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."

Comments

What's with Slashdot and Evolution anyway?

[Kunta Kinte]

And according to this study 64% 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.

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

[billmaly]

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.

Re:The Perceived Threat of Science

[s20451]

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:Note that is hopefully obvious...

[tbone1]

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:The Perceived Threat of Science

[LordKazan]

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

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

Re:Note that is hopefully obvious...

[btlzu2]

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:The Perceived Threat of Science

[hackstraw]

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

[tsm_sf]

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

[Ath]

Your counter-examples and explanations are without merit. You seem to confuse genetic changes across a species with individual changes within a single living organism that have environmental causes. While the theory of evolution postulates that changes within single organisms can actually determine whether that individual organism survives and manages to breed, thereby likely passing on any genetic disposition towards a certain trait and eventually into the species as a whole, I have never heard it used to explain every single anomaly in an organism.

In regards to your point about whether religion determines someone's disposition to believe in evolution versus some other scientific theory (of which so-called Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory because it cannot be tested and verified - it is, by its very nature, non-verifiable), the mainstream religions all provide a literal explanation that says a supreme being created humans. It is a fundamental premise that is at odds with a scientific explanation of how humans came into being. There are, to be sure, plenty of people who have resolved this conflict by taking a less than literal approach to their own religious teachings. So to believe in evolution, it was their religious beliefs that had to be altered - not the other way around. Religion is pretty much self-admittedly not based on logic and rationality - it is based on faith. The two are largely irreconcilable on a logical basis unless one of them is adapted.