First the bad (and somewhat old) news. In a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.�

It is hard to believe that there could be any good news behind this mind-boggling statistic that implies that up to 47 percent of Americans are unwilling to accept a fundamental tenet of evolution and believe that human beings appeared by a special act of creation about 10,000 years ago.

But there is a nugget of good news to be found, since this is the first time that even a simple majority of Americans had accepted that statement.

But even that small glimmer of hope is buried under more bad news. Even though a majority has come around to the accepted scientific view of the origin of humans, the US still lags far behind other countries. In a New York Times article on February 1, 2005, Dr. Joe Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University is quoted as saying that in other industrialized countries, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, while most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright.

He goes on to say that in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, while in Japan it is close to a whopping 96 percent.

So what is different about the US? There are some obvious reasons that can be postulated. One is that the US is in the grip of Biblical literalists who indoctrinate young children with young-Earth ideas and frighten them with the flames of hell if they should deviate from that dogma.

Another is that evolution is either not being taught at all, or is being taught badly so as to be unconvincing, or its teaching is being deliberately undermined (such as using disclaimer stickers in biology textbooks that evolution is “only a theory”, teaching of ‘intelligent design’ as an alternative) by fraudulent claims that it is not a scientifically acceptable theory. The response to these kinds of explanations is to argue for more and better teaching of evolution in schools.

While I am all in favor of better teaching of anything, I am not convinced that inadequate teaching of evolution is the main problem. It may lie in the way the nature of science is taught, and correcting this might require us to pay more close attention to the image we convey of how science itself works and evolves. This may require us to focus, not on more teaching of evolution or any other specific topic, but more generally on the history and philosophy of science.

More about this in a later posting…