If We Evolved From Monkeys...

"If humans evolved from Monkeys, why are they still monkeys?"
  
  If this question makes you facepalm so hard you feel your eyeballs will come out of your ears, I can deduce at least one thing about you: You know the answer to this question and realise why it's so ludicrous.
  I see this question asked so often it depresses me. If, like me, you are an avid user of Twitter you may be familiar with the user @takethatdarwin (if you're not, you should be). His primary aim is to bring this question to the attention of those who know how to answer it. Every day my timeline is awash with dozens and dozens of people asking this question and it's usually followed with the arrogant post script "Check mate atheists!" Or something similarly obtuse.

A typical @takethatdarwin ReTweet

 There are three types of people that post this question. The first type is the rarest, they are the genuinely curious people who know nothing about evolution and are seeking help in understanding it. These people are a joy to respond to, their follow up questions are usually intelligent and well considered. The second type of person, is more common. They are the trolls. We've all come across them. Dishonest people posting incendiary comments fishing for a reaction. In my experience these are quite easy to spot, and they are not worth bothering with. The third type of person is by FAR the most common. And they are, you guessed it, the religious. They seem to think they have the undoing of evolution in this one question, but really all they're doing is showing the world how little they actually know about the subject. Most of them don't even want a response. I have had abuse hurled at me on more than one occasion just for politely pointing out that we didn't evolve from monkeys, we share a common ancestor. A personal favourite is: "Fuck you! If I wanted your opinion I would have asked for it!" (Apparantley, posting an answer to a question posted on a public forum is the wrong thing to do!) Most of the religious people who post this question aren't particularly interested in the answer, they're programmed not to accept evolution and it doesn't matter how much evidence you show them, they will never change their mind. The question is merely their misguided attempt at mockery. They're having a good old laugh at "Those stupid evolutionists with their fossils and their theory."
  Some of them, however, are up for the debate. All debates with the religious on the subject of evolution follow a similar thread. They cite the "missing links" in the fossil record, the fact that you don't see a dog giving birth to a cat, irreducible complexity and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. All of these are easily rebuffed, but that doesn't bother them because they'll take you round and round in circles, throwing in the odd bible verse for good measure, until you're so bored you give up and go away. At which point they feel great because they think they've won, and you feel dejected because they missed the point completely. This has happened to me many, many times, and it will no doubt happen many, many more times in the future.
  In a perfect world we (the ones that know better) should treat these people just like we treat the trolls and give them a wide berth. We should leave them to wallow in their own blind faith and ignorance. But we don't. I certainly don't. Every time @takethatdarwin retweets that ridiculous question I fight hard to resist the temptation to respond. I tell myself it's pointless, that they're not really bothered. But ultimately I give in and respond, as I know many of you do. But the question is, why do we respond? We're basically pissing in the wind, why put ourselves through that on a daily basis?
  One reason we subject ourselves to this torture is because misinformation spreads. Many of these people have children. Children are very impressionable. Do you think these people are going to keep their misguided ill-informed ideas about evolution to themselves? No, of course they're not. The poor little mites are going to receive a hefty dose of their parent's ignorance. That thought alone is too much for many of us to bare. 
  Another reason we can't just walk on by when we come across such ignorance is because we care. We care about what's true. We care that they totally misunderstand the most basic ideas of evolutionary theory. We care that they don't even properly understand the definition of the word "theory". We care that they think it's a stupid idea. We care that they think evolution states that a monkey gave birth to a human. Yes, 99% of the time a response is utterly pointless and will ultimately achieve nothing, but at least we can say we tried.