opinion polls about evolution
Aug. 21st, 2003 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinNo, I'm not starting my own poll.
There's been much handwringing over and discussion of a Nicholas Kristof New York Times column on religion, in which he says in passing that only 28% of Americans believe in evolution. In an e-mail response column he says that the number came from "a separate Gallup poll".
I'm wondering where he got his number, because it doesn't seem to jibe with the Gallup polls on evolution that I've seen cited, either this one from 1999 or this almost identical poll from 1991. Gallup says their numbers are extremely stable over time. They all show that a little under half of Americans polled are hardcore creationists who believe the human species was created fairly recently; about 40% believe in some form of divinely guided evolution, and about 10% are naturalistic evolutionists who say that "God had no part in this process."
The wording of that last option is unfortunate, because it would repel theistic Darwinists. Gallup is apparently trying to gauge how many people credit natural selection as opposed to some sort of non-Darwinian theistic evolution theory, but instead the sentence seems to imply atheism, and we already know from other surveys that very few Americans are atheists. I can imagine someone of deistic tendencies (a believer in the passive clockmaker God), or just a layperson who reconciles faith with the evidence for Darwin through something like a day-age interpretation of Genesis, choosing the centrist answer for lack of anything better.
In any event, while the results are no great comfort to science educators, they do seem to imply that about half of Americans think people evolved from other species, slightly more than the number who think they didn't.
Kristof might have been thinking of this apparently different poll from 2001. I'm not a premium subscriber, but the summary says that "only about a third of the public say that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by evidence." That's a much more specific question that has to do with a specific opinion about the evaluation of scientific evidence. I wonder how many said they didn't know.
Update: In case you're wondering about the opinions of Car Talk listeners, almost half of them are avowed Darwinists, and most of the rest seem to believe in the creationist's separation between "microevolution" and "macroevolution"-- no telling how many of those are theistic evolutionists.
Also: Instead of writing a lot about what I really think, it's much more efficient for me to point you here.
Another update (previously in comment form): I have a guess as to what Kristof's number might be. Some of these Gallup polls ask a separate question, whether the respondent leans more toward the "theory of evolution" or the "theory of creationism." The evolution contingent on that question tends to run around 30% or so. Kristof might be citing one of those. If so, let me say that I think this question is vacuous and dumb, and I wouldn't draw many conclusions from how people responded to it; what is the "theory of creationism"? The question that asks about specific beliefs about human origins is much better.
There's been much handwringing over and discussion of a Nicholas Kristof New York Times column on religion, in which he says in passing that only 28% of Americans believe in evolution. In an e-mail response column he says that the number came from "a separate Gallup poll".
I'm wondering where he got his number, because it doesn't seem to jibe with the Gallup polls on evolution that I've seen cited, either this one from 1999 or this almost identical poll from 1991. Gallup says their numbers are extremely stable over time. They all show that a little under half of Americans polled are hardcore creationists who believe the human species was created fairly recently; about 40% believe in some form of divinely guided evolution, and about 10% are naturalistic evolutionists who say that "God had no part in this process."
The wording of that last option is unfortunate, because it would repel theistic Darwinists. Gallup is apparently trying to gauge how many people credit natural selection as opposed to some sort of non-Darwinian theistic evolution theory, but instead the sentence seems to imply atheism, and we already know from other surveys that very few Americans are atheists. I can imagine someone of deistic tendencies (a believer in the passive clockmaker God), or just a layperson who reconciles faith with the evidence for Darwin through something like a day-age interpretation of Genesis, choosing the centrist answer for lack of anything better.
In any event, while the results are no great comfort to science educators, they do seem to imply that about half of Americans think people evolved from other species, slightly more than the number who think they didn't.
Kristof might have been thinking of this apparently different poll from 2001. I'm not a premium subscriber, but the summary says that "only about a third of the public say that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is well supported by evidence." That's a much more specific question that has to do with a specific opinion about the evaluation of scientific evidence. I wonder how many said they didn't know.
Update: In case you're wondering about the opinions of Car Talk listeners, almost half of them are avowed Darwinists, and most of the rest seem to believe in the creationist's separation between "microevolution" and "macroevolution"-- no telling how many of those are theistic evolutionists.
Also: Instead of writing a lot about what I really think, it's much more efficient for me to point you here.
Another update (previously in comment form): I have a guess as to what Kristof's number might be. Some of these Gallup polls ask a separate question, whether the respondent leans more toward the "theory of evolution" or the "theory of creationism." The evolution contingent on that question tends to run around 30% or so. Kristof might be citing one of those. If so, let me say that I think this question is vacuous and dumb, and I wouldn't draw many conclusions from how people responded to it; what is the "theory of creationism"? The question that asks about specific beliefs about human origins is much better.
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