Meme Madness Monday - Everyone Panics Edition

Welcome to this Monday's meme madness, where we look at stupid memes from the internet. Let's get right into this week's delight!

Meme #1: Is someone wants to teach evolution as fact, nobody panics. Tell them you want to teach kids to examine the evidence, and everyone loses their minds.

I don't really know what this meme is on about. First, evolution is a fact, and the theory of evolution has a ton of evidence to back it up.

Second, teaching kids about evolution is teaching them to examine all the evidence.

That should be the end of this discussion. I bet though that what the meme-maker means by "examine the evidence" is look at the "problems" that creationists have brought up. Maybe s/he thinks there is no evidence for evolution, something I hear regularly from creationists. Maybe they want the Bible taught in schools as fact.

I don't know what they mean, but they can't actually be talking about reality.

Meme #2: What if they keep saying "scientific consensus" to keep me from thinking for myself?

Meme 2 makes a good point. It is easy enough for someone to there is a scientific consensus to end the discussion. But here's the thing, you should go find out if they are correct, by going to the primary sources to see what the experts have to say. Even then, you might want to go look at what the claims are, what the experts have to say, what the problems are, what still needs to be learned etc.

The thing is, there are theories with a consensus, like evolution and climate change. 

Make sure to go look at what the experts are saying, though. There could be outliers, there might not yet be a consensus, so you might need to do some real work and not just go on a random crank's website. You should also be careful about going on websites by people with a vested interest in some belief (like they really need the Bible to be literally true or they are working for the oil and gas industry). Look at the credentials of people proposing their beliefs. You should also be skeptical of beliefs that comfort you and confirm ideas you want to believe.

But there is a problem with just assuming that you can go understand everything about a theory by looking at a couple of websites. There is a reason that people spend years studying a field like biology or climatology. And there might be a reason for someone to counter you with "the points you are raising are not the scientific consensus." It may be you have bought into a crank theory. Also, there are hypotheses that are discarded or proved wrong, hoaxes that are discovered, and so on. For example, creationists sometimes like to bring up Piltdown man, a well-known hoax, as a criticism of evolution. But, the hoax was not proposed by scientists and it was discovered through scientific methods. There are plenty of fossils that have been confirmed.

The point is, you should go think for yourself, but that doesn't mean you should just believe whatever you want or go against real experts when you lack expertise.