It seems many people have trouble admitting many scientific theories or even basic facts, because they can't fathom scales, in time, size, complexity... A sort of myopia about anything that is beyond their range of view. It is certainly hard to grasp the scales in many cases, but could this be the cause for the rejection of many scientific, established knowledge?
EVOLUTION
Even when they understand the basic theory, they refute the idea that we could have evolved from a common ape ancestor.
This common ancestor is at least six million years ago. It is a timespan that defies imagination. The earliest civilization is 12.000 years old, a factor of 500.
Life appeared 3 billion years ago, another 500 factor. These timescales are so immense, so many things can happen over such a long period of time.
VACCINES
Vaccines were the greatest health improvement around the turn of the 20th century. That's already three or four generations ago, and most of us did not leave in a world where we, or even our parents, were affected by measles, polio, smallpox, tetanus...
As a culture, we tend to forget even the recent past. Three generations is really a blip in history, although, for one human life, it starts to represent a long time.
ATOMS
I read in some thread someone saying that if people were made of atoms, they would be like statues. Here it's the size scale that is beyond common myopia.
An atom is around 300pm, that's 300 trillionths of a meter. That's a scale of ten billion to the size of a human. That's more than there are alive people today.
FLAT EARTH
When you look at the horizon, it's generally 20 or 30kms away. On a sphere of 40.000kms circumference or 1000 times longer, you don't get to see the curvature. And as we usually don't get to rise up high enough to see it, people continue to believe, even today, that it is flat.
TAXES AND SOCIETY
Anarchists pretend that the state is useless, that we could do without. If we were to live in a group of 50 or 100, maybe. We would know everyone, and any crime would be known and meted instantly. But nations include millions, tens of hundreds of millions. That's a scale hard to grasp when you have a few hundred friends at most. Things cannot work the same way with this factor.
What do you think? Any other area where myopia would the issue?
Author: Fabrice Cambounet
