Healthy Skepticism or Woeful Ignorance?
I've seen it reported in a few places recently that among a fair list of developed nations the US ranks next to the bottom in terms of accepting evolution. Of 32 nations surveyed only Turkey is less willing to accept evolution as fact.
I was going to pass this by, but after Crypt Leak sent me the link I gave it a second thought and decided this was worth noting even if just as a cultural snapshot.
The article notes most of the important elements, from the politicization of the topic to an important note that the percentage of adults in the U.S. flatly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 percent over the past 20 years -- that much is a good sign.
Religious fundamentalists - believing in a world created roughly some 6,000 years ago - are unlikely to be reached with facts. They've locked onto a set of beliefs and all we can do is make information to the contrary available to them.
Effective education and presentation of what's known, however, should help prevent more people from falling down the path so many are being led, where politicians and pundits play on their emotions with variations on "well, I'm just a simple, country boy, but it seems to me..." approaches that allow them to endear themselves people who don't want to be reminded of yet another area of ignorance in their lives. Having a soothing, seemingly sophisticated person come along and smooth ruffled feathers by lifting quotes from Darwin as if he wrote a definitive, A t Z on evolution rather than what it was - an excellent starting point - allows them to dismiss it. In that respect it's also something of a fundamentalist approach -- they want to find a single book and treat it as if it is being presented as The Truth, so that if they can find anything that's turned out to be incorrect they can decry it as a false in one sweep.
What's amusing about that approach is seen when one considers their reaction to anyone looking at the Bible that same way - picking it apart by lifting conflicting messages within the text and setting them against each other. A fundamentalist either has to accept that Morality has changed somewhat between the Old Testament and the New - or at least that God changed tactics, apparently learning, which would at best appear to deny that Supreme Being label and at worst label him as suffering from some personality disorder.
I've found it's important to remember that as a practical, everyday matter evolution itself - belief or not in it - is of no consequence.
The time-scales involved are not on anything approaching a human scale, and what daily decisions are going to be made one way or the other based on whether one accepts evolution, thinks God created the world 6000 years ago or for that matter that we're an ongoing genetics experiment conducted by an alien race? It might lead someone to see the commonality of life on Earth, especially as one narrows the view to mammals, for instance, which might lead someone towards vegetarianism, but in general it's not a practical concern.
However, the public education system in the U.S. has failed the population in some key respects, leading some to get away with continuing to deny facts such as the high gene correlation between chimpanzees and humans (as noted in the final paragraph of the article) and the increasingly complete fossil record of biological changes within a given species over time.
That much, at least, is certainly an educational goal to shoot for.
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