Friday, November 19, 2004
We Are *So* Screwed, Continued
"Almost half of Americans believe God created humans 10,000 years ago."
The framing of the questions are a bit crappy, so there must be some bias, and given Gallop's recent biases (find the links yourself, I'm talking about pre-election polling), one wonders about their sampling.
As I've said before, one of the huge problems here is that the vast majority of non-scientists do not understand what the word "Theory" mean. They think it's the same "idea or guess" they use in everyday life, when in fact it is not. There is no Law of Evolution, because evolution is a set of events - there are Laws of natural selection, genetic inheritance, etc., all of which come together in the framework of Evolution. Also, the American public is notoriously ignorant, especially about science, as well as being famously anti-intellectual.
But the actual affirmation that so many people believe humans were created such a short time ago, in the face of all evidence, really scares me. But it's not a surprise, sadly.
The framing of the questions are a bit crappy, so there must be some bias, and given Gallop's recent biases (find the links yourself, I'm talking about pre-election polling), one wonders about their sampling.
As I've said before, one of the huge problems here is that the vast majority of non-scientists do not understand what the word "Theory" mean. They think it's the same "idea or guess" they use in everyday life, when in fact it is not. There is no Law of Evolution, because evolution is a set of events - there are Laws of natural selection, genetic inheritance, etc., all of which come together in the framework of Evolution. Also, the American public is notoriously ignorant, especially about science, as well as being famously anti-intellectual.
But the actual affirmation that so many people believe humans were created such a short time ago, in the face of all evidence, really scares me. But it's not a surprise, sadly.
