weren't the ones in charge until recently--in certain benighted countries.)

A few decades later, when Darwin published his findings, they went ballistic. They remained in the ballistic phase.

but there wasn't really any group of people who failed to accept science at least not during that specific time we call the Enlightenment. If anything, there would have been a better understanding that faith and religion were one thing, and the unfolding discoveries of science something else during that period of time.

Even then, as today, there were often fundamental misunderstandings of what science actually says.

Faith and religious belief are very, very stubborn things. Most people start getting taught religion and faith from the day they are born, and a lot of it sticks forever. More to the point, it happens long before they start school and learn any science. If they're in a household that is very strongly religious, very rejecting of science, then science doesn't stand a chance.

Back during the Enlightenment, the very vast majority of people had little or no schooling, and the ideas of the Enlightenment would have been very far removed from their day to day lives. It's only as education started becoming universal, that those ideas started reaching down through society.

Another say to think about it is to consider this: even within science, there continue to be different ideas on the same topic, and it can take quite some time for a new idea (hypothesis, or theory) to be generally accepted. Perhaps the best example, one people here are probably generally familiar with, is evolution. Darwin believed quite strongly that it proceeded at a gradual, more or less uniform rate. But as people looked more and more at the fossil record, it became clear that evolution actually happens in fits and starts, sudden bursts when a lot of things (species) change a whole lot. That's now known as punctuated equilibrium, and is, so far as I know, the current understanding of how evolution occurs.

thank you!

My unscientific theory is, and has been for some time, that this is a visceral reaction to the climate crisis. That is, we know at the cellular level that the jig is up.

Clearly, different groups of people deal with this differently. Some retreat to fear and conspiracy. Some approach it with love and science. More solutions-based.

There is definitely a unifying thread; those who deny COVID also deny climate change and are fearful of US becoming a "majority minority" country. This is their visceral reaction. They can't accept truth and facts and science, so contort, corrupt, and pervert truth to their own version of reality.

How do the rest of us survive this?

Will indeed those attending drumpf's superspreader events be the 1st to go? But, there is no avoiding the climate crisis, sadly.