The Worldnutdaily has another adverticle (that’s my new name for an advertisement not-so-cleverly disguised as an actual news article), this one for a creationist book that they’re selling. And they use the latest poll on American acceptance of evolution to make an entirely illogical point to use as a hook for the story.
Proponents of atheistic evolution have been hit with some bad news lately, which has one leading author proclaiming 2012 may be a tough year for Charles Darwin’s theory of human origins…
Last week, for example, the Gallup polling organization released a survey indicating that the percentage of young-earth creationists in the United States has not only increased in the last two years, but also remains the most common explanation for human origins believed by Americans.
The article states, “Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.”
The Gallup article and survey went on to show that even though these figures have remained virtually the same for about 30 years, there has actually been a slight up-tick in the number of U.S. citizens who believe in a young-earth creationism account of human origins.
“Although the percentages choosing each view have varied from survey to survey,” Gallup explained, “the 46 percent who today choose the creationist explanation is virtually the same as the 45 percent average over that period – and very similar to the 44 percent who chose that explanation in 1982.”
Okay, so the poll is absolutely routine and is pretty much exactly the same as it has been for the past 30 years. But this somehow makes it uniquely bad right now. Or something.
Carl Gallups, author of “The Magic Man in the Sky: Effectively Defending the Christian Faith,” says the trend is not surprising
“The more that real science – science that is truly observable, demonstrable, repeatable, and falsifiable is set forth with modern technological means and experimentation, the more evolution proposition is found ‘wanting,’” Gallups told WND. “People are just not buying the dribble of much of the pseudoscience of evolution that is attempted by the academic community to be passed off as absolute, settled science. Many foundational matters of evolution proposition simply do not meet the definition of ‘settled science.’ I think most people are intelligent enough to figure this out.”
Gallups continued, “Look, we have come a long way since Darwin’s day. After all, Darwin traveled everywhere in buggies pulled by horses and ships powered only by sails. Technology has gone through the roof since the days of the HMS Beagle. With what we are now discovering in DNA/RNA experimentation and our understanding of chirality and cellular respiration, for example, we are finding more and more evidence for the amazing complexities of life. We also are understanding the decreasing statistical chances that all 20 million species of life, and their subsystems and sub-subsystems, and the necessity for their interconnectedness, could have arrived here by an accidental and random beginning in some magical, unobserved, never-recreated soup – as the evolutionists would have us to believe.”
Oh look, it’s a litany of creationist cliches! Life is really complex. Who would ever have thought of that? How terribly clever. I especially like this claim:
When asked why he believes that so many people are still skeptical of evolution theory and the atheist movement that has attached itself to the theory as their foundational belief system, Gallups responded, “I think it is because evolution has been weighed by true science and true facts, and it simply is deeply lacking in hard evidence. I am speaking of the kind of evidence that is foundational to evolution proposition.”
Wanna bet? If you took that 46% of Americans who think humans were created by God in the last 10,000 years and gave them, say, the AP test on biology, I would bet that less than 5% of them could pass the test. I doubt that even 5% of them could identify a single hominid fossil or define even the most basic concepts in evolutionary theory. They don’t reject evolution because they’ve weighed the science; they reject evolution because they are utterly ignorant of it.
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Bronze Dog
June 6, 2012 at 12:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Because polls are the way to the truth. We know this because truth is just a subjective social construct, and thus the most popular narrative is the current truth. Get caught up on the latest polls so that you can know what value of pi is going to be fashionable this fall.
Captain Mike
June 6, 2012 at 12:24 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have a tendency, when confronted with a giant mass of stupid, to fasten on to just one small aspect of the stupid.
Steamships and rail travel were quite common in England before the end of Darwin’s day. Britain had over 7,000 miles of railway by about 1850. Darwin didn’t die until 1882.
jufulu
June 6, 2012 at 12:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In other news, the world will be destroyed again in December of 2012.
Janine: History’s Greatest Monster
June 6, 2012 at 12:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It is good to see that the spirit of JAD lives on.
d cwilson
June 6, 2012 at 12:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Actually, the poll only showed that 46% (stupidly) believe that people were created sometime in the last 10,000 years. It said nothing about whether they thought the Earth was “young”.
Granted, it’s not really a heartening difference, but still.
A poll, though, says nothing about the scientific validity of evolution. In Galileo’s time, most people thought the Sun revolved around the Earth. That didn’t mean that it was true. You can’t prove a theory is false just because it’s unpopular. You have to use actual scientific evidence.
This poll only shows that 46% percent of Americans don’t understand the basic principles of biology.
ArtK
June 6, 2012 at 12:35 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If they say it over and over again and really mean it, then their Sky Fairy will make it come true.
uncephalized
June 6, 2012 at 12:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I got a 5 in AP Bio (for any who don’t know, that’s the highest score you can get on an AP test). You can sure as hell bet I “believe in evolution”, though I hate that phrase. It’s as stupid as asking whether someone “believes in gravity”. Well, we’re both standing here, aren’t we?
uncephalized
June 6, 2012 at 12:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Though actually, as best I can recall there was very little on the test that was explicitly about evolution. I remember having to describe the evapotranspiration process in an essay, and analyze several graphs and data tables. It was about 8 years ago now though, so there may have been multiple-choice or even a short answer that I have forgotten that dealt with evolution directly.
lclane2
June 6, 2012 at 12:47 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Another chapter for Glenn Morton’s History of the Imminent Demise of Evolution
teawithbertrand
June 6, 2012 at 12:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A big part of the creationist midset is “I don’t understand it and I’m sure no one else does either, therefore god did it with magic.”
Tide goes in, tide goes out…
Eric R
June 6, 2012 at 1:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm
time to add an entry for 2012
slc1
June 6, 2012 at 1:20 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Attached is a link to a presentation by Eugenie Scott in which among other things, cites some prior claims that evolution is on its last legs. Just for the information of anyone interested in downloading the file, if one has Firefox and Download Helper, one can use it to and download find a HD video of the presentation.
kagekiri
June 6, 2012 at 1:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I managed a 5 on the AP Biology test when I was in high school, and I was a Young Earth Creationist at the time. As uncephalized mentions, I don’t recall learning too much about evolution in AP Bio that I needed for the test.
Anyway, book smarts are easy; you can be book smart about things you don’t think exist (like say, a fictional universe), and still past tests on them.
Hell, you can get a medical degree without believing in “full” evolution; I have family who just recently got their MD along with a previous masters in cell biology, and who I recently confirmed is a Creationist.
Area Man
June 6, 2012 at 1:39 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Actually, it showed a rather strong spike, a 6 point jump in favor of the hardcore creationist position and away from theistic evolution. This is why the WND is crowing. There’s no reason to believe, as of yet, that it’s anything other than a statistical aberration, but it’s a far greater change than you normally see from poll to poll.
Strangely enough, there was also a spike in the recent Gallup poll for those calling themselves pro-life, and a spike (though much smaller) against legalized same-sex marriage, which had otherwise been trending steadily in the other direction. It’s possible that there’s a resurgence in religious right-wing belief in this country. However, it could be that Gallup’s sampling or weighting methods went screwy since they started including cell phones.
RW Ahrens
June 6, 2012 at 1:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I have always been suspicious of the Gallup polls, given the rock solid sameness of the answer to the question about who believes in christianity over the last 60 or so years, when other polls have shown pretty convincingly in the past twenty years that church attendance and membership (and church collections) have dropped considerably. The demographics of this country have changed a lot in that time, to see that questions’ answers change in one direction or another would not be unusual. But the solidity of the result over that long period is not credible.
Some studies have shown that polls such as Gallup’s are often flawed, as most people lie on them, by either telling the pollster what they think he wants to hear or what they think they should say to be socially acceptable. The rate of untruth has been shown to be as high as 50%!
So, when I hear this poll’s results, I’d like to see the questions as asked. One can easily cook the books on the results of a poll just by how you ask the question, often in juxtaposition to another seemingly unrelated question.
Plus, isn’t old man Gallup an evangelical himself? Talk about having some skin in the game!
Alareth
June 6, 2012 at 1:56 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Too bad for them reality isn’t determined by popular belief.
baal
June 6, 2012 at 2:04 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m certain that evolution will collapse five minutes after the arival of the impending rapture. Please see Mr. Camping for the next absolutely certain end of the world date.
justawriter
June 6, 2012 at 2:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think there is already a term for advertisment/article … advertorial.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/advertorial?s=t
Then again, this is English, where we have six words for every nogoddamned thing.
abb3w
June 6, 2012 at 3:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@14, Area Man:
I suspect it’s because the news environment was contributing to religious priming. The Gallup Evolution poll was done in the four days right after Obama’s “Gay Marriage” stance shift.
@15, RW Ahrens:
Actually, Gallup has explicitly noted “The percentage of Americans who identify with a Christian religion is down some over the decades”. The Gallup and GSS numbers also tend to line up on the fraction, for the period of overlap.
Looking at the GSS, it seems Catholics have steadily dropped in attendance rates over the last 30 years, but still count as Christians. Given that they’re the largest single US Christian denomination, that’s probably a non-trivial factor on the apparent discrepancy between identification and attendance impact.
I suspect your reaction is an example of confirmation bias in action. You don’t like this evolution poll results, so you look for reasons to discount the reliability of the information. Gallup isn’t perfect, but they’re not that bad.
@15, RW Ahrens:
Available from Gallup, at their website; more detail still if you click the “View methodology, full question results, and trend data” link.
geraldmcgrew
June 6, 2012 at 3:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ed sez, “They don’t reject evolution because they’ve weighed the science; they reject evolution because they are utterly ignorant of it.”
I have to slightly disagree. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing, but in my experience, creationists reject/deny evolution for one overwhelming reason: it directly conflicts with their religious beliefs. Evolution says humans share a common ancestry with other primates, and all other life on earth. Their religion tells them humans are God’s very special creation, individually crafted in his image. Those are two mutually exclusive positions.
Up until recently, I spent most of the last decade discussing, debating, and trying to explain evolutionary biology to creationists…in person, on line, op-ed pieces, etc. In some cases I spent years on the subject with the same people. The unmistakable conclusion I reached was that the primary significant factor in their denial of evolution is the conflict I described above. Evolution puts them in a very awkward position; either reinterpret or reject what the Biblical narrative very clearly says about origins, or flat-out deny evolution.
Some of these folks had genetics explained to them by geneticists, the fossil record explained to them by paleontologists, biology explained by biologists, etc., often for years, yet they only became more hardened in creationism. So it wasn’t ignorance of evolution that caused their creationism, it was their religious beliefs. Oh sure, if you talked to them now you’d think they’d never learned anything, but IMO that’s more of a symptom than a cause.
dogmeat
June 6, 2012 at 4:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s worse than that Captain Mike, Fulton’s Clermont was in commercial service nearly five years before Darwin was born. Their ignorance of biology is apparently equaled by their ignorance of history.
thisisaturingtest
June 6, 2012 at 4:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Some of us have come along way since then, using the technology he boasts of to enable further understanding, rather than just to fortify what is, essentially, Paley’s old “watchmaker” analogy- from fifty or so year before Darwin. These people think that better technology automatically means smarter; they themselves are proof that it just ain’t so. And it’s funny that he should use the word “magical” in the context he does, when what he and other creationists “would have us to believe” is the very definition of magic (not to mention unobserved and never re-created).
Moggie
June 6, 2012 at 4:51 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Whereas your worldview was created by people for whom riding a camel was pretty high tech. Has your god figured out his problem with iron chariots yet?
Larry
June 6, 2012 at 5:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
#16
Don’t be too sure of that. Right now, there is a proposed law in North Carolina which seems to be an attempt to legislate away explanations of rising tides due to global warming.
And then, there is the crown jewel in the crown, the Texas bored of education who are all but rewriting American history for their text books so that it conforms to their fundie-derived realities.
I forget who said it, but someone once said (my paraphrasing) that the victors get to write the history books.
geocatherder
June 6, 2012 at 6:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I doubt I’d pass that AP test; I never took a biology class in my life, not even in high school. (I substituted physics.) But thanks to some very well-written textbooks and a former professor emeritus (now a friend) who taught paleontology, I have no doubt about the details which, from the geologic side of the fence, inform the theory of evolution. The biologists have their side of the story, which is central but by and large beyond my ken; I have fossils. Fossils are all I need.
Ichthyic
June 6, 2012 at 6:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
WATERLOOOOOO!!!!
Ichthyic
June 6, 2012 at 6:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing, but in my experience, creationists reject/deny evolution for one overwhelming reason: it directly conflicts with their religious beliefs.
no, there is something underlying that:
they are TOLD what their beliefs are and TOLD where they “conflict”, and TOLD that their beliefs are under threat by specific aspects of scientific endeavor.
it has bugger all to do with religion itself, and EVERYTHING to do with political manipulation and control.
these “xians” are directly being manipulated into thinking that homosexuality, evolution, etc, are hotbutton issues for them.
it could have frankly been anything!
Aliasalpha
June 6, 2012 at 9:06 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@teawithbertrand
I always thought of it as being more like “I dont understand it and I are teh smartestest person evaaar!, therefore god did it with magic”
@thisisaturingtest
Technology doesn’t make smarter people, just faster idiots
dingojack
June 6, 2012 at 11:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ichthyic says (#26): WATERLOOOOOO!!!!
I prefer ‘Money Money Money’.
;D Dingo
matty1
June 7, 2012 at 5:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In my experience if you actually ask a Christian away from the context of political debate what is central to their religion the answers usually centre on – claims of Jesus’ divinity, personal hope for the afterlife and the importance of religious practice. Things like voting against teh ghey don’t come into it until you push the right button.
geraldmcgrew
June 7, 2012 at 5:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Icthyic,
Perhaps in some cases, but having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian household and having read the Bible at an early age (and often), it’s not like Genesis is all fuzzy and ambiguous about where humans come from. It’s pretty damn clear. I mean, I knew just from reading the Bible that God created Adam and Eve, specially, individually, and in his image. No one had to explain that to me. And the first time I heard about evolution, I instantly recognized there was a conflict. It wasn’t until my 2nd year as an undergrad that I totally rejected every last bit of creationism.