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.
