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48% of Americans Reject Evolution
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 31, 2007 03:32 PM
from the we-need-just-a-touch-stronger-educational-standards- dept.
from the we-need-just-a-touch-stronger-educational-standards- dept.
MSNBC has up an article discussing the results of a Newsweek poll on faith and religion among members of the US populace. Given the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?', some 48% of Americans said 'No'. Furthermore, 34% of college graduates said they accept the Biblical story of creation as fact. An alarmingly high number of individuals responded that they believe the earth is only 10,000 years old, and that a deity created our species in its present form at the start of that period.
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In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
But that couldn't possibly be related to poor science education, could it?
Note: I'm referring specifically to the 48% who believe that evolution is not well-supported by scientific evidence and that it is not widely accepted within the scientific community. Well, and the people who think the universe is less than 10,000 years old, despite all the evidence to the contrary. You can believe in God and have an understanding of science, just like you can have morals without being religious. But thinking that evolution isn't supported by evidence, or isn't widely accepted by scientists, is just plain ignorance.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree; this has to be ignorance, not religious zealotry. It's one thing to say "Evolution is bunk, and there's a pervasive anti-religious conspiracy in academia promoting it" and quite another to say "No scientists really believe in evolution." As far as I know, none of the fundies are actually saying the latter and expecting to be believed. The former, however, is one of their standard talking points.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
In America this has worked.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
No single group of humans has a monopoly on ignorance.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Have a gold star.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
- "History is the lie commonly agreed upon," - Voltaire
If the vast majority believes something for long enough, it becomes the truth.
And btw..
"The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter."
- Pope Pius XII
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the many neat things about the way science is practiced, with numerous independent scientists continuously challenging each other's theories and discoveries, is that it doesn't tend to produce Big Lies.
It's conceivable, though highly unlikely, that one day evolution will be disproven completely. If that happens, it will be entirely to science's credit.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... Acceptance of evolution and faith in a higher power are not mutually exclusive. Just ask the Catholics.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your faith and the fact that you believe in God shouldn't make you a creationist per se.
Remember that many of the most inquisitive, rational and critical minds were members of the Church. Even though they had to follow an official Canon, they never took the Bible for granted. Aware that this book was written down by stone and bronze age nomads, they just refused to take for granted that God created the world in 6 (earthen) days. Look at people like Thomas Aquinas ans William of Occam. Would they have shared the creationists views? I think not!
They rather marveled at the way God led the creation of nature and the universe.
After all, how could you have explained a bunch of stone age shepherds what the big bang was and how DNA works. Once you start looking at the Genesis from this viewpoint, you might see the true revelation behind these words.
I consider myself agnostic, although I had the opportunity to let myself be warmly embraced by faith.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with people believing in one or more deities. Some feel the need to have a higher power looking over them. I, personally, am confused by this necessity yet I see some reasoning behind Voltaire's statement that if there was no god, we would invent him.
Yet to be willfully ignorant of the scientific process and instead believe solely in a god is to inadvertantly question him. If you believe that the world is only 10,000 years (or 6,000, or whatever the going age is), then how do you explain the dating processes scientists use that result in objects older than that? The most common argument I hear about this is that "It's the way He wants it to be," yet that throws into question the believability of a benevolent deity since why would a benevolent deity purposefully mislead his creation?
I shudder what would happen if fundamentalists in Europe back in the 1500s and 1600s had been able to fully supress what was discovered. Would we still believe that Earth is flat and the solar system was geocentric?
If you do not believe in evolution, how can you understand how penicillin has become ineffective and how superbugs are being uncovered; strains of bacteria and virii that, while exhibiting all the characteristics of previous ones, are immune to the same attack styles?
Truth and fact are two seperate ideas. They can very well be mutually exclusive.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're a slave to the meme forced upon you by your parents, a believer in an idea considered idiotic by the vast majority of scientists and Christians, and an embarrassment to the 21st century.
GO GO POWER RANGERS! YOU MIGHTY MORPHIN POWER RANGERS!
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is essentially the act of being falsifiable that actually makes Evolution a real scientific theory, and the fact that it has stood for so long (with modifications) that makes it so widely accepted.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science is meaningful and helpful, and it would be a real shame if its pursuit were to be abandoned, but calling science truth is just as bad as calling it a lie.
I wish I could mod down that (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes this is all chemistry despite you prefering to think you have a soul and be a "higher" being than the rest of the animal, in reality you are a mamal and you simply go in a complexer "rut". Sorry to break it to you , you aren't "superior" and "chosen".
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Only 51% of physical scientists believe in any form of Darwinian evolution.
This is a lie.
You are a liar.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Funny)
Beacuase you can't possibly have faith (or religion, your choice) and be well educated in sciences, could you?
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein said once, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Read all about it here [positiveatheism.org].
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's perfectly acceptable to call someone crazy for believing that maybe spewing pollution into the environment for centuries might be harmful, yet heaven forbid someone suggest that just maybe it's kind of strange to believe that Joseph Smith met an angel in the desert who gave him a set of gold-plated dinnerware inscribed with the Word of God and then he proclaimed that everyone should wear special underwear. It's OK to call a woman who choses not to carry a fetus to term a murderer, but don't you dare suggest that there's no reason to believe that some magic juju called a "soul" enters a cell at the moment of conception, or you'll be called a troll and flamebaiter.
I believe in morality, I believe in ethics, and I might even believe in God, but please don't expect me to swallow your Iron Age superstition. Is it really so hard to see that much of the pain in the world is being caused by narrow-minded fools believing that THEY have the TRUTH and everybody else is destined to burn in hell for eternity? Do you really not realize that it was exactly this kind of exceptionalist thinking that led people to fly planes into the World Trade Center believing that God not only wanted them to do it but would reward them? Can we really not call "bullshit" when people start claiming that there's more evidence for the magical events of the Bible than for natural selection and the Origin of Species?
Sam Harris makes a ton of sense when he wonders why it is that we are not allowed to take all the knowledge gained by science into account when forming our spirirtual beliefs. For some reason, we're supposed to disregard all of the insight that science has given us into the Universe when it comes to spirituality. He asks why it is that it's so taboo to suggest that picking one "book written by God" out of all the "books written by God" and claiming that THIS one is the REAL "book written by God" is just a little bit "counter-intuitive".
We are told that most Americans believe that Faith should be part of our political life and they demand that our leaders be men of this "faith". If faith is "belief in that for which there is no evidence" then I say we've already had enough of leaders who ignore evidence when making decisions over war and peace, life and death. I say it's time that we had a little less "faith-based" foreign policy and "faith-based" economic policy and "faith-based" environmental policy and a little more reality-based decision-making.
But if you're going to claim that faith and religion should be part of public life and political behavior, then you best be ready to have questions raised about just what kind of magical thinking you base your political beliefs upon. And for God's sake, stop hiding behind Political Correctness when it comes to people challenging the nature of that magical thinking.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically according to the research he quotes, there are stances the brain takes of thinking. Like the "physical" stance, how an object will react to gravity, etc. But that is slow and not really useful in judging complex machines (like animals for example). So there is a "design" stance, where you judge the function of an object and determine it's expected behaviour. That is sometimes too slow, so there is the "intention" stance, which assigns intentions to things. That tiger over there is going to attack me not because it has sharp claws capable of killing, but because he intends to kill me so I better run. Get the point. Anyway, according to research, infants and young children are especially prone to think in an intent stance. Thus it is conceivable that the thinking that something must have a reason or intent, is something to be discarded through a conscious effort.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is, of course, a bit oversimplified, but I find nothing about evolution difficult to understand.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that you have just explained it in a way which is subtly wrong supports the idea that it is counterintuitive. An animal does not adapt. It is born with a certain set of DNA, which it cannot change or control, and it lives or dies as a result what DNA it has (along with other factors like chance).
In fact, this makes for a bit of a paradox. A single organism cannot ever adapt. Its DNA is essentially immutable, or at least it certainly cannot do anything to change its own DNA in any useful way. So you have an organism, and that organism has offspring, and so on. You have a whole chain (lineage) of organisms, and none of them can adapt, so how does the adaptation occur?
The answer, of course, is that adaptation in that sense doesn't really occur at all. What occurs is that new, different organisms are created when organisms reproduce, and the different ones either are already adapted or are not already adapted at the moment they're born, and the well-adapted ones end up reproducing.
This is a bit counter-intuitive because it's not how people solve problems. Humans generally apply intelligence to a problem. If you're a car company and you want to sell a new model of car, you don't make a bunch of new types of car at random without any direction, then ask potential customers if they suck or not, then throw out the ones that suck. That would be enormously wasteful and slow given limited resources, so humans rarely ever do that. Instead, you figure out what you want, you apply theory, and you make a plan to go directly where you want to go (or as directly as possible).
As it turns out, my sister is a Ph.D. student in genetics, and I am a computer programmer. We've had conversations about the similarities and differences of computer code and genetic code, and it took me a while to grasp, but there are really more differences than there are similarities. If a programmer wants to create a construct, he sits down with a piece of paper (or whiteboard), charts out what he wants it to do, and writes some code, hopefully (if he has any training) in a nice, orderly manner. If he's any good, he makes it modular and separates concerns so that (say) code for the GUI is not mixed in with code for the filesystem.
DNA does not work like this AT ALL. There are huge, gigantic sections of DNA code that are never used. Then there are sections in certain places which are used for two TOTALLY UNRELATED purposes just because the particular sequence of base pairs happens to fit both purposes. It is the equivalent of compiling a header file full of constants (say, error codes or strings) and then after you're done compiling, going, "Oh hey, since we are using a Pentium processor, that sequence of bytes for the error codes happens to also be a valid sequence of opcodes. So now I don't need to bother writing the first half of memmove(), because it already exists right there! Whoopee!" Except that it's worse than that because the DNA will have 100 other copies of memmove() in other places, all different, all incompatible, and most with bugs. Except that you can't call them bugs, because there is no spec. You expect them to do "wrong" things every now and then, indeed often, and the only real crime is to do something so wrong that the organism doesn't survive. And the only reason it does survive is that the system is pretty redundant and tolerates chaos pretty well, except when someone gets heart disease, cancer, dementia, a sore lower back, etc.
The point is this: imagine how you would design a human. Now look at a real human -- it's almost nothing like what you'd make. It's simultaneously way more "clever" and way sloppier. It's totally whacked, totally effective, and the way it works is pretty al
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Informative)
Ahh, no its not. There are some good guesses, and they've been able to discover things like short sequences of RNA that can catalyze their own reproduction, but (natural) abiogenesis is by no means a solved problem. The simplest organism that can reproduce on its own (not without a host organism like a virus) is a prokaryotic bacteria, but even there you still have millions and millions of base pairs of DNA, which could not come randomly together by chance.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I'm a lax hindu*, and evolution fits right in with my world view, and that of others I know. Infact AFAIK I don't know a single creationist.
*by which I mean I'm religious on Tuesdays and during holy festivals and other holy days.
Re:In unrelated news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, it's very easy to attribute intelligence to a natural process, simple algorithm, etc., even if you know exactly what's going on.
This is Exciting News (Score:5, Funny)
This is interesting, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The poll looks fairly well-constructed, but the problem is that evolution has become extremely politicized. For many, this question wasn't asking about science-- it was a political question (are you with the conservative-christians or the liberal-atheist-scientists?).
I think the real story here is the process by which scientific issues get politicized. It's a process that we really need to understand. John Timmer over at Ars Technica often writes about this.
Re:This is interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is interesting, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
My thought exactly, except that I'd point out another aspect of the question that's overly broad. "Evolution" isn't a single theory, it's a whole complex set of theories, some of which have very solid observational evidence supporting them and others of which are almost pure hypotheses. For example, on the one hand, it's scientifically indisputable that species do evolve. We have seen it happen under controlled conditions in the laboratory, as well as having a deep fossil record. On the other hand the theory of punctuated equilibrium is just a fairly random stab at trying to explain why the fossil record seems to show long periods of little change separated by short periods of massive change. There are lots of other examples all across the spectrum.
Personally, I'd have had a hard time answering yes to the question "Is evolution well supported", not because I don't believe it is, but because I *know* it's a political question, not a scientific question, and I know that if I say "yes" I'll be indicating assent to a much broader range of ideas than those I actually believe are supported.
A better poll would have asked several, more precisely-focused questions, such as: "Do you believe evolution occurs?"; "Do you believe that the large number of species that exist today evolved from a small number of ancient species?"; "Do you believe that humans evolved from earlier species?"; "Do you believe that evolution is a result of purely random chance?"; plus similar questions oriented towards getting the individual's opinion about the scientific support and opinions of scientists, such as "Is there solid scientific evidence that evolution occurs?" and "Do most scientists believe that evolution occurs?".
The result would have been a much better view into the understanding and beliefs of Americans, rather than just their religio-political views.
I know why (Score:5, Insightful)
The ignorance to evolution is amazing in this country. It's no surprise at all people haven't embraced it here like they have overseas in Europe.
The Thirty-Percenters (Score:5, Insightful)
People wonder why this country lost its lead in manufacturing and, most recently, technological development. Why is a fairy tale -- and an expurgated, badly translated fairy tale at that -- so much more compelling than the tools and concepts that allow you to take control of your own life and environment?
Schwab
Fortunately, It Doesn't Matter What You "Believe" (Score:5, Insightful)
Schwab
A challenge for science and tech in our society (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we are requiring people to 'believe' in science, simply because science has become too complicated to cover adequately with a standard, non technical education. This creates a conundrum. These people are being required to choose religion -- remember they have been in church since birth -- or science. For them, this must be very difficult. When we listen to a scientist, we hope we are hearing testimony based on evidence, when we hear a preacher we hope we are hearing testimony based on belief.
That said, as a scientist familiar with evolutionary theory, I am troubled by the level with which we understand the mechanisms of evolution and that 48% of people don't even understand the most basic of concepts within it. Should we require people to swallow science without evidence? Should we follow *anything* without evidence? I know I don't, ironically, science doesn't allow me to.
Beyond Belief (Score:5, Interesting)
Religion and evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
I.e. "In the beginning, god created heaven and earth. For further details, consult a science book".
there's something wrong with the poll (Score:5, Insightful)
27% of Agnostics and Atheists think God guided the process of evolution
13% of Agnostics and Atheists think God created man in his present form.
So a better title for the article might have been "40% of Atheists believe in God".
When you're getting that kind of result, it might be a clue that there's something wrong with your methodology.
Change the terminology: acceptance, not belief (Score:5, Insightful)
of just saying that I do, I try to raise their consciousness a bit by answering "No, I accept
that evolution is the theory that best explains the evidence." This usually gives them a pause.
Belief is often closely associated with faith, and faith is something that isn't necessary to
accept evolution. Only evidence is needed and there is lots of that available.
I'm a teacher and my bumper sticker if very appropriate and funny in several different ways, it
reads: "Leave no child behind - Teach Evolution." I wish I had another one as this one is very
faded.
Re:Quick, call in the Hippie Power Squad (Score:5, Insightful)
Let ignorant people remain ignorant, because what harm could they possibly do to our society?
Re:Quick, call in the Hippie Power Squad (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be all fine and well except for one thing: they're reproducing....and at a higher rate than those of us who value science. And those people and their progeny will vote.
Re:Quick, call in the Hippie Power Squad (Score:5, Interesting)
Rejecting evolution makes you a gibbering idiot who is unable to govern your own life and hates science? Do you realize how incredibly arrogant that is?
I don't believe in Evolution. I haven't seen enough facts to support it. I hold the same to be true for all mechanisms whereby the earth, life, and the universe were created. Nothing has enough evidence to support any kind of solid conclusion. There's a bit too much guesswork for me to accept it.
So, IMHO, all it takes is a few preconcieved notions to get you to pick one theory over another. Which one is right? Beats me. I, like most of society, have the luxury of not needing to know how things started to function. And not just function - an understanding of virtually all science, technology, culture, art, and search for truth is available to me without being sure about that.
The only thing I have to deal with is a very special kind of ignorance. The ignorance of the halfway educated - of those who believe that they have Learned and now Know the Right Answer and can therefore Show Others the Way. Once you really start to getting into how things work, you realise that you Know Very Little and Always Will.
How can you be so sure?
Pot, kettle, black (Score:5, Insightful)
Let people be ignorant. It's not like bringing people of below average intelligence or fundamentalist mindset into the scientific fold is going to make them valuable contributors. It'll just be a new type of ignorance to deal with.
First you call them ignorant (which is true). Then you call them stupid. Then you call them religious fundamentalists. Then back to ignorant. These are all very separate categories, which you would understand if you had the above-average intelligence that you probably believe you possess. Given the large percentage of the population that is being cited, I think it's unlikely they are all below-average in intelligence. I didn't RTFA so I don't know about their religious beliefs. I submit to you that these are probably people of average intelligence who are ignorant. That means that we as scientists are not getting the word out in a manner that most people find compelling. The problem is not with them, it is with us.
Perhaps you should check out the film Flock of Dodos [flockofdodos.com] before you start pointing fingers at who is to blame. (Hint: the dodos are not the intelligent design folks, it's the scientists who are in danger of becoming extinct because they can't communicate simple facts to the mainstream audience.) Elitist attitudes like yours ("hey, if they can't keep up, fuck 'em!") is partially what drives the mainstream to give ID folks a listen.
GMD
Re:The Prostate (Score:5, Funny)