Some Hopeful Science News for America

[TheProle]

Evolution Deniers Are Finally a Minority in the U.S.

A recent study found that acceptance of evolution among Americans has increased, even among religious fundamentalists.

Americans continue to have a challenging relationship with science, modern medicine, and at times reality, but a review of annual surveys from 1985 to 2019 does yield some good news: Over half of surveyed participants believed in the science of evolution. That’s a win, I guess.

Nearly a century ago, the Scopes trial of 1925 pitted a science teacher and his curriculum (which included evolutionary theory) against the state of Tennessee, which had just banned the subject in schools because, they said, it contradicted the Bible’s creation story. Evolutionary theory is the idea that living organisms change over time, adapting to their environments through a process called natural selection. The naturalist Charles Darwin observed and chronicled such adaptations in the beaks of finches in the Galapagos Islands. Like every other living thing, humans have evolved over time, and it’s that fact that certain folks seem to take the most issue with.

Over the decades, more and more Americans have accepted evolution by natural selection as a driving force of life on Earth. For a long time, though, the split was pretty much half-and-half, but a new study from the University of Michigan has found that the deniers are finally in the minority. The paper—published this week in the journal Public Understanding of Science—looked at opinions on evolution in public opinion surveys conducted since 1985. It found that a recent surge has pushed Americans over the halfway line in believing in the theory put forth by Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

https://gizmodo.com/evolution-deniers-are-finally-a-minority-in-the-u-s-1847528066

[Hugh_Lebowski]

1. That's f***ing pathetic (nt)

[FakeNoose]

2. It had to happen eventually, the old stupidity is finally dying off

The last 3 or 4 generations of Americans have grown up with science fiction movies, after all. Even the kiddos who watched "Jurassic Park" get it!

[lastlib]

3. Evolution is largely genetics and molecular biology.

Whales, orcas, and cattle are biologically related. Too many similarities in their genome maps to deny it. Of course their ancestries diverged tens, maybe hundreds of millions of years ago, but at some point they had common ancestries. Horses and canines have evolved through tremendous bodily and genetic changes, partly as a result of human selective breeding. It now takes colossally willful ignorance to deny that evolution has occurred among species. But some humans of the fundamentalist variety have accomplished it, much to our collective misery.