The reason is students are exposed to an incredible level of material pushing evolution as virtually an established fact from the time they are toddlers for the rest of their lives.
There is very little or next to no criticism ever presented, unless they watch or read some creationist or ID material.
So from popular culture, and then reinforced from middle school, high school and into college, they are taught a set of "proofs" for evolution. Wells did well, imo, to call these "proofs" the icons of evolution.
So the basic paradigm has been pushed via indoctrination and based often on faulty evidentiary claims. I would say the media and educational messages involved with evolution constitute the largest and most intense media propaganda and indoctrination campaign, if you want to look at it that way, in the history of mankind to date. So the student of science, by the time he gets to a higher level, is faced with a group of people so indoctrinated into the idea ToE is essentially a fact no reasonable person can disagree with, that it doesn't even matter to most if the evidentiary claims are now shown to have been exagerrated.
In a very real sense, the presentation of ToE is sort of an unscripted brainwashing multi-media effort that not surprisingly makes objective analysis very difficult, imo.
In other words, the paradigm has been set, and so although plenty of disagreement is allowed within the existing paradigm of ToE, no dissent is allowed without severe repercussions of the basic paradigm itself.
This message has been edited by randman, 12-01-2005 05:07 PM
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