<As much as you'd like the above words to be my personal unsupported statement, those are the words of Tania Lombrozo, Harvard PhD, in an interview in Scientific American.>
LOL... guy I dont' CARE about THAT... you come in and link that wacko website interview and expect anyone to BELIEVE IT?
Thank you for the REAL context... let's have a look-see:
So the article is about letting people believe what they want vs trying to force it down their throat... which I think is a great topic. IMHO of course you should let people believe what they want... Lambroso seems to think there might be a better way of presenting the material to get it accepted... could be, but I think as long as you present it, let people think what they want.
Further to the discussion at hand... she DOES break down the material somewhat (although of course this isn't the original paper):
<<You had data that broke down people by, sort of, religious background, educational background, economic background; and some of the surprising things there were, for example, somebody might be a fundamentalist Christian but categorize himself as a liberal and have a high education—let's say graduate school—and on average, their acceptance of evolution will be much higher than somebody who is not religious but is low income and only has a high school degree.>>
<<Lombrozo: Right, so one of the interesting things is that all of these factors seemed to be correlated to some extent with accepting evolution.>>
So ummmm guy.... doesn't that directly contradict what you interpreted it to mean... at least in your assertion to me? Something about highly educated?
Thanks for the REAL deal. It's always good to present the original source of information FWIW.
Further tidbits:
<<So the factors you mentioned—being a fundamentalist or not, not surprisingly perhaps being a fundamentalist is associated with rejecting evolution and level of education; so actually the data that I looked at doesn't look at socioeconomic status directly, but it does look at level of education, which might correlate with that.>>
<<Lombrozo: It definitely does correlate with certain religious beliefs. So, for example, studies pretty reliably find a correlation between how religious someone is and whether or not they accept or reject evolution; in particular, a literal interpretation of Genesis is, [as] you might expect, something that's going to be problematic for accepting evolution.>>
Finally your point:
<<I find it interesting that Lombrozo says "..scientists, tend to think that if people reject evolution and in particular evolution by natural selection, it's because they don't understand it very well; they don't really understand what the theory is telling us." And that happens to be precisely the case with you. You think exactly as she said scientists typically do and apparently can't believe otherwise. >>
I agree with that... and I find it a bit of a bummer (like Lambrozo) to think that people are like horses sometimes... you can lead 'em to knowledge but not make 'em learn. :) OTOH, I disagree with her on ID... I find a lot to like as I read ( BUT: I've read very little).
DAK |
