This chart makes me sad
Published by Panda on Friday, February 02, 2007 at 7:39 AM
This chart (from a National Geographic study) is a country-by-country breakdown, showing the percentage of people that believe that "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."
Caveat, this chart is not all-inclusive. It only includes "Western" countries, which seems to include Japan for some reason. I'm sure that if we were to survey some other places, the US might not be second to last.
Even so, I find it incredibly disheartening to think that our country is so behind the times that we are roughly 10 slots behind Poland. If any of you ever makes a Polish joke again, just remember that they're still miles ahead of us in terms of not believing that the Bible is the literal word of God.
One last point. The other disheartening thing about this is that not only are we far behind ranking-wise, the margin is also terrible. Only 40% of us decisively believe that evolution is true. That says something terrible and sad about scientific education and rational processes in this country.
Link via Overcoming Bias
This does not surprise me at all.
Something else: If you want to read an interesting take on evolution, look into "Nabokov's Butterflies." Nabokov had a hard time believing, for instance, that the highly intricate and beautiful patterns of a butterfly's wings could be the result of Darwinian selection, because their camouflage was too effective compared with their predators' ability to detect them. This raised the further debate that, possibly, at one time, the predator's visions was in fact great enough to warrant the selection of more florid patterns. The present animal is a culmination of that history of selection, whether or not its current environment dictates it. So evolution becomes not "true" or "false" but actually a fluid, imperfect sequence of events.
Why isn't Canada in there? :[