crazyfingers

I was poking around and found this survey from the People for the American Way.

The focus is evolution and creationism in public schools.

There is a lot of stuff and worth browsing.

One interesting thing they found was that of the people who could identify the correct definition of evolution, 70% supported teaching it in public school.

Of those who could not identify the correct definition for evolution 55% did not support teaching it in public schools.

And only 50% of those who had even heard the term before could identify the correct definition. And they think that they know enough to even have an opinion? Amazing.

Source

This I think confirms what we run into here all the time.

Anyway, there are some other interesting findings in there.

Undercurrent

I take a dim view of any survey result of the type, "out of the people with demonstrated knowledge of a subject, more people agree/disagree with it."

There was a survey a while back, out of Simon Frasier University, I think, about Canadian gun laws which resulted in something like, "while most Canadians are for increased gun control, those who know about current gun control laws, as evidenced by their performance on a quiz, are opposed to increased gun control laws." The quiz contained questions like, "What is the penalty for gun offense xxx".

The impression it was meant to give was "as you learn more about current gun control laws, the morw you'll think they're adequate", but "those who know the most about gun control laws tend to be gun owners, who would be the most inconvenienced by new gun control laws" fits the data just as well.

Similiarly, the data CF presents are meant to mean, "as one learns more about evolution, the more one supports its teaching," but they also support, "the population of people who identify the correct definition of evolution is weighted towards members of the liberal, homosexual, feminist, satanic conspiracy that wants to indoctorinate our red-blooded american children through the schools with their godless theories," just as well.

I also don't think that the choices for "definition of evolution" were very good. The choices:

• “Evolution means human beings have developed from apes over the past millions of years”
• “Evolution means human beings have developed from less advanced forms of life over millions of years”
• Means something else / Not sure

where the second definition was called "correct" were flawed. I would have picked the third option, since the second deals solely with human evolution, which a definition of evolution in general should not do, and brings up that "less advanced" wording, which is a subjective judgement alluding to the discredited "chain of beings".