386 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
of the Apes. Taylor, the marooned human astronaut (played, ironically, by the conservative
icon Charlton Heston), has fled into the Forbidden Zone, where the sympathetic ape, Dr. Cor-
nelius, has shown him an archeological excavation that proves humans lived on the planet
before apes became dominant. Once they are all captured by the gorilla storm troopers, the
head ape, Dr. Zaius, orders the cave dynamited and the evidence destroyed. As he says in the
film, the evidence might shake their belief systems and therefore it is too dangerous.
With the creationist threats to schools, universities, and museums, are we in danger of
letting dogmatic religious authorities destroy the evidence of our own evolution because
it challenges their belief systems? If the fundamentalists continue to expand their politi-
cal power, are we in for another Inquisition, with the religious fanatics suppressing and
destroying books and evidence, and harassing anyone who doesn’t agree with them? Many
countries in the world ruled by fundamentalist regimes (especially in fundamentalist Mus-
lim countries, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban or the extremist mullahs ruling Iran)
already showed that this is possible.
- Thanks in part to creationists, the American public is appallingly illiterate in basic
science.
Every study and survey that has been done for decades shows consistently that Americans
are among the most scientifically illiterate of all westernized nations. Carl Sagan (1996) esti-
mated that 95 percent of Americans were scientifically illiterate, and most could not give
the correct scientific answers to the simplest questions such as: What is a molecule? What is
a cell? What is DNA? Less than 50 percent knew that the earth goes around the sun once a
year, and a small percentage thought the sun goes around the earth. And thanks to creation-
ism, only 35 percent thought that the Big Bang theory was correct, and 48 percent agreed
with creationists and the Flintstones that humans lived with dinosaurs. The embarrassing list
goes on and on, making the United States the laughingstock of the educated world. Every
survey that has been conducted in recent years ranks American science literacy near the
bottom of the 40 westernized nations that were compared. Countries like Japan, China, the
Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany nearly always rank at the top,
while America usually ranks with several underdeveloped nations with a fraction of our
wealth and nowhere near the money available to spend on education (fig. 16.2).
There have been lots of arguments about why Americans are so scientifically illiterate,
but the evidence is pretty clear. Of all the developed nations of the world, only the United
States has a significant creationist influence in politics. There is no significant creationist
influence pressuring lawmakers in Canada or in any other European or Asian country with
a developed economy. As figs. 16.2 and 16.3 show, the key predictor of science illiteracy is
any question that is influenced by creationism, whether it deals with the Big Bang, the age
of the earth, or evolution directly. No other variable is so predictive of science illiteracy in a
westernized country.
It wasn’t always this bad. During the Sputnik scare and space race of the late 1950s
and early 1960s, Americans were shocked to discover how far they had fallen behind and
brought back rigorous and engaging science education—only to see it languish as creation-
ism has eaten away at the textbooks and the demands of standardized testing have pushed
the time in the curriculum toward subjects covered in the test, leaving science (and physical
education and art and music and many other subjects) out in the cold.