Aside from the generics racism and justification of horrors inevitably behind this, I do find it very interesting how people have difficulties with time scales and generally with logarithms. 500 years to adjust to a climate? If it were a population of 10 intermarrying people having 10 children per set, it might adjust in those time scales if natural selection was killing them so often that only darker tones survived. But differences of skin tones arose more like over 50,000 years. 100 times longer is something we just really struggle with. Then you get the ignorant racists acting like ethnicities are different species, again, mistaking the 50,000 years which allowed differences of skin tone etc to become prevalent with the 500,000 years at least that a species of our average lifespan needs to go through to become anything like a different species... if not even longer. People are really shit at grasping this, and it makes easy room to fill the ignorance with racist bullshit

And rereading it, I think i may be guilty of the same. Might actually be 500,000 for variations of skin tones and 5,000,000 to become a different species

[–] Dimmer06@hexbear.net 22 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Not to mention that however long the differentiation in human skin tones took, it took place in the context of small relatively isolated tribal groups that probably had significantly less genetic diversity than the modern US. Therefore any distinctive mutations like noticable change in skin color would probably become prolific much quicker than they would in the modern US.

[–] MLRL_Commie@hexbear.net 9 points 4 weeks ago

Very true! Half a billion people that sort of genetic variance can't work the same

[–] WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net 15 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

A full genre of ignorance that I see is the inability to conceptualize the scale of things beyond oneself. Flat Earth, for example, can't do distances and sizes and reject space in kind. Your example, evolution, is irreconcilably long for them. I reckon people run into combat sports gyms looking for a fight because they can't conceptualize practicing a discipline for long enough to become good at it.

Even what you're good at today is not a fate written in stone for what you're good at tomorrow. The personality of your partner won't necessarily persist through their life, so you can learn who they are in a way nobody else will ever see them or think that it's yucky because they used to have a superficial trait you miss.

It takes some humility to understand how the Earth rotates.

[–] Krem@hexbear.net 7 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

i think math education in a lot of places just faile to educate kids on understanding scales of things. like, 10x bigger is possible. 100x is very difficult. 1000x is almost impossible. this is probably one key reason why some working class people defend billionaires, they conceptualize them as being something like triple millionaires, and millionaires as being 3-4x as rich as a normal person

[–] NephewAlphaBravo@hexbear.net 6 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

what's the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? about a billion dollars.

incidentally, same as the difference between you or me and a billionaire

[–] WhatDoYouMeanPodcast@hexbear.net 3 points 4 weeks ago

Reminds me of a video where some girl is coughing in a bed and the person behind the camera goes "oh my poor baby..." and they turn around to ask "POOR?" and flashes their money (with presumably prop bills)

ME and a billionaire? money spread

[–] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 3 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

There's also that example of a football field representing dinosaur extinction to the present (65 million years). Humans show up all the way at the 100 yard line, then inches and quarter inches is where we discover things like writing or build the first cities. The last 2,000 years is crunched up into millimeters.

[–] cornishon@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I've seen that analogy but with a clock or a calendar... but I guess for US-Americans a football field really is your best bet.

[–] Krem@hexbear.net 3 points 4 weeks ago

imagine history of life on earth is a borger

humanity is only sesame seed on top

[–] agentant@hexbear.net 5 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

It's helpful to use the seconds analogy for helping people conceptualize the difference

1 million seconds is 11.5 days

1 billion seconds is 31.5 years

That puts it in a relative measurement they can perceive