Only Turkey lower than USA in accepting evolution
In a study in Science, Jon Miller, Eugenie Scott and Shinji Okamoto present the scary statistic that the acceptance of evolution is lower in the USA than in 31 European countries and Japan. Only in Turkey is evolution less accepted than in the USA. 80% of adults in Denmark, Sweden and France, 78% in Japan and 76% in the UK and 70% in Germany accept evolution as true, compared with 40% in the USA.
The study investigates multiple variables that contribute to this. They conclude that the reason for the low acceptance of evolution in the USA is because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States. They conclude:
The politicization of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy. The broad publicacceptance of the benefits of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century allowed science to develop a nonpartisan identification that largely protected it from overt partisanship. That era appears to have closed.This makes depressing reading for anyone who understands how much confidence we have in the fact of evolution. Those of us who care about protecting science from political or religious meddling have a fight on our hands.
4 Comments:
How much confidence "we" have? Who, exactly, is "we"? As far as I can ascertain, your blog is written by one person alone: correct would be "how much confidence I have".
"Those of us who care about protecting science from political or religious meddling have a fight on our hands."
As if "science" were in danger of being abolished by the evil forces of "political or religious meddlers"! A more ridiculous and patently false claim could hardly be made. Anyone who believes that there is a political initiative to "eliminate science" or that religious people are threatening to demoish biology laboratories is suffering from severe delusions.
As far as having "a fight on our hands" is concerned, this seems to be a call to arms. We request only one thing: that pure-hearted and vigilant scientists worldwide, united in their noble quest to defeat the forces of religion and politics, will vow to never again write any text whatsover and will abstain from making any statements in the English language; as such sloppy language and poor ideas constitute a violent and blasphemous assault on our ideals held most high.
Furthermore, it makes absolutely no difference to the practical functioning of society if 100% of Americans believe this or that about evolution; as what one believes or does not believe has no bearing on the process of evolution itself. "Evolution" is indifferent to your worshipful heralding of its all-important truthfulness.
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Leaving aside your hysterical rhetoric, if you don't see that science has been under attack from the religious and political right, from Kansas to Dover, and from Bush to Schoenborn then you have been living in a different universe from the rest of us.
As for this:
Furthermore, it makes absolutely no difference to the practical functioning of society if 100% of Americans believe this or that about evolution
well, a more blatant example of contempt for the truth and of fallacious reasoning would be difficult to find. To follow your reasoning, Newtonian mechanics, atomic and nuclear theory, electomagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry and so on are all indifferent to whether we understand them or not and the practical functioning of society is unaffected by our understanding of them in particular and the natural world in general, since 'what one believes or does not believe has no bearing on' Newtonian mechanics, atomic and nuclear theory, electomagnetic theory, quantum mechanics, genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry and so on. Now that is truly and monumentally sloppy reasoning.
Alec
"Those of us who care about protecting science from political or religious meddling have a fight on our hands"
Pray tell, how do you plan on battling an Internet that has become a quagmire of hell bent evangelicals and apologetic twits thinking their on the road to sainthood?
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