Evolution
Via Kevin Drum, a chart that nicely demonstrates something people often overlook -- lots of people don't believe in evolution. Even in the most evolution-believing country that they have a decent sample for (Denmark) less than 80 percent of the population signs on as real Darwinists. In the United States, it's only about 40 percent.
I'm not sure liberals really grasp this. The tendency is to talk about evolution-skeptics as if they're some lunatic fringe. And certainly it ought to be a lunatic fringe. But when you're talking about such a huge number of people, you're just not dealing with a fringe element and that needs to be faced squarely.
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I remember reading a survey on religion at pollingreport.com that said that 45% of americans believe man was created by god in his present form within the las 10,000 years. I was shocked. Most americans support teaching creationism in school, alongside evolution.
What I keep warning my mid to late 20's friends is that pretty soon we'll be the ones homeschooling our kids, just so they can learn some actual science. I'm only half joking.
http://pollingreport.com/science.htm
August 10, 2006 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Goddamn neanderthals, I was telling g-d just the other day that this planet is still filthy with them.
---- Just say no to 0 ratings. Especially from petey, the ratings abuser.
August 10, 2006 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
What about people like Stephen Jay Gould, who believed in evolution up to the point where it might have something to do with human diversity, and then stop? Or all of those "anti-evolutionary psychology" people who believe in evolution, but who deny that it has anything to do with human behavior?
Or, as I put it,
Whenever someone denigrates evolutionary psychology, what they really mean is "I thought the whole point of evolution was just to deny God. I didn't think it was actually supposed to tell us anything."
"You say I'm a dreamer. We're two of a kind. Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"
August 11, 2006 12:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Think about this: Social evolution is enormously faster than genetic evolution. Assuming that we developed civilization about the time we evolved to be smart enough to maintain one, that implies that we were just barely smart enough to be civilized. And haven't remotely had enough time to get much smarter than that, even assuming (There's evidence to the contrary.) that the evolutionary bias is in that direction.
So this sort of thing is to be expected.
August 11, 2006 3:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Stuff and nonsense. Gould's basic premise, that culture evolves independently from and faster than human biology, and therefore one should not assume evolutionary mechanisms for human behavior without hard evidence, is entirely valid.
As it turns out, there's quite a bit more hard evidence nowadays than there was at the time, and the truth pretty clearly lies somewhere in between Gould's "spandrels" and Wilson's "sociobiology".
While I greatly admire the speculative work with game theory and such, the field of evolutionary psychology remains on the fringes primarily because of the tendency of a few proponents to forget the distinction between hypothesis and theory. Impugning the motives of scientific critics is classless, and it isn't going to get you very far.
August 11, 2006 6:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Having finally seen "An Inconvenient Truth" last night, this is a depressing reminder of how big the challenge will be get Americans to make the necessary changes to their way of life. It'll be like trying to turn a supertanker around in a canal. Over half the country doesn't believe (or doesn't want to believe) in the relatively straight forward evidence behind the theory of evolution and yet we need to convince people and the politicians that supposedly lead them that we need to take drastic action (based on the more complex and less obvious evidence related to global warming) now to head off the likely major negative repurcussions of global warming? We're doomed.
August 11, 2006 6:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't consider "Not Sure" a ludicrous answer here--I mean, I'm "Not Sure" that I don't live in a Matrix-like simulator that was cooked up by aliens to completely conceal the nature of the world from me. The difference between "True" and "Not Sure" is more philosophical than scientific.
Indeed, I have to wonder about places like Denmark in which "Not Sure" is nearly zero. Stranger still are places like Finland and Czech Republic where Not Sure is very low but False almost reaches absurd American levels. Why so binary?
It's the "False" answer that's so incredibly flabbergasting. I mean, geez, what's wrong with people?
The good news is that, though it's ridiculous that 40% of Americans will say Evolution is definitely false, that's still less than a majority. And Intelligent Design teaches that Evolution is definitely false, not just possibly false. That might be why school boards insisting on Intelligent Design seem to get rejected quickly.
August 11, 2006 6:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure what Matt thinks I "overlooked" or whether his statement is true about some other "liberals." I have never suggested that creationists are a "lunatic fringe." They're just ignorant and wrong about an area of science. That's not insane, but par for the course. Many people believe wrong things about science or are just entirely ignorant of it.
For instance, I always have to scratch my head a little to remember how to do a Fast Fourier Transform, though it's one of the most elegant numerical algorithms and shows up in many applications. Most people haven't been exposed to it at all, and if they have been exposed, for instance, to the method of multiplying polynomials in high school, some of them might literally disbelieve me if I asserted that FFTs could be used to do the same operation much faster, and unless they were patient enough to follow my explanation, they would continue to disbelieve me. It's really not obvious (note: critical thinking is not just kneejerk contrarianism but sometimes a willingness to hear out a difficult argument with an open mind). Many would accept an assertion backed by an authoritative reference, so I could just break out my old algorithms textbook. If even that wasn't enough, it would be a little quirky, but I would not call them lunatics just wrong and willfully ignorant.
If 20% of Danes are willfully ignorant about evolution, that's not so surprising. Fortunately, there are still 80% who accept it, though I am not optimistic enough to think that they all accept it for good reasons. I would be happy if the percentage in the US was even close.
People with severe mental disorders make up far less than 20% of the population, so I agree with Matt that we're not talking about a lunatic fringe. In the US, we're not even talking about a fringe, but sadly, a mainstream belief that just happens to be entirely wrong, and which has a lot of financial backing to pollute our public education with that wrong belief.
If creationists were a lunatic fringe (like those people who thought they would be taken away by the Hale-Bopp comet for instance) then there would be nothing to worry about. What makes the trend worrisome is that this is a flawed normative belief that is poised to hurt scientific progress.
August 11, 2006 7:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
It would be interesting to get more detailed opinions about the meaning of the various fossil anthropoids-- do people think, for example, that they are fake? Or, maybe, that there is some irreducible gap between the fossil anthropoids and humans that can't be bridged by evolution alone?
August 11, 2006 8:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
The lunatic fringe is quite a wide fringe, but that just means that there's lots of ignorant hysterical bitches in this world of ours. They're still lunatics.
August 11, 2006 9:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think even people who know about evolution are supposed to identify as "Darwinists." IIRC that's one of those ID slur terms meant to imply that understanding anything about biology is equivalent to membership in a cult.
August 11, 2006 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The underlying problem is most likely that too many people (both here and abroad) don't know enough about evolution to say whether they believe in it or not. And at least in the US "evolution" is shorthand for too many people for "God doesn't exist" so they reject it out of hand without knowing what they are talking about. (And religious skpetics who recruit Darwin's theory into serving their own philosophical project do not help the matter either.)
August 13, 2006 12:57 PM | Reply | Permalink