point he was trying to make.

"Conjecture is still conjecture, my man."

Again, these aren't "best guesses," they're based on observable data. The transitions between different species aren't "guesses," they're based on fossil records and DNA evidence.

"Stuff like what you just said is why fundamentalists coin lines like "it takes more faith to believe in evolution than the Bible.""

The theory of evolution is not our "best guess," it's a scientific theory. The fact that you refer to it as the former demonstrates you should have paid closer attention in biology.

Here's the point you're (deliberately?) missing: you don't need to be an "expert" to understand how the theory of evolution works, and to understand the basic evidence which supports it. This is advanced grade-school level stuff, and basic high school level biology.

Don't bother. The theory of evolution is so arcane and complicated that no one could hope to understand it without a specialized education inaccessible to normal hard-working Americans. I mean, who has the ability to take 9th grade biology except the intelligentsia?

Very few. But I did take high school biology, and I've read at least one book about science in my life. You know, "specialized education" like that.

popular scientific narrative which has an academic basis inaccessible to common people without specialized education