I don't think the issue of evolution has ever been a question of people grasping the science. The issue has and continues to be the resolution of its conflict with their faith. Some have found a way through that mental obstacle course, but most have not.

So yes, it is a question of people grasping the science, not of this specifically, but as a whole. They are not on-board, they never fully confront any contradictions that they encounter or spew. Logic is not their friend, they are not inquisitive, getting to the bottom of something is not in their nature. You might think that in general people are reasonable, but margins are not that high and informed-ness is very surface-level.

It’s reasonable to dislike GMOs (or some subset of them) because of who’s selling them and why, unrelated to the science. It’s reasonable to argue against fluoridated water even while accepting it’s good for dental health, because you disagree with mass medication. It’s reasonable to buy organic food if you know it to be free of certain chemicals which, knowing their scientific characteristics, you would rather avoid.

I think this is a pithy description of human beings. :)

Of course, it's a habit we'd all do well to do out best to develop.

In case of GMO it is a play with the unknown (health, stability), it is a risk against a somewhat cheaper food. In case of vaccine it is still a play with unknown, but there the risk is against another risk not just money. If the virus would be less deadly much less people would have taken it. And the other way around as well, would be more deadly people would queue up instantly.

It is not as black and white as you describe. stupid vs smart people as you say it.

And by the way, this is called common smartness. Everybody is susceptible for different thing everybody is resistant to different things so the whole word is hard to take on.

This baffles me. I believe most Christian religions(definitely Catholics and most Protestants) embraced the evolution decades ago. So who is debating it and why?

In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way.

That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution.

It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.

I struggle with the speciation aspect of Evolution. Not hard to empirically verify in-species adaptations, but I'm still waiting to see coronavirus turn into influenza (etc)

Covid won't change into the flu, that's like assuming a chicken might evolve into it's ancestors species or humans will evolve into apes. Evolution goes forward, not (or rarely) backwards.

It's a completely new species that, up until 2019, did not exist in the human population.

This sort of evolution happens frequently when people are in close contact with animals. Hence the reason European disease wiped out native populations but not the reverse. Also, a direct example of human evolution.

I think this is where we differ. That obnoxious spiky little ball we all now know as coronavirus(es) existed in both humans and bats long before making the "jump". Ignoring the possibility that humans are directly responsible for the new host capabilities, it's not like we watched influenza slowly morph into a coronavirus and cause a new form of havoc. All we saw was an existing "species" that had mutations inside the bounds of its genetic code that enabled it to survive elsewhere.

You might find that pondering the existence of "ring species" proves enlightening. It turns out that "species" isn't even a well defined concept when you look closely enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

(Also, you needn't capitalize "evolution". It's not a god :))

Only if the members of those communities are receptive to re-evaluating their ideas and changing their minds.

I've heard people say that hurricanes and natural disasters were God punishing us, I can easily see the same logic applied to COVID. No need to rely on science for answers when a vengeful god suffices.

We basically guess what the US flu will be by what is “popular” in Asia or Southern Hemisphere, we figure in about 6 months or so it’ll be in the US. I have no idea how Europe or Rest Of World makes flu vaccine guesses.

Guess what though? They do the same. What is “popular” in the west MAY be popular in Asia in a few months.

The flu game is constantly a best guess of what others saw months ago.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/past-seasons-estimates...