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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (771775)	2/27/2014 10:51:00 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (9) \| Respond to of 1575005

Don't be smug...... The Republican and conservative refusal to recognize evolution is well known, but the extent of it may not be. As if the numbers for all adults (48 percent) aren’t depressing enough, only 28 percent of conservative Republicans believe that humans evolved from earlier species. In the next three spots are 32 percent of Republicans believing in evolution, 34 percent of conservative Democrats, and 37 percent of conservatives. (For comparison, 28 percent of fundamentalist Protestants believe in evolution, as do 27 percent of those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God.) At the other end of the spectrum, the political group most likely to embrace evolution is moderate Independents (68 percent), followed by liberal Democrats (66 percent) and liberals overall (66 percent). In 2012 the NSF did a fascinating little experiment. On both evolution and the origins of the universe in a Big Bang, the NSF study used a split ballot. On evolution, a random half was asked the standard evolution question quoted above and the other half was asked a different question probing not belief but knowledge. (The NSF report is somewhat confusing on how the experiment was done ( p. 7-21), but on Thursday I confirmed with Tom W. Smith, who directs the General Social Survey for NORC, that an ordinary split ballot approach was used, one half getting one version and the other half getting the other version.) The alternative evolution question asked whether it was true or false that: According to the theory of evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. [EVOLVED1; emphasis added] Because a rejection of evolution is mostly a belief, but is typically analyzed as a scientific knowledge question, the second version was designed instead to test the respondent’s knowledge of the theory of evolution. The results were quite different. Overall, 71 percent of people agree that the theory of evolution involves humans evolving from earlier species, compared to only 48 percent believing in it. For Republicans the reversal is dramatic: on evolution only 32 percent of Republicans are believers, well below Independents (53 percent) and Democrats (53 percent). But in understanding the gist of evolution, Republicans (76 percent) are insignificantly ahead of Independents (71 percent) and slightly, but significantly ahead of Democrats (68 percent). What this NSF experiment suggests to me (though other interpretations are possible) is that some standard scientific knowledge questions do not actually measure what one knows, but rather what one chooses to endorse. For this reason, in its report the NSF did not include the evolution and Big Bang questions in its index of scientific knowledge.