Why do people deny evolution?

You're talking in circles.

2 sentences.
Remove first
Second still applies. Should apply to any belief.

The central issue here is belief. In the end, one must believe speciation to be valid. Or, one must advance some other explanation. Whatever you arrive at, belief must be the product of consideration void of desire for license or expectation of reward. ...

Perhaps you could tell me which question he asked that I did not answer. Should you take the trouble to review, I believe you will discover he misread this post:
http://able2know.org/topic/229102-324#post-5981739
He then proceeded to ask me to explain an assertion never made.
He's good at that.

I don't believe speciation has been proved

I see nothing ambiguous about the post.
I don't believe speciation has been proved.
Therefore, I deny evolution as presented.
I could be wrong, of course.

What is Motivated Reasoning? How Does It Work?
By Chris Mooney | May 5, 2011 8:32 am

...
Recently, scholars and commentators have drawn attention to the contribution of “motivated cognition” to diverse political conflicts, including climate change and the birthplace of President Obama. I will offer a few points to help people assess such claims.

1. To begin, motivated cognition refers to the unconscious tendency of individuals to fit their processing of information to conclusions that suit some end or goal. Consider a classic example. In the 1950s, psychologists asked experimental subjects, students from two Ivy League colleges, to watch a film that featured a set of controversial officiating calls made during a football game between teams from their respective schools. The students from each school were more likely to see the referees’ calls as correct when it favored their school than when it favored their rival. The researchers concluded that the emotional stake the students had in affirming their loyalty to their respective institutions shaped what they saw on the tape.

The end or goal motivates the cognition in the sense that it directs mental operations—in this case, sensory perceptions; in others, assessments of the weight and credibility of empirical evidence, or performance of mathematical or logical computation—that we expect to function independently of that goal or end. But the normal connotation of “motive” as a conscious goal or reason for acting is actually out of place here and can be a source of confusion. The students wanted to experience solidarity with their institutions, but they didn’t treat that as a conscious reason for seeing what they saw. They had no idea (or so we are to believe; one needs a good experimental design to be sure this is so) that their perceptions were being bent in this way.

2. Motivated cognition is best understood as a description or characterization of a process and not an explanation in and of itself. For a genuine explanation, we need to know, at a minimum, what the need or goal was that did the motivating (or directing) of the agent’s mental processing and the precise cognitive mechanism or mechanisms through which it operated to generate the goal-supporting perceptions or beliefs.

Examples of the goals or needs that can motivate cognition are diverse. They include fairly straightforward things, like a person’s financial or related interests. But they reach more intangible stakes, too, such as the need to sustain a positive self-image or protect connections to others with whom someone is intimately connected and on whom someone might well depend for support, emotional or material.

The mechanisms are also diverse. They include dynamics such as biased information search, which involves seeking out (or disproportionally attending to) evidence that is congruent rather than incongruent with the motivating goal; biased assimilation, which refers to the tendency to credit and discredit evidence selectively in patterns that promote rather than frustrate the goal; and identity-protective cognition, which reflects the tendency of people to react dismissively to information when accepting it would cause them to experience dissonance or anxiety. Identifying these more concrete and empirically established mechanisms and giving a plausible and textured account of how they are at work is critical; otherwise, assertions of “motivated cognition” become circular—“x believes that because it was useful; the evidence is that it was useful for x to believe that.”

3. To be sure, motivated cognition can make us stupid, but it is not a consequence of stupidity. Social psychologists and behavioral economists distinguish between two forms of reasoning: “System 1,” which is rapid, intuitive, emotional, and prone to bias, and “System 2,” which is more deliberate, more reflective, more dispassionate, and (it is said) more accurate. A long line of research in social psychology, however, shows that “motivated cognition” spans the divide—that is, that needs and goals can unconsciously steer not only rapid “gut” reactions, but also even more systematic forms of analysis that are thought to be examples of “System 2.” Indeed, some researchers have shown that expert scientists are at least sometimes prone to motivated reasoning—that they conform the performance of their reflective and deliberate evaluations of evidence to the desire they have to see exciting conclusions vindicated and disfavored ones rejected. Scary stuff. And humbling (unless as a result of motivated reasoning we see evidence of its operation only in those who disagree with us—in which case, motivated reasoning makes us anything but humble).

4. Work on motivated cognition and political conflict tends to focus more on the need for maintaining a valued identity, particularly as a member of a group. It is certainly plausible that an individual would employ one or another of the mechanisms for motivated cognition to advance her economic interests. But the seeming inability of economic interests to explain who believes what on issues such as climate change, the HPV vaccine, one or another economic policy involving tax cuts or social welfare spending, and the like is in fact the motivation—as it were—for examining the contribution that identity-protective forms of motivated cognition are making.

Perhaps you could tell me which question he asked that I did not answer.

Oldest Human DNA Reveals Mysterious Branch of Humanity
by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | December 04, 2013 01:01pm ET
The oldest known human DNA found yet reveals human evolution was even more confusing than before thought, researchers say. The genetic material came from the bone of a hominin living in what is now the Sima de los Huesos in Northern Spain approximately 400,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene.

The oldest known human DNA found yet reveals human evolution was even more confusing than thought, researchers say.

The DNA, which dates back some 400,000 years, may belong to an unknown human ancestor, say scientists. These new findings could shed light on a mysterious extinct branch of humanity known as Denisovans, who were close relatives of Neanderthals, scientists added.

Although modern humans are the only surviving human lineage, others once strode the Earth. These included Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, and the relatively newfound Denisovans, who are thought to have lived in a vast expanse from Siberia to Southeast Asia. Research shows that the Denisovans shared a common origin with Neanderthals but were genetically distinct, with both apparently descending from a common ancestral group that had diverged earlier from the forerunners of modern humans. [See Images of Excavation & Mysterious 'New Hominid']

Genetic analysis suggests the ancestors of modern humans interbred with both these extinct lineages. Neanderthal DNA makes up 1 to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes, and Denisovan DNA makes up 4 to 6 percent of modern New Guinean and Bougainville Islander genomes in the Melanesian islands.

Pit of Bones

To discover more about human origins, researchers investigated a human thighbone unearthed in the Sima de los Huesos, or "Pit of Bones," an underground cave in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain. The bone is apparently 400,000 years old.

The thighbone of the 400,000-year-old hominid from Sima de los Huesos, Spain.Pin It The thighbone of the 400,000-year-old hominid from Sima de los Huesos, Spain.

"This is the oldest human genetic material that has been sequenced so far," said study lead author Matthias Meyer, a molecular biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "This is really a breakthrough — we'd never have thought it possible two years ago that we could study the genetics of human fossils of this age." Until now, the previous oldest human DNA known came from a 100,000-year-old Neanderthal from a cave in Belgium.

The Sima de los Huesos is about 100 feet (30 meters) below the surface at the bottom of a 42-foot (13-meter) vertical shaft. Archaeologists suggest the bones may have been washed down it by rain or floods, or that the bones were even intentionally buried there.

This Pit of Bones has yielded fossils of at least 28 individuals, the world's largest collection of human fossils dating from the Middle Pleistocene, about 125,000 to 780,000 years ago.

"This is a very interesting time range," Meyer told LiveScience. "We think the ancestors of modern humans and Neanderthals diverged maybe some 500,000 years ago." The oldest fossils of modern humans found yet date back to about 200,000 years ago.

Denisovan relative?

The researchers reconstructed a nearly complete genome of this fossil's mitochondria — the powerhouses of the cell, which possess their own DNA and get passed down from the mother. The fossils unearthed at the site resembled Neanderthals, so researchers expected this mitochondrial DNA to be Neanderthal.

Surprisingly, the mitochondrial DNA reveals this fossil shared a common ancestor not with Neanderthals, but with Denisovans, splitting from them about 700,000 years ago. This is odd, since research currently suggests the Denisovans lived in eastern Asia, not in western Europe, where this fossil was uncovered. The only known Denisovan fossils so far are a finger bone and a molar found in Siberia. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors]

"This opens up completely new possibilities in our understanding of the evolution of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans," Meyer said.

The researchers suggest a number of possible explanations for these findings. First, this specimen may have been closely related to the ancestors of Denisovans. However, this seems unlikely, since the presence of Denisovans in western Europe would suggest an extensive overlap of territory with Neanderthal ancestors, raising the question of how both groups could diverge genetically while overlapping in range. Moreover, the one known Denisovan tooth is significantly different from teeth seen at the Pit of Bones.

Second, the Sima de los Huesos humans may be related to the ancestors of both Neanderthals and Denisovans. The researchers consider this plausible given the fossil's age, but they would then have to explain how two very different mitochondrial DNA lineages stemmed from one group, one leading to Denisovans, the other to Neanderthals.

Third, the humans found at the Sima de los Huesos may be a lineage distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans that later perhaps contributed mitochondrial DNA to Denisovans. However, this suggests this group was somehow both distinct from Neanderthals but also independently evolved several Neanderthal-like skeletal features.

Fourth, the investigators suggest a currently unknown human lineage brought Denisovan-like mitochondrial DNA into the Pit of Bones region, and possibly also to the Denisovans in Asia.

"The story of human evolution is not as simple as we would have liked to think," Meyer said. "This result is a big question mark. In some sense, we know less about the origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans than we knew before."

The scientists now hope to learn more about these fossils by retrieving DNA from their cell nuclei, not their mitochondria. However, this will be a huge challenge — the researchers needed almost 2 grams of bone to analyze mitochondrial DNA, which outnumbers nuclear DNA by several hundred times within the cell.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

All information exist below c. So anthing in existance is the action that nonlocality as god is omni present to. All information is a presentation of god.

Yes. Exactly as I have been saying.
The roots are subtle; are they not?