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1. Cindy Scroggins on February 12th, 2009 at 10:37 am

   A new Gallup poll found that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution.”

   I think I need to go back to the donut shop.

2. Lucy Foley on February 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am

   Well in a similar poll, also gallup I believe, only 50% of Britons believed in evolution.

3. Cindy Scroggins on February 12th, 2009 at 10:47 am

   I find the whole concept of believing in the theory of evolution astonishing. Do people believe in gravity? Do people believe in germs? The way people approach scientific theory–as if it’s all “just a matter of opinion”–boggles my mind.

4. Deron Bauman on February 12th, 2009 at 10:54 am

   you have a self-perpetuating system based on the submergence of mind. he’s a man of faith. none of his evidence points to reality, but he perseveres.

5. Cooper Renner on February 12th, 2009 at 11:29 am

   Happy birthday, Lincoln, too! Amazing to think of those two men sharing a birthday. 200 years for them both!

6. Mike Dresser on February 12th, 2009 at 11:31 am

   It’s all a matter of semantics; the map is not the territory. “Do you believe in evolution” now means to those 39 percent “would you like to take this opportunity to deny the Holy Bible”. I would like to think very few of those people are pulling their kids out of biology class, demanding textbook re-writes. It’s frustrating…double-think like that is either how bad things start, or how they peter out.

7. Mike Dresser on February 12th, 2009 at 11:31 am

   Er, the other 60-odd percent, that is. Still.

8. John Buaas on February 13th, 2009 at 8:03 am

   I don’t have a link to this, but yesterday (I think it was), there was a story on NPR about a coalition of pastors, several thousand in number, who on Sunday will preach sermons about the compatibility between, generally speaking, Science and Religion. Evolution Sunday, it’s being called. One fellow interviewed for the story and who will be delivering one such sermon is a Southern Baptist pastor in Maryland.

   In that same survey, by the way, it reveals two things that should be heartening: 1) The more education a person has, the more likely s/he will “believe” in evolution; 2) younger people are more likely to “believe.” I think it’s important to remember when looking at stuff like this that even among scientists there isn’t instant acceptance of ideas now taken for granted: plate tectonics is now the broadly-accepted theory that it is basically because its naysayers have all died off. Wide acceptance of truths comes as much (maybe more?) via simple attrition as through persuasion–which, by the way, is how Richard Dawkins describes how memes (the propagation of ideas) work.

   I have no problem reconciling Darwinism with my faith. Those who see those as mutually exclusive and yet cannot acknowledge the broad correspondence in the sequence of events (I’m not speaking of mechanisms or scales of time here) described in Genesis and by evolutionary theory are, frankly, having some troubles with the basics of reading comprehension, no matter how they think of either the Bible or science. But it’s just as important for advocates of science to be clear that evolution is properly called a theory for a reason: while the general principles of evolution are not at issue among the vast majority of scientists, the particulars of its mechanisms are still very much at issue. Even so, the latter fact in no way invalidates the former fact. We still lack The One True Equation that accounts for all of gravity’s manifestations in the cosmos, but gravity itself is no less a fact for all that.

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