U.S. less likely to accept evolution
May 3, 2007
National Geographic News has an article running that claims that the U.S. is less likely to accept evolution than other Western countries for a mix of reasons: religion, politics, and public understanding of biology. In fact, we came in second to last with only Turket coming in behind us.
The story is loaded with interesting stats… most of which boggle my mind. For instance, the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years. It’s RISEN!?!?!? Yup! “…the researchers found that the effect of fundamentalist religious belief on opinions of evolution was almost twice as much in the U.S. as in Europe.” Ya that sounds about right… I’ve been grumbling a while about how as a country we complain about fundamentalist Muslims, all the while we’re becoming more and more fundamentalist Christians. It’s clear this is part of the Republican platform. I think Bush used religion and his “morals” extraordinarily well in the last campaign. What I didn’t know is this started all the way back with Reagan when he’d slip statements like “I have no chimpanzees in my family,” poking fun at the idea that apes could be the ancestors of humans when giving speeches in the Southern and Midwestern states.
More mind boggling is that the researchers cite a 2005 study “finding that 78 percent of adults agreed that plants and animals had evolved from other organisms. In the same study, 62 percent also believed that God created humans without any evolutionary development.” I dunno about you, but something doesn’t jive there. No suprise that less than HALF of American adults can provide a basic definition of DNA.
One arguement that I continuously hear is that evolution is only a “theory”.
Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty–above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.” No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution–or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter–they are not expressing reservations about its truth. In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.’” If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find that “A theory in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena.”
Another arguement is that we’ve never seen complete evidence of evolution. This just isn’t true. There are many famous fossils that show evolution from dinosours to birds, evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus, and whales that once had legs and walked on land. Perhaps 20 or more hominids (not all of them our ancestors) fill the gap between Lucy the australopithecine and modern humans. Yet pure creationists will argue that since we don’t have EVERY iteration it cannot be proven. That’s a bit like saying you can’t look at a Model T and a Ford Mustang and conclude that one was born of the concept of the other.
If you’re interested in reading about the top 15 answers to Creationism check out Scientific American’s excellent article.
Perhaps most suprising to me is that evolution and creationism cannot live happily with one another. I can understand from a scientific point of view that some would dismiss the notion of a higher power; lack of scientific evidence. But what I don’t get is why those of strong religious background can flat out dismiss science (maybe it’s the devil tricking us?), or why modern science cannot jive with their religious beliefs. Who’s to say how long 1 god day is? Is EVERYTHING supposed to be taken literally in the bible?
