Ignorance of the Public about Evolution

While I've sort of known this was the case, an article at Creation Watch (http://www.csicop.org/creationwatch/) by Matthew Nisbet called "Polling Opinion about Evolution" documents the abysmal reality of the situation.

People just don't know the facts and this represents a fundamental failure in our system of education. According to Nisbet, "...in a November 2004 Gallup poll, respondents were asked: 'Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is: a scientific theory that has been well supported by evidence, or just one of many theories and one that has not been well-supported by evidence, or don’t you know enough to say?' Only 35% of Americans indicated a scientific theory supported by evidence, whereas 35% indicated that evolution was just one among many theories, and 29% answered they didn’t know."

How do you suppose 64% of these folks missed that Evolution is one of the most extensively verified and accepted theories in the scientific community? Nisbet goes on to say that in a Newsweek poll the next month, "...45% of respondents indicated that evolution was well supported, compared to 42% who believed that scientists had serious doubts, with 13% answering they didn’t know."

I don't know of any reputable scientist that has doubts about the validity of the fundamental theory of evolution although some aspects of the theory continue to be rather hotly debated. In a 2001 survey Nisbet reports "...nearly eight out of ten (79%) believe that 'The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future,' and a slight majority (53%) agree with the statement that: 'Human beings as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.'

Accepting continental drift while not accepting evolution is a tad inconsistent as the two theories tend to compliment each other while contradicting any sort of acceptance of the creationist view.

The bottom line is that people just don't appear to have access to the facts. In another article, "Why do Scientists Get so Angry When Dealing with ID Proponents," Jason Rosenhouse shows how the folks pushing ID take advantage of this lack of information by repeatedly making spurious arguments against evolution. While these arguments are readily recognized as nonsense by those with better than average scientific knowledge they are very often NOT readily recognized as such by the majority of folks. The fact that the invalidity of these arguments has been repeatedly pointed out to those making them doesn't seem to stop them from continuing to be made. This is so common that these arguments even have their own acronym. They're called PRATTs, which stands for Point Refuted A Thousand Times.