Did Humans Evolve? No, Say Americans

Stern Thinker writes "In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents) to assert that 'humans developed ... from earlier species of animals.' Iceland, meanwhile, has an 85% acceptance rating for evolution." The blurb on the site for Science magazine is less circumspect about the findings: "The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."

The Perceived Threat of Science

The current administration has been quite effective in keeping this issue in the public eye and billing it less as an issue of science and more of a threat to society. The issue has taken on the sentiment that if the concept of evolution becomes widely accepted then faith is voided and we enter moral decay (which is obviously wrong, thanks Bush). But it's definitely how a majority of Americans feel. Science threatens their faith.

Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net] -- Exercise for the rest of us.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Science threatens their faith.

On a related note, did you hear that the Bush administration now says that bird flu is nothing to worry about? More to the point, for bird flu to be a threat to humans, it would have to evolve, and everyone knows evolution is just a theory!

Not quite....

A fine anti-Bush troll/joke, but a few facts [chron.com] are in order....

WASHINGTON - All year, the government has promised stepped-up testing to see if bird flu wings its way to the United States. On Monday, the Bush administration announced those tests got a hit -- but the suspect isn't the much-feared Asian strain of the virus.

In almost the same breath, Agriculture Department officials announced that routine testing had turned up the possibility of the H5N1 virus in the two swans on the shore of Michigan's Lake Erie -- but that genetic testing has ruled out the so-called highly pathogenic version that has ravaged poultry and killed at least 138 people elsewhere in the world.

"We do not believe this virus represents a risk to human health," declared Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "This is not the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that has spread through much of other parts of the world."

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Worrying about Bird Flu is so 2005. ... but that whoooshing sound of a joke flying over someone's head NEVER gets old!

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

"Science threatens their faith"

You say it as if it doesn't, but it does. Science inherently threatens any form of ill-founded blind belief, and seeks to find support and evidence for all ideas. While I say this is not inherently incompatible with faith in general, it seems to be incompatible with most people's faith.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Which is why my god is the Scientific Method, and my religion the study of our suroundings.

There's only two classifications of things in my religion.

1.) Things we understand.
2.) Things we don't understand yet.

There isn't a "3.) Things we will never understand and aren't meant to understand, and must take on faith".

~X

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Which is why my god is the Scientific Method, and my religion the study of our suroundings.

My god is the philosophy of epistemology -- the study of what, if anything, we can know.

Rumsfeld should be fired, but I love this quote:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

-- Donald Rumsfeld

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Evolution makes no claims as to the origin of life. It merly theorises what has happened to that life once it did start.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Carl Sagan had a line about how people who think that evolution and creationism are incompatible don't really understand either.

William Gibson had a line about people who don't know shit about anything, and hate the people who do.

I've got a line in the water, because I'd rather fish than listen to dipshit fundies.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Your college science class must've failed to teach basic scientific method. The whole "lightning strike" thing is one of many theories about how life began, each with supporting and refuting evidence. The key here is that science acknowledges that it doesn't know what actually happened, readily accepts alternate theories, and when the leading theory is debunked it is celebrated and nobody gets burned at the stake.

That's the difference between blind belief and educated belief. Educated believers are willing to be challenged, and accept anything that has sufficient evidence.

Evolution on the other hand is an educated theory based on sound observation and evidence. Evolution does not define the origin of life, but rather it defines the phenomena that is readily observable whereby populations and species change over time. The exact mechanism of this process is arguable, though natural selection is the leading explanation, and has a extremely large amount of evidence in its defense.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

No, evolution is based on the notion that one group of creatures evolved from another group of creatures, a notion that is supporpted by tangible evidence such as genetics, the fossil record, etc.

You're referring to the question of the origin of life (i.e. the very first living organism), which is arguably a separate issue from that of evolution.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Yes, you're wrong. The Urey-Miller Experiment [wikipedia.org] tested a theory that organic compounds evolved from inorganic compounds over time, in hypothetical ancient Earth conditions. That's nothing like the blind belief that god created the universe with a word.

It's anti-intellectual posers who are afraid of science who look at the ongoing philosophical debates on the definition of "life" and flee into useless blind beliefs like Creationism. People who use the words of logic to pretend to dissect science. You know, the kind of people who post badly hidden Creationist propaganda on Slashdot, using their stupidity and disrespect for learning as a cover for their theocrat agenda.

The people we're discussing in disgust while reading this story, because so many Americans are so ignorant.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Beliefs not based on logic cannot be swayed by logic.

What a shame that so many people believe this is an either/or thing. It makes me sad. I thought most Americans were smarter than that.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Isn't evolution still based on a blind belief that someday in the past, life just magically began with a strike of lightning?

No. Evolution explains how one species turns into another over time. It says nothing about how the original one got there in the first place. Sure, there are various theories, such as the lightning strike you mentioned. But they're not part of the science that is evolution, (at least as the word is most commonly used).

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Wikipedia is your friend, biased language is not.

there are a lot of chemical reactions where "life can arise from non-life" given the proper conditions, conditions which were present on *gasp* early earth!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis [wikipedia.org]

Evolution describes how life changes, it has NOTHING to do with how life began.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Science threatens their faith.

And if science threatens your faith, perhaps you ought to re-examine your beliefs. Science and religion don't have to be mutually exclusive things. It's really just a handful of overly-dogmatic religious sects (read: fundies) that need science to be wrong on evolution (and a number of other things, for that matter), in order for their religious beliefs to be right.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

The thing that cheeses me off the most is that this is a theological issue. It's the age old argument of literal vs. interpreted reading of the bible. It's a theological argument that has been going on between sects of Christianity for centuries. Yet they have managed to make it into a political argument some how. The literal interpretation doesn't just go against the scientific community, but also the beliefs of other Christians like Roman Catholics. It simply doesn't belong on the political stage.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Devil's advocate.

Your average non-scientist citizen is not likely to go and check all the sources to verify that, yes indeed, evolution is the most likely explanation for the diversity of species. So, to demand that this average citizen believe in evolution is to demand the same leap of faith as for that citizen to believe in creation. Either way, some "expert" is telling this citizen what to think about something s/he doesn't understand.

Why don't these polls include an "I don't know, I don't have time to check the facts, and it really doesn't matter in my everyday life" option? I think that would be the best response for a thinking non-scientist.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Science threatens their faith.

It's sad that most Christians base their faith on The Bible and not the teachings of Christ. This is the same problem Fundamentalist Muslims are suffering from...they confuse the Qur'an(and subsequent mistranslations and commentaries) with the spiritual message of Mohammed. Both Mohammed and Jesus promoted love, tolerance, forgiveness, and understanding. None of which is in conflict with science(the pursuit of truth).

If the direct teachings of these prophets were the focus of religious organizations(instead of using scriptures to control their followers through fear), science would be embraced by the world religions rather than shunned by it.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

Those Icelanders have NO sense of decency. Why, once one was visiting my parents in Arizona on a cold day and he was wearing shorts! It was a freezing 60 degrees and he had the indecency to wear very revealing shorts (I could see his knees!). Them and their... ice festivals... and... beastiality (I read it on the internet -- Icelanders are notorious for polar bear rape). Go America, these colors don't run!

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

it tells that most Americans are more likely to believe what they find desirable to believe, rather than the truth.

Hey, buddy, that's everyone. The only thing that changes are the idiosyncrasies, the individual blind spots, usually about the things that we personally or culturally choose to care about. That my fellow countrymen happen to believe a particularly embarrassing one is unfortunate, but in the grand scheme of things is hardly the ultimate sin against 'Truth'. It is a telling fact that in every stage of human history, a large portion of people believed that they had stumbled (by revelation or inductive practices or some combination thereof) onto the basic paradigm that accurately describes truth. They were all, every single one of them, wrong. Why do we believe we are different than them, that this age we are lucky enough to live in is somehow different than all those others? One need not believe in relative truth (and I don't) to believe that for the actual amount of truth that we can be honestly confident to presently hold, our current beliefs might as well be treated relatively.

I agree that it sucks for people who live in an age defined by the scientific enterprise to be lorded over militarily and economically by a scientifically stunted nation. But then so was Greece by Rome, and yet life (historically speaking) goes on.

P.S. Don't ever believe, in this age of media and relative concentration of power that the actions of the US are driven by the opinions of its citizens at large. It's very much the other way around; citizens are the played, not the players. That should be the far more terrifying realization than that rural Kansas doesn't know jack about Evolution.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

If our government is run by people who think Evolution is false, they can make laws to outlaw it in schools

"Miss Crabtree - call the feds! I think Johnny's evolving!"

Note that is hopefully obvious...

...the idea among Americans that humans didn't "evolve" from earlier forms of animals isn't new, and definitely hasn't changed markedly since 2000.

I'd hope that would be obvious to most people. The figures are mostly unchanged for decades, so the assertion that this is because of "widespread fundamentalism" and the "politicization of science" seems to be somewhat of a politically motivated assertion in itself.

Note that about one third of Americans reject the concept of evolution. It's unfortunate that even if people do want to have a religious or spiritual belief, they can't reconcile it with fairly firmly established scientific truth.

Further note that "fundamentalist religions", as the study refers to them as, are also not new in the United States. A lot of people would like to think that these people have sprouted up from nowhere in the last 6 years, but that's simply not the case.

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

It's certainly been around since 1620.

One little-regarded fact is that the Pilgrims got to North America after the Jamestown colony started. The Pilgrims were such a pain in the gluteus that even the Dutch, the Dutch mind you, kicked them out. At the people of time Jamestown were leading a near subsistence living; the markets for cotton and tobacco would become important later. And here came a ship of fools whose beliefs were basically intolerant communists and religious radicals, bringing nothing to help the colony economically, and would expect to be fed. Oddly enough, when the Jamestown colonists heard this, they bribed the Mayflower captain to dump them off where all the cod fishing was going on up north.

(For the record, I am descended from some of those Jamestown colonists.)

And let's not forget the grand European tradition of sending their religious loons to North America; the results of this should be obvious.

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

Evolution isn't a scientific truth. It's a theory.

Changes of species over time is a fact, in the sense that we've observed it. Explanations for how this occurs and what paths it has taken in the past are theory, and a very well established and emperically backed theory at that. Still, I'll accept this as a useful instance of pedantry.

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

Right, "Theory" in science, and "Theory" in popular conversation are not the same thing. When you say "I don't know where I left my keys, but I've got a good theory", you mean hypothesis.

A "Scientific fact" is usually something that can be expressed as a simple equation or formula. Anything that can't be reduced to that level of certainty probably will never be anything but a Theory.

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

i don't think so whatsoever. the good thing about science is it systematically corrects itself via peer review when contrary evidence arrives--even if "correction" means scrapping the whole thing. That's what WORKS about science.

that said, when the entire fossil record we have supports evolution and predictions are made and proven true, I don't think I need to worry about semantics. It's fact.

Some predictions made based on evolution:

• Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil and genetic evidence (Ingman et al. 2000).
• Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients (Oliver et al. 2000).
• Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey (Yoshida et al. 2003).
• Ernst Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction (Webster et al. 2003).
• Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. On the basis of a detailed study, they found the fossil Haikouella "fit these predictions closely" (Mallatt and Chen 2003).
• Evolution predicts that different sets of character data should still give the same phylogenetic trees. This has been confirmed informally myriad times and quantitatively, with different protein sequences, by Penny et al. (1982).
• Insect wings evolved from gills, with an intermediate stage of skimming on the water surface. Since the primitive surface-skimming condition is widespread among stoneflies, J. H. Marden predicted that stoneflies would likely retain other primitive traits, too. This prediction led to the discovery in stoneflies of functional hemocyanin, used for oxygen transport in other arthropods but never before found in insects (Hagner-Holler et al. 2004; Marden 2005).

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

The people that spout the rhetoric "evolution is a theory, not a fact" just plain don't know the meaning of the word "theory". Here's the best definition of the word I could find:

"In science, a theory is a proposed description, explanation, or model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena, capable of predicting future occurrences or observations of the same kind, and capable of being tested through experiment or otherwise falsified through empirical observation. It follows from this that for scientists "theory" and "fact" do not necessarily stand in opposition. For example, it is a fact that an apple dropped on earth has been observed to fall towards the center of the planet, and the theory which explains why the apple behaves so is the current theory of gravitation."

Sure, in scientific theory there is always room for stuff to be proven wrong and for improvement. Relativity superceded Newton's laws. Does that mean Newton was wrong and we had to throw all his laws out? No, it just means that he assumed that the conditions under which his observations were made were the same everywhere, he didn't know about relativity. His laws still hold perfectly true under certain conditions. Einstein didn't prove him wrong, he merely came up with a new theory that took that into account. Scientific advancement is building on the shoulders of giants, new theories build on top of existing ones, clarify them, sometimes prove certain points wrong, but it's very rare for an entire theory to be completely wrong. Sure, evolution as we understand it now may not be completely accurate, there may be more factors that we don't know about, things like that. However, learning more about it and clarifying things that we don't understand doesn't invalidate the original theory, it merely adds to it. Saying it's a "theory, not a fact" just shows the ignorance of these people...proving points of a theory wrong doesn't invalidate the entire thing, it merely clarifies and adds to it.

Note that the poll only covered Japan and Europe

I can't believe I'm trying to defend America's honor by pointing out that we may still be better than Burma or Pakistan. :(

Praytell!

Some claim politization. I say Americans are simply observant. Take a look around in America lately, would you believe evolution?

Sigh

Yea yea, we suck. Who were the last people to accept Coninental Drift? Americans. We don't believe in global warming, we don't believe in evolution, but 50% still believe we found WMDs in Iraq. If we couldn't brain drain scientists from other countries, we'd probably still be living in caves.

I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information? Most people aren't stupid...I'm sure the average person in Iceland isn't any smarter than the average american (Kansas excluded). It could just be the religious thing; a lot of european social democracies are much less religious than we are. I mean, I understand we're not a pro-intellectual country, but there is a huge difference between not rhapsodising about your elite scientific tradition, and being completely averse to new knowledge.

You can't even blame it on modern schools...We have a tradition of this type of mental blindness going back more than a century.

Re:Sigh

I just don't get it. What is the deal with people never changing their minds, or letting in new information?

Do you remember back in elementary school and then high school when you were taught critical thinking, logic, problem solving, and the scientific method as applied to making everyday decisions?

Yeah, nobody else was taught any of that either. Instead we were all subjected to mindlessly memorizing facts by rote, day after day, year after year.

You can't even blame it on modern schools...We have a tradition of this type of mental blindness going back more than a century.

Public schools in this country were based upon the model of mental institutions, with a healthy dose of military brainwashing techniques. I can certainly blame them.

Re:Sigh

The problem lies not with the people, as Americans are as smart as anyone else, but with the educational system. In the US, only those that get to college are taught to ask questions and challenge any preconceived notions that they have. Even then, not all colleges to an adequate job of it.

Thus, the majority of the population that has a high school education at best has never been taught to change their minds. Instead, they are taught to learn material and repeat it. When what they are taught (at church, or on the TV/radio) that the world is 6000 years old, that global warming is a liberal hoax, or that we were divine creations dropped into the Garden of Eden, that's what they repeat. They were never told that they could question what they hear, nor that they should.

You want to fix this problem? Be willing to pay higher property taxes, attend school board meetings, and push for changes to the curriculum that encourage curiosity and questioning... Then maintain the effort for a generation so that the kids who start with the program in kindergarden can progress through the system and go into politics.

And you can blame it on modern schools... the problem is the definition of "modern". Schools have been focused on churning out industrial workers (factory-workers, etc.) for the last century. That's the "modern" model. Now that we're largely post-industrial, we notice the need for people who can reason and think, as opposed to people who only had to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. We need to take a long, hard look at what the current school curricula are designed to teach, and work from the ground up. Moreover, the more recent fixation on testing to academic standards only exacerbates the problem; we're telling schools that so long as kids can regurgitate information, they're okay.

Re:Bad example.

You might want to provide a real link to back up that assertion. Degrading mustard gas shells from the Iran-Iraq war in the 80's do not constitute WMD, no matter how much you silly conservatives try to say differently.

Hans Blix said they didn't have them. Scott Ried said they didn't have them. And except for a long forgotten stock pile of shells, they have never been found. No nukes, no mobile weapons labs, no sarin gas missle. Nothing.

Re:Bad example.

Clearly it does. Some moron modded him informative. =P

This is the actual report saying no WMDs were found in Iraq [cia.gov].

Damn liberal CIA. Always twisting the truth. Gotta listen to Fox News, because, you know, they're Fair and Balanced.

Rants

Why wasn't the Science article [sciencemag.org] linked to, rather than a newspaper?

The article is about the US, Japan and a whole swack of European countries (presuming that I can include Turkey as European). Okay, but what about the rest of the world?

Where is the "OK, this is lame" selection?

What's with Slashdot and Evolution anyway?

And according to this study 64% [cnn.com] of respondents believed that aliens have contacted humans.

Many, many people all of the world do not 'get' science. It has nothing to do with religion. This happens all over the world.

Proof

The roughly third percent of the US population who do not believe in the evolution of humans cited themselves as proof...

Arrrgg...please don't lump me in with zealots

For the record, I'm conservative, I voted Republican in 2000 and 2004. Yes, it's all my fault, let's move on.

I'm against the idea of abortion but think it should be legal. I don't like flag burning, but I think an amendment against it is a silly idea. I don't care about gay marraige, it shouldn't be banned, but before we allow it, we need to take a careful look at all the societal and economic consequences.

All that said, I am also decidedly NON religious and think that Creationism and Intelligent Design are fairy tales for children. PLEASE do not color me and all the other conservative red stater's in with the religious right. They're not connecting with reality, and I feel bad for those people who continue to blindly follow the paths of organized religion (which has done OH SOOOO much good for the world over the last several years). <sp<sp>We don't ALL live in Je$u$land (perhaps geographically, but not mentally), and some of us choose to follow science, watch the Discovery Channel instead of Pat Robert$on, and sleep in on $unday morning rather than gathering to worship at the altar of Chri$t.

Thus endeth my rant. Thanks for listening. Go Darwin.

News for Nerds

You know those jocks that beat up nerds in highschool for being "too smart"? Those jocks are running America. And you are still the nerds.

I believe

in evolution because I personally evolved from a lower life form--I used to be a Republican.

I don't really..

mind people rejecting evolution.

as long as they're consistent.

In the event of a bird flu outbreak in humans, they should not ever take a vaccine or medicine for it.

There win-win.

Re:Well...a little of both?

"I guess I often think of something I heard someone say: "If humans evolved from apes...why are there still apes?"

Maybe you should think a little more.

Re:Well...a little of both?

because you don't know the very first thing about evolution.

humans did not evolve from apes. humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.

apes are just as evolved as humans. evolution does not have a goal. apes are not trying to become human. everyone is just trying to survive in their environment as best as they can.

Re:Well...a little of both?

Ahh, but humans didn't evolve from apes; they shared a common ancestor [bbc.co.uk] (who no longer exists). Nowhere in evolution does it state we descended directly from apes, current day or otherwise.

Re:Well...a little of both?

It's called a fork in development. Consider OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

Re:Well...a little of both?

Because apes are pretty good at being apes.

A "daughter species" doesn't necessarily kick the parent species out of its niche. That's common when the environment changes but doesn't eliminate the old environment, or when the old environment splits into to different parts. Humans evolved from tree-dwelling apes who ventured out into the encroaching grassland. That selected for apes which walked on their hind legs at the expense of prehensile feet, but the trees were still there and apes live in them to this day.

Go into an ape's niche and you'll find yourself massively out-competed. You'd make a lousy chimpanzee.

Sometimes a daughter species does compete with, and outcompete, the parent species, and drives it into extinction. We appear to be working on that pretty vigorously. In a century or so the answer to the question "Why are there still apes?" may be "There aren't." But it doesn't really change the answer: new species come all the time without destroying the old ones.

Remember that from the evolutionary point of view, humans aren't "better" than apes, any more than apes are "better" than fish or fish are "better" than amoebas. Each one fits into a niche without driving out the older species. It's only our bias that puts us on the top of an evolutionary ladder.

It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.

Re:ugh

Well, if people vote someone into office based mostly on the candidate's belief that evolution is false, then it would have a direct impact on the daily lives of all Americans. Now if everyone would simply vote for candidates based on relevent issues (like, oh I don't know, healthcare/education/etc) we would be fine.