Fiction Over Fact
I'm currently reading Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond & James Moore. Having recently read two outstanding books by David Quammen (The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, and Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind), I was much interested in November's cover article in National Geographic Magazine by David Quammen, titled Was Darwin Wrong. It is a good read and a fine introduction to understanding Darwin's contribution to science, but this little tidbit is what really caught my eye:
According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.Only 37 percent of the polled Americans were satisfied with allowing room for both God and Darwin – that is, divine initiative to get things started, evolution as the creative means. (This view, according to more than one papal pronouncement, is compatible with the Roman Catholic dogma.) Still fewer Americans, only 12 percent, believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.
The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades. Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999. The creationist conviction – that God alone, and not evolution, produced humans – has never drawn less than 44 percent. In other words, nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.
Darwin, by the way, was right.
4 Comments:
I'm not too wont, as a rule, to give my fellow bipeds the benefit of the doubt. But I'd be interested to know the makeup of the surveys-- number of people polled, diversity breakdown, etc. Gallup is for shit, in general--and poll samplings are often of, like 500 people in the state of Virgnia. or 2 people from every US state. Not really a fair sampling.
Much like I want to believe that Social Security will still be around when I'm one of the infirm, I also I guess still want to believe that we are not, as a species, this fucking stupid.
Did you know that in South Carolina, I believe, or it may have been North, there are grade schools that have stamped in their Science text books (the ones featuring anything having to do with Darwin) "This book is opinion and not based on fact"
The school district that began said stamping is currently in the Supreme Court of that state fighting to keep on stamping.
How about them apples? Maybe they did the questioning there... that would explain A LOT!
Poor Darwin. Have these people not read Inherit The Wind? Ah, the Scopes Monkey Trail days. Bringing back glory to the south!
Temple, you may not want to believe it...but you've got evidence to the contary to contemplate for the next four years. Resistance to Darwin's work runs deep; it influences people's views on abortion, homosexuality, environmentalism and a whole host of "liberal" causes. Personally, I believe that the truth will win out. The pertinent question is, "will it be too late?". Years upon years have (apparently) had little effect on a large swath of Americans. What WILL have an effect? That's a good - and difficult - question. Darwin asked (and answered), "why do men have nipples?"...another good and important question - which is still being heatedly debated in countless college bull sessions. We've got our work cut our for us, and it depends on our being more pursuasive than Darwin. A very tall order indeed.
More and more I'm realizing that this country is nothing like I thought. This comes from sharing the majority of my time with informed folk. I guess Heinlien was right: Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-stiggy.
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