Who believes in evolution? Part I

The 2006 General Social Survey asks the following question about evolution:

1044. Now, I would like to ask you a few short questions like those you might see on a television game show. For each statement that I read, please tell me if it is true or false. If you don't know or aren't sure, just tell me so, and we will skip to the next question. Remember true, false, or don't know. i. Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (Is that true or false?)

Only slightly more than half the respondents got the question right:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -Weighted N		Distribution
EVOLVED	1: True	50.3 791
	2: False	49.7 782
	COL TOTAL	100.0 1,572

A sad indictment of U.S. science education. But we will see below that people who answered “Yes” are very different from people who answered “No.”

Let’s look at the data by race. The table below excludes Hispanic respondents:

Non-Hispanics Only!
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
RACE	1: WHITE	52.7 624	47.3 560	100.0 1,184
	2: BLACK	28.6 58	71.4 144	100.0 202
	3: OTHER	68.5 52	31.5 24	100.0 77
	COL TOTAL	50.2 734	49.8 729	100.0 1,463

We see that 71.4% of non-Hispanic blacks said that human beings did not develop from earlier species of animals.

People of “other” race are the most scientific because many come from non-Christian countries where they are not taught by their church that evolution is false.

What about Hispanics?

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
HISPANIC	No	50.2 734	49.8 729	100.0 1,463
	Yes	51.6 57	48.4 53	100.0 109
	COL TOTAL	50.3 791	49.7 782	100.0 1,572

Hispanics show little difference from the average American. This speaks pretty well of Hispanics, in my opinion.

By sex:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
SEX	1: MALE	55.8 385	44.2 304	100.0 689
	2: FEMALE	46.0 406	54.0 477	100.0 883
	COL TOTAL	50.3 791	49.7 782	100.0 1,572

55.8% of men believe in evolution compared to only 46.0% of women. This demonstrates, once again, that men are the more logical and more scientific sex.

By region (per U.S. Census designation) of the country:

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
REGION	1: NEW ENGLAND	78.1 54	21.9 15	100.0 69
	2: MIDDLE ATLANTIC	60.3 135	39.7 89	100.0 223
	3: E. NOR. CENTRAL	48.3 128	51.7 137	100.0 266
	4: W. NOR. CENTRAL	50.9 43	49.1 41	100.0 84
	5: SOUTH ATLANTIC	39.2 140	60.8 216	100.0 356
	6: E. SOU. CENTRAL	32.1 26	67.9 56	100.0 82
	7: W. SOU. CENTRAL	39.2 64	60.8 99	100.0 162
	8: MOUNTAIN	59.8 73	40.2 49	100.0 121
	9: PACIFIC	61.7 128	38.3 80	100.0 207
	COL TOTAL	50.3 791	49.7 782	100.0 1,572

Of course, I knew from previous research that New England was the smartest region of the country, and the deep south regions the dumbest. But I was still very surprised to see such a huge difference with respect to the evolution question. 78.1% of people in New England believe in evolution, compared to only 32.1% of the East South Central region (which I previously determined to be the dumbest region of the entire nation).

Now, let’s limit the distribution to Republicans only:

Republicans Only!
Cells contain: -Row percent -Weighted N		EVOLVED
		1 True	2 False	ROW TOTAL
REGION	1: NEW ENGLAND	65.0 11	35.0 6	100.0 18
	2: MIDDLE ATLANTIC	57.1 28	42.9 21	100.0 50
	3: E. NOR. CENTRAL	31.9 30	68.1 65	100.0 96
	4: W. NOR. CENTRAL	38.3 7	61.7 10	100.0 17
	5: SOUTH ATLANTIC	27.3 31	72.7 82	100.0 113
	6: E. SOU. CENTRAL	27.1 9	72.9 23	100.0 32
	7: W. SOU. CENTRAL	50.6 25	49.4 24	100.0 49
	8: MOUNTAIN	52.4 22	47.6 20	100.0 42
	9: PACIFIC	48.9 23	51.1 24	100.0 48
	COL TOTAL	40.2 187	59.8 278	100.0 464

We now see the regions of the country where Mike Huckabee might pick up some delegates. In South Carolina, McCain beat out Huckabee. But McCain’s probable loss to Romney in Florida next week will remove him from front-runner status, and give Huckabee a chance of picking up delegates in the regions where more than 70% of Republican voters share his unscientific views on evolution.

(The reason why Republicans are less likely to believe in evolution is because evangelical Christians are predominately Republican.)

Well, that’s enough analysis for one post. This topic will be continued in a future post.

LINKS TO OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES

Part II

Comments

[Cássio]

Hispanics as a group are mostly Catholic (and so Christians), even in countries where the presence of primitive African-American religions is strong (the Caribbean Islands, for example). Not all Christian religions teach (should I say preach instead?) that Evolution does not exist and Genesis is a literal report of creation. Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism and Protestantism do not defend Creationism Historically and numerically they are more important than any of the several Christian denominations in the US.

[dearieme]

Leftists believe in evolution from earlier species TO humans, but not thereafter FOR humans. That is even more foolish than the bible-bashers'nonsense. At least the latter believe in a consistent nonsense.

[JewishAtheist]

Really? It's more foolish to believe that significant evolution hasn't occurred in the last hundred thousand years or so than that an omnipotent being created humans and every other species on Earth less than 6,000 years ago?

Wow. Good point.

(Note: I'm not arguing that evolution hasn't happened in the last 100,000 years, but your attempt at making an equivalence between "leftists" and creationists is laughable.)

[David Alexander]

We see that 71.4% of non-Hispanic blacks said that human beings did not develop from earlier species of animals.

Despite his theories believing that the creation of the universe per the Big Bang Theory is an act of God, David Alexander believes in evolution. Evolution certainly does not conflict with his belief in God.

BTW, unlike most blacks in the United States, David Alexander is a Roman Catholic.

Leftists believe in evolution from earlier species TO humans, but not thereafter FOR humans.

Race realism destroys one's faith in a loving, kind-hearted God, and rewards those who believe in the angry God of the Old Testament, and especially those who believe in the Curse of Ham.

[SFG]

BTW, unlike most blacks in the United States, David Alexander is a Roman Catholic.

The Catholic Church doesn't oppose evolution last time I checked.

Race realism destroys one's faith in a loving, kind-hearted God, and rewards those who believe in the angry God of the Old Testament, and especially those who believe in the Curse of Ham.
Yup! I don't believe in any god, but with all the misery human beings endure and inflict each other, the nasty OT God seems more likely to me.

New England's off the charts, eh? Maybe I need to move up there.

[roissy]

DA: Race realism destroys one's faith in a loving, kind-hearted God,

you might think atheism would unburden the follower of feeling betrayed by the inherent unfairness of the world, and yet self-righteous fire-breathing atheists are among the biggest believers in the audacity of hope.

the biggest believers in the audacity of hope.

Is this necessarily bad? A society in which the attitude "No God so who gives a fuck" prevails doesn't strike me as a place I'd like to live. Of course, such a society would inevitably destroy itself.

[SFG]

Is this necessarily bad? A society in which the attitude "No God so who gives a fuck" prevails doesn't strike me as a place I'd like to live. Of course, such a society would inevitably destroy itself.
Of course! Discovering the true amoral nature of the universe tends to make people behave more selfishly. That's why we need to teach people religion so they think they'll fry in hell if they behave badly. Imagine if everyone behaved like Roissy over there: no more kids and lots of brokenhearted women. It's the best possible life for a man, but if everyone does it things are going to go badly. I had this argument with a paleocon blogger; he stated that life made no sense without God, and I argued that in fact life made sense. The universe is what it is; why does it have to be comprehensible or beautiful or meaningful to our stupid little minds?

you might think atheism would unburden the follower of feeling betrayed by the inherent unfairness of the world, and yet self-righteous fire-breathing atheists are among the biggest believers in the audacity of hope.
Not really. There are all kinds of atheists, ranging from paleolibertarian nerds to lefty Buddhists. Besides, there's probably some sort of compensation going on; if you can't find transcendence in God, you'll find it in art or Wicca or political action. The religious impulse is probably hard-wired into us.

[SFG]

er, I argued life made no sense. Sorry.

[John Smith]

Leftists believe in evolution from earlier species TO humans, but not thereafter FOR humans. That is even more foolish than the bible-bashers'nonsense. At least the latter believe in a consistent nonsense.

Uh, leftist don't say evolution stopped, they merely say that it wasn't enough TIME to evolve anything significant, and even if so, the selection pressures did not differ between different climates. I remember that racial similarity was a big point stressed by Miller in The Mating Mind though he did a poor job of it.

you might think atheism would unburden the follower of feeling betrayed by the inherent unfairness of the world, and yet self-righteous fire-breathing atheists are among the biggest believers in the audacity of hope.

Instead of God being the one responsible for taking care of the world, atheists put the burden on man to do it. What else can one call it but hope? Free from the whims of a tyrannically unjust God, we can mold the world into something great. Or we can fail miserably.

HS,

Is the dataset available to the public? In SPSS form or excel or something?

[Bob]

Actually, a very large majority, in fact nearly all, of university faculty in the humanities and social sciences (atheists and socialists all) hold positions that are logically incompatible with any theory of evolution, and even many physics, math and chemistry faculty implicitly disbelieve in it. However, it requires careful questioning to reveal this, because for pc reasons all of them claim otherwise.

[Turambar]

I am not sure what your point is here HS.

Would you rather be governed by the faculty of Harvard (which would have a very low belief in evolution) or, say, Ronald Reagan?

There is no evidence that the belief in evolution correlates with good government, and I'll go out on a limb and say that the staunchest anti-ID people would mostly likely be the worst choices to put in power.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,919618,00.html

[hugh go naught]

Turambar,
Is your point that you could be part of a cult whose founder found holy golden tablets with invisible writing only he could see, who didn't allow blacks into their fold until the 1970s, wear magic underwear, and still be a better candidate than Hillary Clinton? If so, I agree.

[Half Sigma]

John Smith, the General Social Survey is available for free, no registration required, with an easy to use web interface, at the UC Berekely SDA archive.

[Rain And]

Race realism destroys one's faith in a loving, kind-hearted God

And cholera and droughts didn't already??

Methinks you haven't examined your religion seriously enough.

[Half Sigma]

hugh go naught: “Turambar, Is your point that you could be part of a cult whose founder found holy golden tablets with invisible writing only he could see ... and still be a better candidate than Hillary Clinton?”

No, they weren’t tablets, they were “plates.” See The Pearl of Great Price:

He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants;

[dearieme]

"It's more foolish to believe that significant evolution hasn't occurred in the last hundred thousand years or so than that an omnipotent being created humans.."
You're quite right. I should have said that the biblebashers are foolish whilst the Left are crooked. Thanks for the correction.

[Republican Patriot]

I am an agnostic on the question of where human life comes from. However, I will say to those who are ardent believers in Darwinian Evolution that your adherence to this "theory" requires nearly as much of a leap of faith as a belief in creationism. There are so many logical and evidentiary holes in Darwinian Evolution. I suspect most of you would never accept another theory as "true" that was built on equally shaky grounds. Sometimes love of grandiose theory gets in the way of a rational, empirical evaluation of the evidence. See, e.g., those who believe Marxism explains the workings of society or psychoanalysis explains the workings of the mind. Same for Darwinian Evolution. There is no cold, hard evidence that shows one species "evolving" into another. But some people require a "religious" certainty about life, one way or ther other. Agnosticism is the truly hard position to hold.

[Andy]

HS. That is more depressing than any analysis I could have imagined.

[Vim]

Most people believe in evolution. Most people do not believe in its corollary, speciation. The idea of Darwinian evolution is this: variation exits, variation is hereditary, variation confers different success in animals, differing outcomes causes different numbers of offspring in animals. I you decomposed evolution into these four ideas, I do not think anyone will disagree. You ask for instance: do some animals(people) differ from other animals: height, weight, sex? Does the child (human or animal) often look like the parent? Do you think some (animals or people) have traits that affect if they get sick more often or can run faster or longer? Do you believe that this kind of difference in success would affect how many children an animal or person had?

(Note that believing that poorer people had more children than richer people is a valid awareness of differing success causing differing numbers of children.)

It is hard for me to believe, you would get somebody disbelieving what I have laid out.

However, if I ask about speciation, then they might balk at this ... but seeing that this can lead to strict speciation involves more complicated genetic machinery that most people don't get anyway ... there are also some finer points of what a species is that most people are unlikely to know about.

Anyway, I think people rightly believe the 'Do you believe in evolution?' question as a litmus test for whether they take their faith seriously or not and are responding symbolicly that they do take their faith seriously. I believe some atheists use the evolution question to force atheism on others as a 'scientific' reality ... but if you are going to play politics with a particular truth then you can expect people will react politically by lying, evading, diminishing etc ...

[Vim]

Republican Patriot:

There are some parts of evolution such as abiogenesis (life emerging from inanimate matter) that require a leap of faith but some of the other things like speciation are about as much of a leap of faith as walking into a room and finding a bowl that you had previously seen on the table, broken and on the floor and saying "I think it fell!".

For instance, the idea that chimps are related to humans can actually be looked at by going and getting the genetic code of a chimp and a human and looking at the actual genetic code. You can see with your own eyes where the genes are and how close they are to humans.

You might well say, and I consider it a fair objection that maybe God used the same design principles.

However, we also have parts of our genetic code that are unused, old genes that have been retired, viruses that seem to have grafted themselves and been forgotten and duplications of genes and reversals of genes and other somewhat random things that seem to happen in the genetic code. And you can go back and compare humans and chimps and see these kinds of things being the same.

You could say we just don't understand the whole design and I do think this is a fair thing to disagree on, especially if you are religious. You are entitled to give your faith and your God as much lattitude as you want. However, as I said, finding the bowl on the ground broken, you will forgive that some of us are lead to reasonable hypothesis that it fell.

If you left me in a room with your wallet and you returned to find your wallet empty, you probably wouldn't believe that God did it. If you leave some water in a pot on a lit stove and you come back to see it boiling, you probably don't explain it by saing God made the water boil. Scientists simply try to keep within this kind of way of explaining things.

[Mark]

It's hard to understand at this point that there are still some (unevolved?) people who don't understand that evolution is a fact, not a theory.

Thank you, HS, for showing the race data.

[BobC]

The results of this poll are disgraceful. Only 50.3% of Americans accept evolution, and I would bet most of them stick god in there somewhere. I've seen another poll that showed only 13% of Americans accept evolution without invoking god to help it or invent it. That means 87% of Americans don't understand an extremely important scientific fact. What the creationists don't understand is evolution is not an opinion. Biologists don't debate the basis facts of evolution because they know for certain all life evolved. The DNA evidence for evolutionary relationships is so powerful a person would have to be nuts to reject evolution.

[SFG]

It's hard to understand at this point that there are still some (unevolved?) people who don't understand that evolution is a fact, not a theory.
Actually, evolution, like gravity, is a theory. 'Objects fall' is a fact, 'Objects fall because gravity pulls them down' is a theory. Scientists create theories to explain facts and are refining and discarding theories all the time. Newtonian mechanics seemed pretty factual until you got too fast.

Evolution is the best theory we've come up with to explain the diversity of life. We may come up with another one, but it doesn't seem awfully likely right now.

[SFG]

It's hard to understand at this point that there are still some (unevolved?) people who don't understand that evolution is a fact, not a theory.
Actually, evolution, like gravity, is a theory. 'Objects fall' is a fact, 'Objects fall because gravity pulls them down' is a theory. Scientists create theories to explain facts and are refining and discarding theories all the time. Newtonian mechanics seemed pretty factual until you got too fast.

Evolution is the best theory we've come up with to explain the diversity of life. We may come up with another one, but it doesn't seem awfully likely right now.

[Michael Clarkson]

Oh for the... SFG, evolution is a fact. We observe evolution all the time, not only by implication from fossils and genetic alignment but from the development of novel activities in living organisms (i.e. MRSA, nylonases, etc.). Natural selection is the theory.

[SFG]

Whoops! You got me. That's what I wanted to say.

And yeah, I forgot about microevolution. Though you don't know, it could be the FSM changing the frequencies of methicillin resistance to frustrate us with his noodly appendage. It's just the most logical explanation.

(I don't actually disbelieve evolution, BTW)

[Canis]

Evolution is a fact. It was observed and discussed before Darwin was even born (by his Grandfather Erasmus Darwin among others). It's an observation comparable to "things fall down" - "species change."

Natural Selection or descent with modification is the theory applied to explain evolution. It is equivalent to gravity.

There were other theories used to explain evolution. The most famous one was Lamarckism, which persisted for some time until the better theory of natural selection was proposed. The finer points of theory are continuously tested and modified (e.g. by the addition of genetic variation) through scientific inquiry, as any good theory should be.

Evolution, the observation, is never modified by scientific testing - it is the fact that must be explained.

[Vim]

Canis's point is an excellent one. Evolution is a fact. Of course when we say 'Evolution is a fact' many of us mean 'Darwin's explanation of evolution is a fact'. Complicating things still further is the usage of the word 'theory' in lay terminology is very close in meaning to what a scientist would call a 'hypothesis'. Therefore, there is a misunderstanding between the parties which seems to persist.