Do you think that Donald even knows that the Quora internet site exists? I don’t think he has any idea. I think Quora is just about the best we can have/do on the internet. Quora comes in the form of answers to submitted questions, the answers illustrating more often than not the wisdom of common sense.  Common sense, I would say,  is the knowledge , sometimes designated as wisdom, that we share, knowledge, that has come to us over the some tens of thousands of years of our species’ existence, thanks to the countless observations and note taking of science and its practitioners.  Actually all, of us, to to the extent we are human, are all scientists. We are always looking about us and “taking down” what we see.

This kind of common sensical knowledge doesn’t come from religion. Religion is all that science is not, often all dogma rather than discovery, as some have put it, and whose, practitioners, shamans, ministers, priests, rabbis, monks, magicians et al.. have mostly led themselves and the rest of us astray, while inflicting upon us untold suffering, causing millions of unnecessary deaths most often by something as an insubstantial difference of opinion, a little difference that too often leads to genocide and war. While science is no less subject to differences of opinion these differences have never led us, as have religions, to the brutal exterminations of the ones out of power by those in power

Anyway getting back to my subject, Quora (the plural of quoram, both words, meaning the group of people required to carry over a transaction in an organization, that is the requisite number of those needed to get the business done. Why was this name chosen for the web site. I don’t know.

Here’s the Quora question and answer for today:

Mats Andersson, Professional Translator English into Swedish (1991-present)

Answered May 8

I’m sorry, but the word “evolutionist” always makes me laugh; I shouldn’t laugh at what is simply ignorance. We all started out ignorant.

“Evolution” is not an “ism” to be believed or embraced. “Evolution” is the name we give to the fact that biological entities change over time. This is a fact, established beyond any doubt, reasonable or unreasonable. It is no more uncertain or controversial than gravity. You don’t call people who believe they will fall over when they trip “gravitationists”, do you?

This being said, it is universally agreed that modern humans evolved from a species called Homo Erectus. Their remains fit nicely on the time scale and sit morphologically halfway between us and their forebears.

The full picture is a bit more complex. In other parts of Eurasia, Homo Erectus evolved into different forms, known as Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Denisova (in popular accounts, Neanderthals and Denisovans). Homo Sapiens encountered these forms, interbred with them, and we still carry their genes. But they were also descended from Homo Erectus, so it’s still the same ancestry.

The latest primate ancestor that we have a good grasp of and don’t call human is the Australopithecus Afarensis, the famous “Lucy”. It would more resemble an ape than a human to us, probably something like a chimpanzee on two legs. But whether we decide to say that something is of the genus “Homo” is, basically, somewhat arbitrary. You can argue that Lucy was a human, or that her descendant Homo Habilis was an ape; it’s not like there’s even a clear boundary in time when one species ends and the next one starts, so it’s possible to argue something different. These are all just labels that we put on things after the fact to make it easier to discuss them.