Death and numbers

Do people believe that the following is important to accept in order to understand evolution?Evolution deals with incredibly long periods of time, which are usually beyond human comprehension. For example, a year is not difficult to grasp, neither is ten years, but when you get to 100 years or more things get a little trickier. Evolutionary theory works on time scales of billions of years (1,000,000,000) which is very difficult to get your head round.I personally believe that the long periods of time involved make it difficult for a lot of people to understand evolution, not just because of religious texts but because 1,000,000,000 years is simple beyond the scope of human comprehension, many people do not want to beleive it.
I suppose it has parallels to the Creationist arguement of "Do you want to believe you were descended from chimpanzees?". In my opion, it is not a question of believe, more one of understanding.Cheers,WhirlwindThis message has been edited by Whirlwind, 11-29-2004 10:38 AM

I think you have two topics in there (even numbered )It doesn't hurt to deal with one then start another one. I find them both potentially interesting and wouldn't want to see them all muddled up.By the way, Welcome to EvC!Please don't take my suggesting a change as a real criticism; it is just a way to keep people focussed on your topics one at a time.Please edit the opening post (OP) to remove one. It would also be improved if you gave some of your own views.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

(btw as AdminNosy may I now changet the topic title to something like "Dealing with Large Numbers" ? )A small nit, the billions are, of course a problem for all of us. However, most of the evolutionary history shows pretty darned interesting things happening in millions of years. A bit more graspable but still a problem.I think you are right about the problem of "wrapping our heads around" such quantities but I think there is more to it than that.Dwarfing the billions of years are the truely huge number of events that take place. If a species (like a mouse with at least on generation a year) has a population of millions then in a scant millenium a billion different "tries" take place in the evolutionary dance. In a million years there are a trillion different individuals each with some change and a different chance at being selected or not.If there are 10 million species (perhaps a low number) extant at any one time then in a million years there might be over a "sextillion" (this is getting silly) different individuals.It is the difficulty of being able to imagine what can happen when there are so many "events" occuring each contributing to the evolutionary process that makes it hard for anyone to understand the developmental power of evolution.These numbers start to dwarf some as small as a silly little billion.