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New Study Shows One-Third of Americans Don't Believe In Evolution
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that thirty-three percent of Americans reject the idea of evolution and believe that 'humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time' rather than evolving gradually through a process of natural selection, as described by Charles Darwin more than 150 years ago. Although this percentage remained steady since 2009, the last time Pew asked the question, there was a growing partisan gap on whether humans evolved. The poll showed 43 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats say humans have evolved over time, compared with 54 percent and 64 percent respectively four years ago. 'The gap is coming from the Republicans, where fewer are now saying that humans have evolved over time,' says Cary Funk. Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants topped the list of those rejecting evolution, with 64 percent of those polled saying they believe humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."
There is a statistically significant difference between Republicans and Democrats on this issue. That's just the reality of it.
Many people reject science and education in general. Make no mistake about that.
I had the misfortune of attending school with such trash (until rescued by boarding school), and rejecting science was the least of their problems. Such folk are why schools are Hellmouths. They are stupid, base and want to stay that way.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
God is the intelligent universe itself.
Depends on your definition of god.
Any sufficiently complex system is, by definition, intelligent.
Trivially false.
Congratulations, you're 0/2.
So you say.
And that statement about "sufficiently complex" is an axiom of AI.
Trivially true.
There is no such axiom in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Is math not your forte? Here's one simple example:
270 people were asked.
100 of them identified as Democrats.
100 of them identified as Republicans.
70 of them identified as Green, Libertarian, Independent or some other affiliation.
33% of Democrats plus 57% of Republicans would be 90 people. That's one third of 270.
The theory of relativity, the theory of evolution, the theory of causality, and theory of capitalism, all UNPROVEN, and at this time UNPROVABLE.
Scientific theories aren't proven, they are confirmed through amassing sufficient supporting evidence. Mathematical conjectures are proven and provable. But there will exist no time in which the theory of relativity is "proven" except colloquially, because Science doesn't prove theories.
General Relativity makes predictions, and those predictions have been demonstrated to be true to the best extent we can measure. That means General Relativity is "true" to a Scientific certainty. One day GR might be superceded just as GR superceded Newtonian gravity, but Einstein did not prove Newton wrong. Newton was basically right: objects continued to obey Newtonian gravity after Einstein published his work on General Relativity to the best extent Newton himself could have ever confirmed. Einstein demonstrated that Newton was approximately right, but not quite right in all cases, and Relativity is much more accurate. But we still teach Newtonian physics, because 400 years later its still basically right.
Speaking about evolution specifically, the theory of natural selection states that all species arise through natural variations in generations that reward certain traits which are passed on to future generations, eventually causing different populations to distinguish themselves in ways we refer to as different species. The actual *mechanisms* of evolution are not in question: they aren't theoretical because they've been observed to function on smaller time scales and in certain situations. All of human agriculture and animal domestication demonstrates the mechanisms in action over tens, hundreds, and thousands of years, for example. That evolution is happening is not in legitimate dispute. The only legitimate dispute is whether it can account for all speciation. Believing evolution did not create all species is denying the overwhelming Scientific evidence, but denying evolution itself isn't happening at all is denying direct observational facts.
But today, we can't easily determine if all those specimen formed a single, continious procreation community, or if they were actually separated by time and place. There is just not enough of the fossil record right now to give a definite answer, we just have some hypotheses, that make more sense to us than others. But we are looking at a single genus (Homo) with several species and subspecies, which are very closely related. And we are looking at a time frame of 2.5 to 6 mio years (not 60,000 as you stated).
Dinosaurs are a very different kind of beast -- in the literal sense of the word. First, dinosaurs are not just a species or a genus, they cover two orders (Ornithischia and Saurischia), which would be comparable to analyzing the orders Primates and Dermoptera (colugos, batlike mammals from Southeast Asia), which are closely related and part of the superorder Euarchontoglires. The last common ancestor of the colugos and Homo sapiens lived about 80 mio years ago, which means that the evolution of the Homo sapiens from a comparably encompassing group than the dinosaurs took 80 mio years until today.
And then the time frame from the last known common ancestor of crocodiles and dinosaurs to the dinosaurs as we know them today took much less than 100 mio years. The Crurotarsi (modern crocodiles and their ancestors and related, but extinct groups) split about 270 mio years ago from the Ornithodira (pterosaurs, dinosaurs and today's birds), and the first dinosaurs appeared about 245 mio years ago (Prorotodactylus).
IQ tests are really good for figuring out how good someone is at doing IQ tests
The main evidence I have against evolution, in favor of some sort of creation, is speciation. I observe that within a species, there is a continuous spectra of traits within that species - I am sure I can find every gradient of dog somewhere between a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua if I had to. However I do not find any gradient part dog, part cat. Same within the plant species. I hold that if evolution were true, I would expect to find gradients across the entire living ecosystem, yet that's not what I see.
There is a great deal of popular science writing on the topic of evolution that explains why your expectation is not practical, and why it is actually fulfilled to the extent that it is practical (look up "ring species" on Wikipedia for one example). Seriously, before claiming to form a rational opinion, why not spend at least a few hours reading up on what the mainstream scientific consensus on evolution actually is?