At last, it all makes sense.
(via ExChristian.net)
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
We are so screwed.
That’s the result of a new survey of people’s attitudes toward evolution. Notice where the United States lies: nearly dead last. We beat Turkey.
There was more to this study than just asking whether a person agreed with the statement that “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” They also collected other data on age, gender, education, genetic literacy, religious belief, attitude toward life, attitude toward science and technology, belief in science and technology, reservations about science and technology, and political ideology, and carried out a statistical analysis to determine the relative contribution of these variables to ignorance about evolution.
I’m sure you can all guess what the number one biggest obstacle to accepting evolution was.
The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0.42 and -0.24, respectively), which indicates that individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God and who pray frequently were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views.
The number two problem?
Second, the evolution issue has been politicized and incorporated into the current partisan division in the United States in a manner never seen in Europe or Japan. In the second half of the 20th century, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has adopted creationism as a part of a platform designed to consolidate their support in southern and Midwestern states—the “red” states. In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in seven states included explicit demands for the teaching of “creation science”. There is no major political party in Europe or Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform.
On the positive side, one factor that improves the acceptance of evolution is genetic literacy, and the authors advocate improved science education in our public schools. We need it, desperately.
It appears that many of these adults have adopted a human exceptionalism perspective. Elements of this perspective can be seen in the way that many adults try to integrate modern genetics into their understanding of life. For example, only a third of American adults agree that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice and only 38% of adults recognize that humans have more than half of their genes in common with chimpanzees. In
other studies, fewer than half of American adults can provide a minimal definition of DNA. Thus, it is not surprising that nearly half of the respondents in 2005 were not sure about the proportion of human genes that overlap with mice or chimpanzees.
Nick Matzke has more to say on this part of the work)
Despite the good suggestion about improving education, the paper ends on a grim and pessimistic note. Like I said, we are so screwed.
The politicization of science in the name of religion and political partisanship is not new to the United States, but transformation of traditional geographically and economically based political parties into religiously oriented ideological coalitions marks the beginning of a new era for science policy. The broad public acceptance of the benefits of science and technology in the second half of the 20th century allowed science to develop a nonpartisan identification that largely protected it from overt partisanship. That era appears to have closed.
Hmmm. I wonder what the Discovery Institute thinks of all this. Let’s ask Bruce Chapman!
“A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field,” Chapman said. “In particular, the growing doubts about Darwinism undoubtedly reflect growing doubts among scientists about Darwinian theory. Over 640 have now signed a public dissent and the number keeps growing.”
I think the study shows precisely the opposite effect. Americans are being rolled in large numbers by an ideological ‘elite’ nested in our churches and in the Republican party—the reason we are falling so far behind in our understanding of the biological sciences is that political and religious authority figures are lying to the people and fostering ignorance, and Americans are dumbly falling for it…and the more ignorant they are, the more they depend on those false authorities.
Americans aren’t second to last because they are “famously independent.” They’re failing biology because they’re god-soaked sheep, and the Republican party has exploited that failing.
By the way, I am quoted on Fox News on this one. That feels…strange.
Miller JD, Scott EC, Okamoto S (2006) Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.
That Moonie creationist with a degree in developmental biology, Jonathan Wells, floated an actual hypothesis a while back: he postulated that the centrioles were little turbines that generated a force with their rotation. I never saw it as much of a support for Intelligent Design; it was an idea about how centrioles function that did not rule out that they arose by evolutionary mechanisms. Wells seemed to think it was significant because he was inspired by an analogy with a human artifact, but la de da…I don’t think benzene rings are actually made of snakes, despite Kekule’s inspiration.
Anyway, now Ian Musgrave hammers another stake through that idea’s heart: Wells’ hypothesis is falsified.
Since there was a comment asking about that strange “PYGMIES + DWARFS” exclamation we sometimes get in these parts, I thought I’d bring over all the articles from the old site, just to have them here and explain some of the inside baseball lingo. So here’s the collection:
“PYGMIES + DWARFS” is simple—it’s a wonderfully illogical non sequitur. How do we know that there were biblical giants? Because there are very short people nowadays. It’s a representative example of a whole mindset, where any random observation is marshaled by an unconscious chain of absurdist logic to prop up an unlikely claim. It’s not just Pinkoski that does this, there’s also a reek of the same silliness to Francis Collins, for instance: seeing a three-part waterfall and leaping to the conclusion that the Christian trinity is a universal truth is a perfect example of “PYGMIES + DWARFS” logic.
One other thing. I think I’ve been rather mean to poor Pinkoski, publicly and repeatedly exposing his foolishness like this. I suspect from my few interactions with him that he is a decent human being, lives a normal life, and has a bit of talent. Don’t forget that, inane as his ideas are, he’s still a person who has every right to enjoy the privileges of his life and that he has done nothing criminal.
What we have to do, though, is criticize these idiotic ideas as harshly as possible. They’re wrong, they’re insane, and Pinkoski is part of a whole network of people whose goal is to disseminate ideologically-driven lies as far as possible, and Pinkoski’s role in this is to write comic books that appeal to kids to corrupt them as early as possible. Pinkoski might be a nice guy on a personal level, but we can’t afford to pull punches when such flaming gobshite is presented to the public.
It’s been a little while since I last brought up Pinkoski, so maybe you can handle another dollop. When I got his creationism comic book, I also picked up another, titled “Christian SF”, which promised to be the first in a series of comics containing science fiction stories with Christian themes.
Oh, it is bad.
Ignoring the Christian content completely, it is a major rip-off. It contains all of two stories, each given only 3 or four pages, which barely set up the premise and then stop cold, telling you to buy Christian SF #2 to find out what happens.
The first is titled “Who is the model citizen”, and consists of a few pages of exposition about terrorist attacks on the US requiring new weapons, and then the unveiling of a humanoid robot. That’s it.
The second, “The aliens”, sets the stage with some alien worlds where everyone is perfect and happy and worships God, when another alien shows up and announces that there has been a “great non-friendliness among the beings that serve the great I AM”, and that part of the Milky Way has been declared off-limits. Again, it just ends there.
As science fiction and as story telling, this thing just plain sucks. It’s got a few pages of the beginnings of some very lame stories, and everything in between is evangelical Christian babbling…and that’s where you’ll find the real science fiction. I haven’t seen such bizarre theology since I caught a glimpse of premillennial dispensationalism—what is it about the crazed Christian extremists that they can simultaneously declare their belief in literal biblical fundamentalism while indulging in the most fantastic distortions of the book itself?
For instance, here’s how Pinkoski explains the Christian Trinity.
John Price sent me some scans from another Pinkoski masterpiece, titled Discovered: The True! Genesis Story of Creation. A Presentation of Ron Wyatt’s Material. It’s clear that Pinkoski has completely swallowed all of Ron Wyatt’s pseudo-archaeological hokum—Wyatt was an outrageous fraud, and even devout Christians and creationists back away from him.
Can you stomach a little more Jim Pinkoski? He’s ranting in the comments most amusingly.
You guys LIE about Java man, you LIE about Lucy, you LIE about the horse ancestary chart, you LIE about fetuses mimicking evolution stages, you LIE about upright trees sticking through different geology layers, you LIE when you ignore the arguments about the earth’s magnetic field, you LIE when you respond to the rotation of the moon orbiting the earth — SO WHY SHOULD I EVER CONCLUDE THAT ANY OF YOU ARE ACTUALLY “RIGHT” ABOUT ANYTHING? All I see is repeated pathological LYING done by evolutionists in the evolution vs. poor old Kent Hovind’s Creationism!
I’ve been having some fun with a bizarrely didactic creationist comic book by one Jim Pinkoski that purports to explain all the flaws in evolutionary biology. What it really is is the most astounding collection of bad creationist arguments I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. I’ve been trying to slog through rebuttals, but unfortunately, it’s like every word and phrase is so far off kilter that it’s going to take me forever to get through it. One putative “problem” that I’ve already dealt with is that we only use 10% of our brains, and so scientists are stupid and untrustworthy, but here’s another one: evolution requires that everything be extraordinarily brilliant. Or in comic book speak,
Evolutionists are saying that “teeny-tiny” life forms somehow willed themselves to “evolve,” which means that we must credit
MICROBES
with being smarter than Albert Einstein!!!
I promised to show you some more of Pinkoski’s A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution, so here we go.
Pinkoski’s book is actually reasonably representative of the majority opinion held by creationists; the arguments in this book aren’t what you see openly presented by most of the Intelligent Design creationists, but do reflect what you’ll see in most of your small town church meetings and your big city mega-church revivals. Informed Christians are, of course, a bit embarrassed by the foolishness and don’t endorse this stuff, but unfortunately the kind of nonsense peddled by Gish and Hovind and Ham and Pinkoski is exactly what drives the creationist activists to get out and poison our public schools.
Which brings up a problem…if these are the people we want to persuade, we face a near-impossible task. Pinkoski’s book is 56 pages long, and every page contains a shocking array of falsehoods and outright stupid crap. There’s no point in pussy-footing around it; creationism in all of its forms is nothing but ignorance, misconceptions, dishonesty, credulity, and sloppy logic. I don’t think it helps the cause of reason to be gentle with fools, nor should we be trying to persuade creationist activists—all we can do is dissuade, by showing others the bankruptcy of their position.
And wow, but is A Creationist’s View of Dinosaurs and the Theory of Evolution an example of a foolish position.
How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!
Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah’s Ark, and announces that ‘THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A “MYTH”…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!‘ It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?
