Accept the implications

Awww, poor William Dembski is puzzled by the data that shows that acceptance of evolution rises with education level. I’m sorry, guy, but that’s what the evidence shows: better educated people tend to support good science more than poorly educated people, and Intelligent Design creationism derives its popularity from ignorance. Larry Moran puts him in his place.

At the risk of boring anyone with an IQ over 80, let me make the point that Dembski is deliberately missing. In 2002, if you rejected evolution you were an idiot. That’s because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The same correlation holds today, only more so.

One other thing that that graph shows is that conservatism is associated with disbelief in evolution, and several people have complained that they dislike the way I phrased it, as “American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science”. They’ve complained that it’s only a correlation, not evidence of causation, and that it’s not about science, it’s about evolution. However, I stand by my wording.

The voice of conservatism in America is the Republican party, and the Republican party stands against evolution, against stem cell research, against reproductive rights, against education, against the environment, against alternative energy research, against pollution controls, against good science education, against universal health care, on and on and on. I appreciate that individual conservatives in good conscience may deplore the anti-science agenda and divorce themselves from rather large chunks of the Republican platform, and I understand that the party has not always been such a refuge for know-nothings and may someday reshape itself, but face it: conservatism in this country is tightly coupled to scientific ignorance. If you are a conservative, that is your problem (just as the ineffective, dithering dullards of the Democratic party are my problem, as an openly declared liberal). Buck up, accept the responsibility, and do something about it. Fight for reform of America’s conservative political party.

Or maybe you sensible people who believe in conservative values just need to found a new party and get out from the umbrella of what should be called the Insane Christianist party.

It’s good to piss off the right people

One other important thing about using ridicule to combat your opponents: you have to be on very solid ground yourself for it to be effective. An excellent case in point is Michael Fumento, a rather deranged lawyer by training with negative experience in science (i.e., paying too much attention to him will cause cortical neurons to wither and die) has chosen to flail against competent science, and he makes a complete fool of himself. Fumento’s schtick is to play Chicken Belittle and downplay the importance of public health in favor of privatizing everything, and something that would require coordinated community response, like a potential pandemic, is anathema to him…so he ignores the science and pretends it will never happen. To make his case, I’m amused at his choice of targets: Revere, Mike, and Tim. This is another reason to be pleased to be at Scienceblogs—my peers here raise the ire of the anti-science crazies on both the right and the left. It’s good company!

Worms ‘r’ us

What’s a philosopher doing writing about science? Willikins has a short article on the idea that bioturbation was a major factor in the Cambrian explosion. I can go with that: the Cambrian and pre-Cambrian seem to have been times when the sea floor was covered with algal mats, and the successful animal forms were grazers who scraped the surface and worms that burrowed through them. Along with changes in atmospheric oxygen, the radical remodeling of the marine substrate were the major biologically induced changes in the environment.

Ridicule is a useful tool

And Federal Way is feeling its sting right now.

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The kooks who promote foolish ideas are one target for ridicule, and this Frosty Hardison character is a prime example. He’s got a reply to the Seattle PI article that exposed him; it’s a MS Word file that doesn’t help his case. It starts off with a collection of bogus complaints about climate science, and just gets weirder and weirder. Here are a few choice bits.

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American political conservatism impedes the understanding of science

Science magazine has just published a graph of data taken from a general social survey of Americans that quantifies what most of us assume: a well-educated liberal who is not a fundamentalist is much more likely to accept evolution than a conservative fundamentalist with only a high school education. You can see the trend fairly clearly: here we see the percent believing in evolution vs. fundamentalism, amount of education, and self-reported political views.

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The percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent’s religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.

It looks to me like being a fundamentalist means you’re about half as likely to believe in evolution as a non-fundamentalist of the same level of education and place on the political spectrum. The majority of fundamentalists of any kind (except the liberal ones with a grad school education; I wonder how many of those there are) reject evolution. To get a majority of conservatives to accept evolution, you have to drag them through grad school and make sure they aren’t fundamentalists.

It’s not surprising that fundamentalism puts such a strong damper on evolution, but it is surprising that political conservatism would do likewise. That, I suspect, is a consequence of the strong association between the religious right and Republicans in this country, and I have to wonder whether conservatives who reject religion completely are as screwed up as this sample indicates, and if conservatives from other countries would do as poorly.

One problem I have with these data, though, is there is no indication of the sample size in each category. It’s taken from a total of 3673 respondents, but I rather suspect that the liberal-fundamentalist category was significantly smaller than the conservative-fundamentalist group in raw numbers, so that, for instance, there are actually many more fundamentalist grad students who disbelieve evolution than believe it.

The chart also shows that a college education has a negligible effect on fundamentalist’s belief in evolution, but what we don’t have here is any data on what kind of college education we’re talking about. The fundamentalists may have mostly attended a bible college that reinforces their ignorance for all we know, and they may have had a very different experience than the non-fundamentalists, who would have been more likely to attend a secular school.

The association of anti-evolutionism with conservatism is not a particularly reassuring trend to me. Despite being liberal myself, I think the acceptance of good science ought to be independent of political affiliation; the data says it isn’t. The chart is about belief in evolution, and that’s a good word for it—if you are saying you agree that humans evolved from earlier species of animals because your political views say you should, you may not be evaluating the evidence rationally…or perhaps liberals are simply more receptive to education.

Mazur A (2007) Disbelievers in evolution. Science 315(5809):187.

William Dembski says something useful

This is a concrete image of biology’s future under the Intelligent Design creationists: it would be dissolved by fiat.

If I ever became the president of a university (per impossibile), I would dissolve the biology department and divide the faculty with tenure that I couldn’t get rid of into two new departments: those who know engineering and how it applies to biological systems would be assigned to the new “Department of Biological Engineering”; the rest, and that includes the evolutionists, would be consigned to the new “Department of Nature Appreciation” (didn’t Darwin think of himself as a naturalist?).

Dembski’s ignorance of biology departments apparently rivals his ignorance of biology. I don’t know what he means by “engineering”, but I know a fair number of physiologists who will go on and on about Reynold’s numbers and force-structure relationships and other such esoterica…and every single one of them is an evolutionist.

I think they already understand the problem, but such a vivid example of creationist lunacy will be very useful in discussions with my colleagues.