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

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: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.