Rational Answers to Stupid Questions: Debunking Flat Earthers, Evolution Deniers, Creationists, and More

By Eric Peterson

"Rational Answers to Stupid Questions" is an expansive and meticulously researched book that addresses and dissects around one hundred of the most prevalent and persistent arguments that challenge and often contradict mainstream scientific understanding. This book is a comprehensive journey through various fields of science, systematically debunking misconceptions and unfounded claims that frequently surface in public discourse and media.

The book is divided into several sections, each dedicated to a different scientific discipline, ensuring a well-rounded and thorough exploration of each subject. The sections include evolution, where the author delves into the common misconceptions about Darwinian theory and the evidence supporting it. Additionally, the author addresses misunderstandings in various biological concepts, including DNA, heredity, and the role of genetics.

Next is the Big Bang, where popular astronomical myths and misunderstandings about our universe are clarified; and physics, where fundamental principles and theories are defended against common misinterpretations and oversimplification.

The book also covers the field of science in general, and addresses some misunderstandings about how science works.

In the realm of young Earth creationism, the book tackles misconceptions about the age and formation of the Earth, plate tectonics, and geographical phenomena.

In the flat Earth section, the author debunks the insane idea that Earth is not a globe.

What sets "Rational Answers to Stupid Questions" apart is its commitment to not only correcting misinformation but also explaining the scientific principles and evidence behind the correct answers. The book is written in an accessible and engaging style, making it suitable for a wide audience, including those without a scientific background. It aims to foster critical thinking and scientific literacy, providing readers with the tools to critically evaluate claims they encounter in everyday life

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350940466

Eric Peterson

Eric Neal Peterson, stage, film and television actor is recognized as one of the early pioneers of the collective theatre movement in Canada during the 1970s. In 1976, he began working with John MacLachlan Gray, a playwright/director and fellow alumnus from Tamahnous Theatre, to create his most critically successful work, Billy Bishop Goes to War, a two-man show (Gray appeared as the narrator and pianist) in which he played more than a dozen characters. He is also recognized for his roles in three major Canadian series – Street Legal, Corner Gas and This is Wonderland.

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Rational Answers to Stupid Questions:

Debunking Flat Earthers, Evolution Deniers, Creationists, and More

© Eric Peterson 2023

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a

book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35094-045-9

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35094-046-6

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: Evolution

Part 2: The Big Bang

Part 3: Science

Part 4: Young Earth Creationism

Part 5: Flat Earth

Part 6: Rational Arguments

Nobody Can Rebut

Appendix

Logical Fallacies

References

Preface

Why does this book exist? I consider it a public service gesture. Like you, I have noticed that the public discourse surrounding science is terrible. A big reason why I became a teacher was to promote science literacy because I feel it is a necessary component of a healthy democratic society in the modern world. We wield too much power and influence to afford to be misinformed. I wrote this book to try to counter the endless tsunami of anti-scientific nonsense out there.

Here’s how this book came to be. I started making educational videos on YouTube in 2018. I wanted to make videos that my students could watch as a way to always make my curriculum available. But I secretly wanted to also teach science to a large online audience one day. That never happened.

Then the pandemic started. I downloaded TikTok out of sheer boredom (we all did) and started trying to make quick educational videos. For months, nothing happened, but suddenly, every now and then, a video would get a few hundred thousand or a million views. Soon after that, I started doing live streams with a text box claiming basic scientific facts such as evolution is true and invited people to debate me. This has proven to be more successful than I would have ever hoped, and I currently have a following of over a quarter million. Turns out all that practice making YouTube videos and being a class clown when I was in school prepared me to be informative and entertaining enough to get people to sit and be educated while sometimes having a laugh.

The most common comment I get is, I cannot believe how much patience you have. I have had hour-long conversations with people who constantly contradict themselves and who say almost nothing true. I like to think that teaching prepared me to deal with nonsense and silliness, but the real answer is practice—hours and hours of practice. I used to immediately tell people their idea was stupid, laugh at them, or just insult them. It’s a natural instinct when you hear something obviously false, such as The Earth is flat.

I’m not sure when it happened, but my tactic changed. Sometimes, I admit, something so unworthy of a debate comes up that I fall back on my old ways. For example, a flat-Earther once told me that if gravity exists, the moon’s mass should suck all the clouds away from Earth and it should never rain. These days, I try to make the conversation about the path that led to the conclusion rather than the conclusion itself. Most people’s failure to accept science comes from a misunderstanding of some basic aspect of science. Many persuasive arguments are junk because they appeal to common sense and logical fallacies. Common sense gets us a long way, but it’s also why ancient philosophers were wrong about almost everything.

Not every claim in this book is that bad. Many of them are formed out of ignorance. While some of us are wise enough not to make assertions about something we know nothing about, others aren’t. But we all hate the idea of not knowing. What we don’t know, we assume, and the less you know, the more reasonable your assumptions seem.

Some of you might have immediately thought of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and fair enough. For the uninitiated, The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It occurs when individuals lacking knowledge or competence in a particular area mistakenly believe their ability to be much higher than it really is. Many people I debate are the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but all of us are guilty of this to some extent. Few of us are comfortable saying I don’t know, especially when debating. Even if the logic is flawed, at least the person is engaged in critical thinking. That makes me a little bit hopeful.

If you rearrange several of these claims into questions, they sound more like they’re coming from a curious person who is genuinely interested in the answer. Sadly, the people I debate will seldom ask questions. Instead, they make claims and accusations. The hubris is palpable.

I have no doubt that if you’re reading this, you are a curious, intelligent person. I like to think that I am too, but I didn’t always know how to defend the truth. It’s surprisingly difficult. Before I started debating with people, I knew what the facts were, but I didn’t know how to express or defend them adequately. I also did not know that there was so much nonsense out there. Much of that nonsense is framed reasonably but falls apart upon scrutiny. It took a long time to scrutinize all that nonsense.

You probably have better things to do than talk to people who think the Earth is flat, but I don’t. So, luckily for you, I have compiled this work. My goal is to arm you with the necessary knowledge to counter these terrible claims, and perhaps learn some new things and have a few laughs.

Part 6 of this book is unique. Instead of responding to claims and questions, Part 6 gives a series of claims. These are your secret weapons. No evolution denier or flat-Earther will ever have an argument against them because they expose the contradictions and shortcomings of their alternative explanations.

Introduction

This is not a chapter book, nor does it tell a story. This book jumps all over the place, which reflects the way the arguments contained in this book come about. The people I debate typically have a list of rehearsed (and often contradictory) arguments that don’t connect. Hopefully, after reading this book, you will be armed with the proper response to those arguments. The roughly one hundred claims in this book are by no means exhaustive, but they cover the most common arguments that I hear.

Because every claim I chose to write about is different, my approach to each of them is also different. Many of the claims in this book are examples of faulty logic. For those arguments, I will mainly explain why the logic is terrible. Other arguments misunderstand science from first principles. For example, a flat Earther will argue that a rocket cannot work in space because there’s no air to push off. That is a failure to understand Newton’s third law of motion–a first principle. In those instances, we will stick to first principles. Rarely, an argument will include an attempt to do science from a broken methodology. These arguments take time to break down because we must explain the scientific reason why they fail.

According to many people, if science has an enemy, it is religion. Indeed, many of the claims I argue against in this book are claims that people bring up because science is incompatible with their religion. But that’s just their opinion. I have spoken to all kinds of people who believe in the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, and more, and believe in God. I have no quarrel with these people. Once more, even the most zealous evolution deniers or young Earth creationists rarely think the Earth is flat. Yet the flat Earther shares those other beliefs and a belief in God. I have never, nor would I ever, tell someone who doesn’t believe in evolution that they also should think Earth is flat because religion says so. So, while I recognize that religious belief underpins many of the claims I argue against, I normally regard a fault in their logic as the problem, not religion itself. Other times, the error comes from a person’s interpretation of what they believe the Bible says. Plenty of people find ways to prevent their personal beliefs from corrupting the way they comprehend science, and others manage to believe in religion and science.

I take the truth and education seriously, but I don’t take myself all that seriously. That is how I have always lived my life and acted as an individual. This book reflects that. I have consulted with people who have expertise in multiple and varied fields. Genuine scientists have checked the information you will read to ensure accuracy. But I will also joke around from time to time. I think this book is written in a style like that of Randall Monroe’s fantastic What If? books, which are fun to read, but you can also trust for their accuracy. Randall Monroe is much smarter and funnier than I am, however.

I speak one and a half languages–English and sarcasm. I recognize my style can make it seem as though I am straw-manning or engaging in ad hominem attacks. Readers, such as yourselves, who have any common sense can tell the difference between arguing in bad faith and having a laugh. Although I will not be so gracious to the flat Earthers when we get to that point. The point is that this book isn’t as serious as life or death. We could all benefit from taking everything a little less seriously.

As a matter of fact, several times in this book, I go out of my way to modify an argument to make it stronger. Sometimes stupid questions have interesting answers, but sometimes the question gets some aspect of basic science wrong and is dead on arrival. Several times in this book, you will notice that I say something to the effect of, Even if we assume… to steel man, rather than strawman, the counterargument.

Part 1:

Evolution

I used to think, If we came from chimps, why are there still chimps? was the only argument against evolution. How naive I was. Evolution is by far the most contested scientific fact that I deal with on a regular basis. While I hear many of the same claims repeatedly, there are innumerable reasons people come up with for why evolution can’t be true.

Why evolution? For one, people take offense to the idea that they are no more special than some wild animal. Science tells us that, evolutionarily speaking, chimps are more like us than they are like gorillas. But that seems absurd. I see the chimpanzee and the gorilla in the zoo or on TV, and they seem far more like each other than the chimps seem to be like me. I think this is because we over-emphasize the cultural aspects of what makes us human and disregard the biological aspects of what makes us primates.

Another reason is it’s personally insulting to their religion. Religious ideas can be dangerous because they are identity-defining. To entertain the idea that Adam and Eve never existed is to not only accept that you’ve wasted your life believing in something, but it would mean destroying a part of you. People will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve these kinds of ideas. As a reference, just think of almost every war that ever happened. I’m sympathetic to this. I’m a science advocate, not an atheist evangelist. When people say, I’m a Christian, but I believe in evolution, I don’t ask them why or try to debate them. I only say I’m glad we agree on the science.

Theodosius Dobzhansky famously said, Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. I care about what’s true, and biology is not a throwaway or unnecessary science. Think of how much misery our ancestors suffered from lack of a basic understanding of disease. Think of the catastrophic famines ushered in by hare-brained anti-evolutionary and pseudoscientific agricultural policies in Stalin’s Russia. We must take evolution seriously because it’s part of biology, and the baby will get thrown out with the bath water if we capitulate to anti-evolutionary sentiments. Yes, I am making a slippery slope argument.

You’ll have to excuse me for the shift in tone, but this idea worries me the most. I can’t imagine living in a country where political leaders think the Earth is flat or the Sun orbits a stationary spherical Earth. But I do live in a country where half of the right-wing electorate and a third of the general public thinks evolution is false¹. Not a single Republican candidate running for President in 2016 would claim they think evolution is true. Several proudly declared unequivocally that they do not believe in evolution (including Ben Carson, a brain surgeon), while others did not comment. Jeb Bush was the possible exception, but it’s hard to tell. Hurray.

I promise this is not a political book. I only bring this up because the consequences of Congress, which writes laws, being full of anti-science gargoyles are severe.

Evolution fascinates me because it is, on the one hand, elegant and simple. On the other hand, it is as complex as life itself. Some of the answers are simple, while others are challenging. Likewise, some of the arguments are incredibly stupid, while others are interesting.

Enjoy.

If humans come from apes,

why are there still apes?

There are many reasons why this question is terrible. Ironically, there is a way in which it’s a good question for reasons that the kind of person who asks would be totally oblivious to.

Problem number one–we are apes. Even if there were no other apes, we still are apes, so the idea of them being unable to exist is dead on arrival. I have had hilarious debates with people who tell me humans are not apes or animals. But these same people never disagree that we are mammals. A mammal is a type of animal! Much how the word mammal refers to a group of many species, the word ape also refers to multiple species. It means any tailless primate of the superfamily Hominoidea and includes chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, and human beings. So even if other apes ceased to exist, we (an ape) would still exist.

I don’t know what people even mean when they ask this question, and I don’t think they do either. Whenever I reply with, Why wouldn’t there be? they have nothing more to add.

This question has different versions, such as If humans come from monkeys and If humans come from chimps. If we came from chimpanzees, you might expect there not to be chimpanzees (although we will see how that’s not always the case), so that is a fair point. But nobody who knows anything about evolution proposes that we come from chimpanzees. We are related to chimpanzees. Ask yourself, are you related to your cousin? Yes? So, did you come from your cousin? Of course not. You and your cousin come from your grandparents. Chimpanzees and humans are the direct descendants of some other primate that went extinct long ago.

But even if we were the descendants of chimpanzees, why would that mean they can’t exist? Dogs are the direct descendants of wolves. Once two populations are separated and no longer exchange genetic information, one population will diverge, eventually becoming a different species. One does not need to go extinct.

The illustration The March of Progress by Rudolph Zallinger causes much confusion. The linear progression of the very chimp-like earliest hominid up through Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and then to us implies that evolution works like Pokémon. It implies that it is the destiny of knuckle-walking primates to become humans. That’s not how it works. In reality, the most primitive primate in the illustration is related to many different hominids who coexisted. Homo erectus, Neanderthals, the Denisovans, us, and probably several other species of humans all lived simultaneously. Rather than us being direct descendants of Neanderthals, we all are (or were) the descendants of that first hominin. It should be noted that Lucy, and even earlier hominins like Ardipithecus, were not knuckle-walkers.

Now here’s how the question is almost reasonable. It implies that if humans evolved, then what we evolved from shouldn’t exist. Guess what? It doesn’t! The famous Lucy specimen, scientific name Australopithecus afarensis, went extinct long before we showed up, and we came from Lucy. This isn’t perfect because we are confident Homo sapiens did evolve directly from Homo heidelbergensis, and we may have coexisted². Again, that is possible because of how evolution actually works. Two populations become separated, and then if one remains in the same area, it will have the same selective pressures, but the other will not. So the population that migrates can speciate. Just like we did.

Timeline of human migration out of Africa. Image by Urutseg,

courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Direct ancestors and cousins of modern Homo sapiens. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The original Lucy specimen (Australopithecus afarensis). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The March of Progress by Rudolph Zallinger. Courtesy On Verticality.

If evolution is true, why aren’t other animals

turning into humans?

Once again, this question has so many problems. How can so few words imply so many mistakes? This question assumes an element of orthogenesis. Orthogenesis is the idea that organisms evolve because of a mysterious force. Orthogenesis begins with the assumption that human beings are the pinnacle, the apotheosis of evolution. This is a teleological argument for evolution. Once again, the person asking the question is practically guaranteed to have no idea this is the implication. The idea that evolution is supposed to end up creating upright walking primates who build SR-71 Blackbirds and twerk (among other things) is nothing but a species-centric bias created by those very same twerking primates.

Evolution does not work in a linear or predetermined way. The future has not happened yet, and there is no conscious force that is aware of what will happen and manipulates the present to achieve the predetermined future state.

Humans and other animals have evolved in different environments. The selective pressures in two areas, not that far apart, can produce dramatically different characteristics. At present, humans have conquered the Earth, but we have been relegated to a much smaller range for most our species’ existence. Humans evolved in Africa because that was the only place humans could have evolved. But we evolved in a specific region of Africa. Meanwhile, our close relatives (Neanderthals and Denisovans) evolved into something similar in other areas near us.

This question also implies that there is such a thing as the best way to exist. That argument immediately falls apart when you look literally anywhere. In any environment, you will find multitudes of different living things. There are many ways to survive and be successful in nature. None of them are objectively better than any of the others. If there are many ways to survive and be a successful species, there’s no reason anything would have to turn into a human.

There are plenty of environments humans can’t live in, but other organisms do. Are they the superior ones? If humans were the best, we should be able to exist in all environments. Perhaps microbes were the ones created in God’s image. A British biologist named J.B.S. Haldane once quipped that if God created life, he must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles, as they make up about a fourth of all animal species.

Why aren’t other animals intelligent like humans?

Why don’t other animals invent alcoholic drinks, then invent vehicles, then drink one of the inventions while trying to drive the other and die? If they were so smart, they would do that. Why aren’t they embroiled in pointless wars over fictional stories or resources, of which there’s more than enough to go around? Why don’t they dramatically overshoot their natural carrying capacity by doing agriculture and then die by the thousands when the weather doesn’t cooperate? Why don’t they commit genocide? Why don’t they invent democracy and then routinely put pathological liars, convicted felons, domestic abusers, and fraudsters in charge of their governments?

I’m only being a little bit facetious. Human beings appear to be the most intelligent species on Earth, but we also do inexplicably stupid things. I’ve used this counterargument against people who bring this up, and they usually say no other animal is smart enough to do any of that. I don’t understand how the capacity to cause your own destruction can be a symptom of intelligence, but they seem to think it is. I have asked people, If human beings completely annihilate our entire species with nuclear weapons, that would have been an intelligent action?. The answer I got was Yes.

I remember reading The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin years ago. He tells the story of how captured baboons would happily drink alcohol and even smoke cigars, but if one got sick from the stuff, they would never touch it again. Darwin noted this made them far wiser than many humans who will suffer this fate repeatedly, seeming not to learn their lesson³.

Maybe smart isn’t the right word. Perhaps rational is the best word. But if the root of intelligence is rationality, then we can’t say no other species is rational. Many of them appear to be more rational than us much of the time, but they can’t form social networks and use language as we can. Perhaps we are only the most capable of creating error-correcting networks within our groups that save us from ourselves and our shortcomings. I wouldn’t say this is the same thing as intelligence.

In his book The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond argues convincingly that an objective observer would not think humans are as remarkable as we do. If we looked at the human race in its infancy, say 300,000 years ago, what would we expect from them? Stupid question because we are their offspring. We know what to expect. Let’s imagine that we are aliens visiting Earth 300,000 years ago. Humans 300,000 years ago, to an alien species, would

Reviews for Rational Answers to Stupid Questions

[supersquad178t · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've been watching planet peterson for a quite a while on yt and found this book, really well laid out responses for stupid arguments from both ignorant theists and people who misunderstand science. Absolutely loved it, keep publishing more books like this.