Monday Meme Madness - Fall is Here edition

Happy meme-day! The leaves are changing but it is still warm here in the Mid-Atlantic. It is a perfect day to look at absurd memes. Today, memes that don't really make an argument. They are just here for the lulz. Because really, creationist memes can't make an argument. They can only stand at the sidelines and jeer at those who are. Let's get into it.

Meme #1: "So you are a evolutionist Tell me about your imaginary theory"

Willy Wonka really is a favorite meme, used by nearly everyone to score easy points. By the looks of the internet, Wonka espouses every belief, from the nearly 100% established-as-true to the battshittiest of the crazy. We're supposed to buy into whatever the meme says out of nostalgia for a character from a favorite childhood movie and the wonderful attitude he had.

There's no real argument though. It's just an assertion that evolution is imaginary.

I think it's a stab at atheists who claim that theists' gods are imaginary, and since evolution = no god, by the transitive property of mathematics, evolution is god, so evolution can be imaginary.

Or something.

Anyway, even if evolution had no real evidence and was invalid, it wouldn't be "imaginary." It would be a hypothesis or a concept.

What is imaginary is the notion that there are people who are "evolutionists" as if accepting the fact of evolution was a belief system or nationality or whatever.

And, nitpick, can we get an "an" in front of the word evolutionist?

Meme #2: "The weak must die Evolution says it"

Wow, Godwin's meme! Evolution = Hitler so we should avoid it.

Actually, evolution does not require death. Death is a fact of the world and allows for new organisms to come into a world in which there is space and there are resources for them. Death is a fact of being a biological entity. Evolution really just describes the mechanism of how the diversity of life got here through natural selection.

People often confuse the simplistic "survival of the fittest" to mean that the strong win out, but really, fitness does not have to mean the strong defeat the weak. We still have prey animals, after all. The ones that make it to reproductive age must have some ways of outwitting their predators, and they can pass those adaptations along to their young.

The fact that some racist asshats from a different century picked up on natural selection has nothing to do with the fact of evolution. Racist religious asshats point to the Bible for their ideas about their racial superiority. Racist asshats basically point to whatever they can to bolster their ideology. The ideas themselves are not racist.

And it should be pointed out that evolution does not show the kind of genetic difference between what we think of as races that racists would like to think.

It also must be stated yet again that evolution by natural selection is not a moral system. Just because creationism in the form of Christian Bible thumpers leads to their theology doesn't mean that everything does. Such creationists often end their criticisms of evolution with the Genesis account of how we were created in their god's image and then rebelled against him by eating a piece of fruit, thus damning humans to a life of sin which can only be redeemed with god's grace and a human sacrifice a couple thousand years and a few genocides later.

What evolution says is that, as social animals, we developed moral systems because it benefited our species (as have lots of animal species), but evolution itself isn't about how we treat each other. It is about how genes drift in various species over a population over time and have created all the life - including plants, btw.

Meme #3 "What this evolution"

I'm not sure what this punctuation-free zone is trying to say.

Is this trying to make the point that since a fictitious character in the Star Wars franchise looks like animals that don't speak and use technology evolution is a fraud?

I don't know, but that's it for meme day!