Slashdot Mirror
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."
The average IQ is 100, after all...
yes - a third of the american population don't have a basic science education
33% of monkeys don't believe in it, either.
Republicans are such a perverted facsimile of what used to be a very reasonable party. If 6 years of Obama has taught us anything, it's that the empty can gets the grease. USA Politics desperately needs the GOP to fork into two factions - there are enough independents currently voting "D" to jump over to make a center-right candidate feasible. Center-right by US Standards, that is.
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."
And I forgot to inculded the link:
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21591190-united-states-amoeba
There is a big difference between what someone believes and what someone says they believe. The main cause is needing to belong. Someone may say they believe something to fit into the mold they want even though they actually believe something quite different.
Actually, I thought it would be higher than that, somewhere around 50% don't believe in evolution.
Although honestly I find the wording somewhat awkward, if someone asked me if I believed in evolution I would probably glare at them. Believe? I certainly find the evidence supporting that theory convincing, but what does it have to do with belief?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Read the article... and the big change is 10% fewer people "believe in evolution" than (expressed) belief in evolution in 2007. Did 10% of Americans REALLY change their views in 5 years?
I think the survey measures something else. Something even more disturbing, perhaps - the growing willingness to express falsehood as a demonstration of political purity. The last Republican primary showed even very educated Republicans willing to state opinions they didn't really hold (and I doubt Democrats are much different in that regard). It's expressed in immigration law reform, in budget reform, climate change... It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong, you show your value as a teammate by expressing the teams' view loudly and forcefully. Did 10% of American change their views about evolution? No. They just taking cues from people who think "denial" is a "philosophy"?
Gently reply
yes - a third of the american population don't have a basic science education
If it was only about education. Unfortunately it isn't about the extreme religious types being ignorant. They know about evolution, the debates have been made, the evidence has been brought fourth and the facts presented time and time again. But it is not the answer they want.
I have on two separate occasions debated with close relatives about religion and evolution and after coaxing the same answer from them both it is clear that they and other like minds embrace a delusion. They wanted answers to two questions that they absolutely felt must have answers. Questions about where we go when we die and why we were put on Earth in the first place. Not only did they need, and I mean absolutely need these answers, but they had to be good; like their is a heaven, and life has a divine purpose and a plan and its all sunshine and butterflies. They wouldn't even allow the conception that other possibilities could exist because that would shake the sanctity of the delusion that they embraced. To them if their was not heaven or divine purpose and god didn't lay everything out in this nice little plan for us then their was no meaning or purpose and what's the point. ....And this was not something I came to the conclusion by analyzing what was said to me from those arguments with family members. Those were literal statements, not the exact wording, but the idea was the same. So they willingly embrace a delusion and want, and I do mean want, to kill any facts, evidence or arguments that challenge their worldview. They would rather embrace a fantasy and believe they can make it real by closing their eyes and clicking their heels.
A lot of people are not democrats neither republican. Stop thinking in binary terms.
That's okay. Personally, I don't believe in Republicans. Indeed, I'm pretty confident at this stage in my life that "Republicans" and "Americans" were things my Dad invented for bedtime stories when I was young to scare the crap out of me and keep me on the straight and narrow.
Yaz
Visit the Andes and the Himalayas. The people who live there have different genes from low-landers *and* from each other, that make them better adapted to high altitudes. Unless you want to postulate that God is a trickster who wants to fool us into thinking evolution is happening, it's hard to explain how different adaptions to the same problem have happened. Not being able to breathe is such a strong selection factor, that these changes have happened over just a few thousand years. It's the fastest known evolutionary change in humans.
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.
Yeah, it's at those times I sort of start to get Cypher from the first (or, for many, the *only*?) Matrix movie. Some people just *want* to live in the Matrix, even if it's just an illusion.
Don't get me wrong, we all do it. Concepts like fairness and justice are entirely made up -- we willingly buy into them, much like currency or economics. To paraphrase Pratchett's Death in Hogfather, you won't find a single atom of justice in the entire Universe and yet we believe in it, or that it should exist somehow. The difference here is that with some of those delusions, it actually makes us better (on the whole) or at least tries to nudge us in the right direction.
Religion used to be like that (with many notable exceptions, of course). Lately it seems we're getting two camps: those that hold onto their beliefs while making allowances for what we slowly learn from the Universe around us; and those that hold onto their beliefs so tightly that they *refuse* to make allowances for anything that might jeopardize their carefully constructed world view.
It's a losing war. Sadly, it's an artifact of most religions that they're based on very old notions and precepts put in place at a time where average knowledge beyond the practical and empirical (and even there...) was virtually zero, so when you truly believe that *everything* written down in a book largely authored thousands of years go is sacred and True, it becomes very difficult to reconcile that with modern life.
Honestly, I think this is the larger issue here -- cognitive dissonance. And the fact that we're constantly reaching new highs as to the level of cognitive dissonance the human species can achieve. Watching the way some pundits talk sometimes, I fully expect one of these days we'll see one of them literally blowing their heads out on national TV -- I mean, there *has* to be a limit on the amount of cognitive dissonance you can force on your brain, right?
About a quarter claim to believe in evolution, but say it is divinely controlled. The whole point of the theory of evolution is that speciation and adaptation result from natural selection rather than design. So "divinely controlled evolution" is really a longer way of saying "creationism".
Many people reject science and education in general.
That is a tough spill to swallow for a lot of people who blame schools for everything. There are kids in school who just don't want to learn. No amount of shiny iPads or newfangled courses will change that. Ask some college kids why they are studying there, and most will answer:
I need to get a college degree to get a job.
. . . not many will say:
I'm here to learn.
This even goes right up to the top of the heap. I've heard premed students complain:
I hate organic chemistry . . . but I need a good grade in it to get into medical school
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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).
Where exactly do you live? Not all schools in the US are created equal. I live in Massachusetts and our schools are rated some of the best in the world. Granted the rest of the country uses pejoratives like "Taxachusetts", commie liberals, the list goes on.. They laugh about how much money we spend on our schools, universal health care, etc. However they usually stop laughing when they notice that we have one of the lowest rates of unemployment and one of the highest levels of education in the country. At last check eighty six percent of adults in Massachusetts have a bachelors. Massachusetts is one of the innovation centers of the world.
Please don't judge the entire US merely on the poor experience in your state.
As to your second point... yes, churches are dangerously powerful. I feel in the last election many states crossed the line and participated directly in fundraising and coordination efforts.
I disagree with your assertion that the US system is broken compared to most 3rd world countries. Just like there are lots of variations in the wealth of 3rd world countries, their educational systems vary greatly as well. We could have a lengthy conversation just on the many different education systems in Africa, some pubic, some for profit, some that are good and some that are horrifyingly mindbogglingly bad.
As to your last point, yes there are many people in this country who think that their ignorance is a sign of reverence. They've come to a place of cognitive dissidence in regards to the world. Their lack of education, combined with their incomplete and poorly contrived belief system has backed them into a corner.
I'm proud to say I work every day to make that corner smaller and increasingly uncomfortable.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Even people that claim to be "educated" fail at science.
Last I checked, "Science" and "The Scientific Method" had numerous requirements. If you wish to claim that humans evolved from other primates, or dogs evolved from another species, or cats from another, we lack proof. This is why "Evolution" is called a "Theory".
Actually, no. An idea without proof is a "hypothesis." When you get evidence that confirms the hypothesis, it becomes a theory. No matter how much evidence piles up, it never graduates to anything else in practice. A scientific theory is only upheld if it is a way of explaining a set of observations. the more observations a theory fits or "explains", the more powerful and well supported the theory is. In this case, the facts are that people keep digging up fossils out of the ground. They can date those fossils by using many dating techniques, and can determine that they are very old. that the younger fossils show up higher in the strata than the older ones. When they put some of the fossils together to get a good idea of the animals they came from, it seems the animals are different at different times (the remains and fossils you find at different depths are from different kinds of animals.) There are for examples, many identified versions of dog-like animals, that aren't exactly dogs in the fossil record ( http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/otherprehistoriclife/a/Prehistoric-Dogs-The-Story-Of-Dog-Evolution.htm ), cats that aren't exactly cats ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Fossil_felids ) and yes different types of monkeys/gorillas/humans that aren't exactly like the ones we see walking about today ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fossil_primates. ) These different types of animals show up in the same place at different times, based on their depth in the fossil record.
There is also that in many parts of the world there are species that are similar to, but different from other species which are in neighbouring areas but separated by barriers such as mountains or large bodies of water. Classic example here is the Galapagos Finches. They don't look like finches from the mainland, they are all different on each island, with the differences suiting type of food available. There is also the fact that humans have been able to make dog breeds over relatively short periods of time, selective breeding clearly can alter skeletal characteristics.
There is also the strange poverty of designs in large animals. They have the same types of skeletons, same number of appendages and limbs, and innumerable common features that lead to groupings of animals into hierarchies of similarity. Once genetics were discovered, these hierarchies of similarity were found to be reflected in the degree of similarity of species genomic variation. Humans have genes that are 98% identical to those of chimpanzees, but only 50% identical to those of bananas.
but we can go beyond fossils, taxonomies, and genetics into innumerable examples from the living world that make perfect sense through an evolutionary lens. take a look at this: ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22848088 ) where it shows how there are hundreds of different species of fig, and each one or two has a corresponding single species of wasp that pollinates it. Or the fact that our eye design (same design used in all animals with a backbone) is "backwards" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye#Evolutionary_baggage ) in that nerve fibres pass in front of the retina and all go to the centre whe
Although honestly I find the wording somewhat awkward, if someone asked me if I believed in evolution I would probably glare at them. Believe? I certainly find the evidence supporting that theory convincing, but what does it have to do with belief?
I see this particular stupidity come up whenever evolution is discussed. It needs to stop. If you find the evidence convincing -- and you are convinced -- then by definition you believe in evolution. The role of evidence is to provide good grounds for belief. There's no sense in denying that evidence has nothing to do with belief, because to do so would require that there is some "knowledge fairy" that somehow drops the knowledge in your head, bypassing belief, when the evidence in sufficiently strong.
If you are rational, the role of evidence should be to shift your beliefs. Weak evidence should shift it weakly; strong evidence should shift it more strongly. The problem with creationists is not that they believe in creationism, but rather that evidence does not shift their beliefs at all. That's why they are irrational. Rationality is not about what you believe but in your beliefs' response to evidence.
Stop claiming that scientific evidence has nothing to do with belief. It makes you look almost as dumb and unsophisticated as creationists.