Believers in human evolution, statistics
A 2005 survey of people in the US and European countries found that people in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan and England have the largest number of believers of human evolution from animals.
By contrast, Turkey and the US have the smallest number of believers.
See the chart here.
The report titled Public Acceptance of Evolution was written by Jon D. Miller, Eugenie C. Scott, and Shinji Okamoto.
They attributed the low acceptance of evolution in the US to widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.
Apparently many Americans have not read articles such as the 2002 Scientific American's 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense and the more recent National Academy of Sciences' booklet: Science, Evolution, and Creationism.
It would be interesting the see similar statistics for other countries such as Russia, India, China, and the Middle East.
4 komentar:
I'm suspicious of all those people believing that, say, cats have evolved from bacteria. Their imagination and knowledge must vastly surpass mine.
Obviously, the biblical account of creation is balony. Limited instances of evolution are entirely believable. In my belief map there are some pretty big blank areas and I suspect this should be so for a lot of those enlightened-sounding Europeans.
Bernard Shaw has remarked that it used to be that sickness was believed to be caused by seven worms eating away at your intestines; that nowadays it is believed by the public to be caused by a million bacteria. Shaw said he could only conclude that nowadays Million is a more fashionable number than Seven and that there is no change in credulity.
Maarten, thanks for your recent comments. They are all very inspiring and thought provoking.
On evolution:
Bacteria and cats are end nodes in the tree of evolution. Evolution does not claim one end-node is evolved from another end-node (e.g. Humans from chimps), but rather whenever you take two end nodes, there is common ancestry. The discovery of Tiktaalik (see the NAS booklet) is therefore very important, as it is most likely a ancestor of amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. Similar discoveries can be expected in the future. Evolution is gradual, you don't need extreme imagination unless you are trying to morph one arbitrary animal to another. Looking at the DNA records, you can define their similarity distances of the strings which give an idea of the evolution tree.
Indeed, someone said, that evolution is the only thing that makes sense in biology.
Beyond biological evolution, we now have cultural (language and social) evolution, which will be even more important for our future. The biological evolution is slow, but the cultural evolution is very very fast, partly thanks to the internet.
"Indeed, someone said, that evolution is the only thing that makes sense in biology."
The correct quote from Dobzhansky, 1973,should be" "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution"
thanks, that was the quote I was looking for.
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