An interesting statistic

[Dragonfly]

See here.

[Chris Grieb]

I can't seem to make the connection.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is the graph from the Pharyngula blog entry. People surveyed all over the world were shown the statement, "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals," and asked whether they agreed. The blog comment was "We are screwed." The USA came in next to last in believing in creationism among the world's countries, being outdone only by Turkey.

Michael

[Reidy]

Looks fishy to me. The message of the FoxNews story is that the authors are partisans out to establish a preconceived conclusion, politically motivated at that. This doesn't prove that they're wrong, but it raises a warning. These people don't care what damage they do to their credibility by tipping us off to their class prejudices.

Another suspicious item is the statement "The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005." I.e. they didn't do their own research. This doesn't prove that they're wrong, either, but it raises questions about the consistency of the research methods that the different surveys used (one question being: were the questions identically phrased in all the surveys?).

Not too many years ago we read that more people believe that flying saucers visit the earth than that Social Security will be around for their retirement. The story eventually disappeared when somebody pointed out that the claim combined the results of two different surveys and was thus not statistically respectable.

The conclusion I'd draw from the chart, if it's reliable, is that beliefs about evolution don't tell you much about a country; it shows no correlation I can see between such beliefs and anything you'd want to know about these countries' cultures, political systems, scientific eminence, technological importance or economic productivity.

The statement "we're screwed", if it means anything (big if), is a testable prediction, and a reliable commentator would have been more explicit about what that is. My guess is that it predicts the US is going to lose its scientific, technological and economic lead because so many of its citizens reject evolution. I recall similar predictions from my childhood during the post-Sputnik era. Back then, America's failure to teach foreign languages to everyone, from grade school on, or its failure to adopt the metric system were going to do it in. These prophecies failed the test of time, and I predict a similar fate for this one.

My rule is to discount, by about 98%, scientific or scholarly stories I come across in the news. What you see there are the findings of showboaters, the kind of academics who cultivate the media while most of their colleagues are at work doing science. Give it a few months and see if anyone remembers it.

Peter

[Dragonfly]

There is little doubt however that of the countries of the Western world anti-evolutionism and creationism and belief in a personal God in the VS is far more widespread than in other countries. This has been confirmed by all statistics on this subject that I've seen in the course of the years.

[Robert Campbell]

I'd also like to know more about the provenance of the numbers.

But the relative position of the US and various European countries is consistent with the results for many other surveys.

Obviously, if the authors had had access to data from

Sa'udi Arabia

Iran

Algeria

Kyrgyzstan

Mali

Central African Republic

and so forth,

they would have found lower, even much lower rates of endorsement of human evolution than they found in the United States.

Robert Campbell

[BaalChatzaf]

I'd also like to know more about the provenance of the numbers.

But the relative position of the US and various European countries is consistent with the results for many other surveys.

Obviously, if the authors had had access to data from

Sa'udi Arabia

Iran

Algeria

Kyrgyzstan

Mali

Central African Republic

and so forth,

they would have found lower, even much lower rates of endorsement of human evolution than they found in the United States.

Robert Campbell

No doubt. But among the civilized industrial nations. the U.S. has the worst record in science education and training. You can thank the public schools for that. Americans who excel in science and mathematics do so in spite of their school training, not because of it.

Ba'al Chatzaf