politburo diktat 2.0

NYT: Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey

I’m not going to rant and rave about this. The wide support for creationism in the U.S. is nothing new.

But I will note the problems of polls and polling. The literal statement gaining 42% agreement was “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” That would mean no dinosaurs. If the pollsters had asked those 42% of respondents if dinosaurs really existed, surely the vast majority would have said ‘yes.’

So what do those 42% actually think? I don’t know. Polls looking at attitudes and knowledge always show muddled thinking and conflicting answers by large portions of the populace. Getting at such things is much trickier than “Who are you going to vote for?”

Powerline (no link) suggested that the Pew researchers actively wanted to “make evolution skeptics look stupid.” Heh. While that’s an easy thing to do, I also don’t think that was the Pew group’s goal.

Given the state of science education in the country, it’s no surprise that people’s opinions are self-contradictory.

In a finding that is likely to intensify the debate over what to teach students about the origins of life, a poll released yesterday found that nearly two-thirds of Americans say that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools.

The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was “guided by a supreme being,” and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.

The poll was conducted July 7-17 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The questions about evolution were asked of 2,000 people. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of “American pragmatism.”

“It’s like they’re saying, ‘Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.’ It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists,” said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.

Eugenie C. Scott, the director of the National Center for Science Education and a prominent defender of evolution, said the findings were not surprising because “Americans react very positively to the fairness or equal time kind of argument.”