I read the title of this article from National Geographic News and I thought to myself, fuck me, Evolution Less Accepted in U.S. Than Other Western Countries, Study Finds. I knew that there are a lot of boneheads from coast to coast, but I didn’t think they outnumbered the people who actually learned some stuff in school. The article in NGN is a summary of a larger article from today’s edition of Science. Adults [and judging by this study, I use the term here in America very loosely] were asked to respond to the following statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.”
In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.
In European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, and France, more than 80 percent of adults surveyed said they accepted the concept of evolution.
The proportion of western European adults who believed the theory “absolutely false” ranged from 7 percent in Great Britain to 15 percent in the Netherlands.
Fuck me. Fourteen percent?!
Below the fold is a chart from the article as well as some more frothing at the mouth.
Chart: Jon Miller, et al./Science
As you can see, the adults of the United States of America, home to some of the finest institutes of higher learning in the world, rank 33rd out of 34 with only Turkey finishing behind them. Catholic strongholds like Italy, Ireland and Poland were all around 60% or higher in believing that we Homo sapiens did evolve over the course of several millennia. But why are those traditionally religiously conservative areas so open to the theory of evolution? Well, it seems like it’s a matter of politics.
The article provided this little nugget of information:
The investigation also showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years.
Why that coincides with the rise of the neo-Con[vict] right wing of the Republican party here in the U.S. of A. What a coincidence. And the people behind the study tested whether or not one’s political views here in America influenced one’s view on Darwinism. In short, YES.
The team found that individuals with anti-abortion, pro-life views associated with the conservative wing of the Republican Party were significantly more likely to reject evolution than people with pro-choice views.
The team adds that in Europe having pro-life or right-wing political views had little correlation with a person’s attitude toward evolution.
The researchers say this reflects the politicization of the evolution issue in the U.S. “in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan.”
“In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in Southern and Midwestern states,” the study authors write.
Miller says that when Ronald Reagan was running for President of the U.S., for example, he gave speeches in these states where he would slip in the sentence, “I have no chimpanzees in my family,” poking fun at the idea that apes could be the ancestors of humans.
When such a view comes from the U.S. President or other prominent political figures, Miller says, it “lends a degree of legitimacy to the dispute.”
So the people are listening and it’s coming from the top down according to this study. The neo-Con[victs] have done an incredible job in the last two decades or so and we have a shitload of catching up to do in educating the public on what the rest of the God-fearing world believes.
We’ve got a president that looks like a chimp and acts like a parrot. Don’t these people have eyes? I know they have ears because they’re hearing all this bullshit and soaking it up like a sponge.
The National Geographic News article gives a wonderful summary, but this may be one to go to the newsstand and pickup it up for the full study.
And one last thing for clarification – the chart says that ~40% of adults in the U.S. believe in evolution while the article I quoted from noted the 14% “definitely true” statement – the chart takes into account the “definitely true” and “probably true” to come to that number and the “probably false” and “definitely false” for the other side.
So US citizens are stupid and ignorant! We’re doomed! Really. Better start learning Chinese…
Or better yet, Madnarin or Cantonese 😉
well done.
Try living in Nebraska. I don’t need a national publication to tell me that the majority of uh-MER-cuns iz stooopid.
(Even Kansas is finally coming around…they booted the creationist members from their state school board that were up for re-election. Though, that pendulum usually swings very quickly in the crazy state.)
I’m constantly taking into account that I’ve only lived in the NYC suburbs, DC and now Philly and that I live in especially liberal areas. I’m constantly telling myself, it’s not like it is here everywhere else. But even so, I thought that this number was shockingly low.
When politics and religion marry, their offspring is bound to have the qualities of an “antichrist.”
Where are all those strict constructionalists heeding the idea of the separation of church and state? I guess we divorced ourselves from that in 1776?
ugh. thus confirming once again how fucking stupid people in this country are.
Liberal: ‘We have work to do to fix this problem!’
Elitist: Americans are so f–in’ stoopid!!
I’ll take a little from column A and a little from column B.
Waking up with coffee in the morning, since 9/11 I always flip on the television to see who’s blowing who up. Without cable my TV choices are limited to two local broadcast news stations — the other non-PBS channels have preachers every morning. The other morning I was astonished to see of the preacher stations was showing a slickly produced “documentary” with a parade of “experts” denouncing evolution as a fake science infiltrating our schools, leading to childhood agression, drug-taking and general societal breakdown. And this is in commie central, San Francisco. This shit is everywhere.
WhooooHoooooo!
We beat Turkey!
USA! USA! USA!
I am visualizing Homer Simpson dancing around with his shirt off eating from his nacho hat screaming this while pumping his fists.
Egg-zactly.
We’re # 33!
Two things:
First, if asked whether evolution were “definitely true”, I, too, would have a hard time answering “yes”. I’ve seen too much established scientific dogma go swirling down the drain to call any theory, no matter how much I believe it, carved in stone as it stands. So not all who neglected to get aboard the “definitely” were necessarily non-thinkers — they were responding in kind to tragically incompetent question construction.
That nitpick aside, I wouldn’t be so disturbed by the evolution deniers if they had a coherent view in opposition. But they don’t. They have vague babbling of religious quacks, the kind of half-formed phrases one hears in a drunk bar. They know nothing of the sect they supposedly defend, nothing of what their Bible says except for a few worn cliches, and are not in the least concerned that their statements make no sense even strictly in the context of the worldview they think they’re defending. There is nothing in their “faith” to bring curiousity or wonder or moments of joy beyond their own cramped ideological boxes. Which, I think, is why the religious mythologies that produce this state are so tied to obsessive hate for the Other.
It seems that in America the myths of Christianity and the myths of the frontier, the cowboy, and the “self-made” billionaire hustler have combined to form a toxic and brain-destroying cultural wasteland. The ferment of dialog that the founders envisioned never had a chance where ignorance is prized and even the “left intellectuals” fall all over themselves dissing “elitism”. Our country was born as a new chance for a society held together by the common denominator of reason and empiricism. The worm of “faith” was working from the beginning to destroy that dream. It is no accident that the percentage of scientific ignorance tracks so closely with religiousity.
as I’m in the middle of an H.L. Menken bio at the Scopes Trial chapter.
It appears we have made little progress on this issue since 1925:-(
I agree that how the question is asked is important to the answer you obtain in this case.
It is important to educate the public that evolution is about as true a fact as 2*2=4. However, what the ID people rely on for their argument, is the fact that there are probably no scientists who would say that they understand completely, in every detail, the mechanisms and details of the evolutionary process. If they didn’t doubt their knowledge of those facts, they would not be scientists at all. All scientists come from Missouri (only kidding!) and their most important rule of thumb is “Show me!”
So with the US at the bottom of the ladder with regard to this most crucial question, the rest of the world will continue to increase their technological capabilities, and create new medicines and therapies (e.g. stem cells) while we languish, and become less competitive in these fields.
I personally know two Ph.D. level scientists who have moved overseas so that they could pursue the work on stem cells that most moved their scientific curiosity.
scientific brain drain as a result of politics and not necessarily better money. wonderful.
Except for a few outliers, the ranking on this list is rather similar to rankings for things like low crime rates, longevity, availability of health care and other public services, etc. It seems that people who don’t depend on religion do a better job of taking care of each other than those who leave everything up to god.
A PhD student friend of mine, conveniently in the sciences, got a .pdf copy of the report to me yesterday evening. It ends with this: