390 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
creationist like DeVos tries to cripple public education while funneling tax dollars to private
religious schools that teach creationism, not science?
When the prophetess Cassandra told the Trojans what they didn’t want to hear, they
ignored her and were eventually destroyed. If science tells us that we have evolved from the
animal kingdom, or that microbes are evolving resistances to all our medicines, or that our
wasteful society is destroying our planet, we had better learn from it, rather than shooting
the messenger—and letting our children pay the ultimate price for our folly.
Polling Problems—and a Ray of Hope
Having battled creationism for most of my professional career (more than 40 years now),
I sometimes find myself despairing that nothing ever seems to change or get better. For
decades now, the Gallup Poll has surveyed Americans about their belief in evolution and
creation. Year in and year out, the numbers seem to remain constant: about 40–45 percent of
Americans appear to be young-earth creationists (YEC). The exact phrasing of the question
in the Gallup Poll is as follows:
Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and
development of human beings: human beings have evolved over millions of years
from other forms of life and God guided this process, human beings have evolved over
millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process, or God
created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.For decades about 44 percent of the respondents agree to the last answer (YEC), another
37 percent chose the first answer (theistic evolution, ID creationist), and only 12 percent
favor the second answer (nontheistic evolution). Gallup wrote these questions decades ago,
before there was much understanding of how the framing of a question can bias the answer,
and for decades, they have kept the question the same, so comparisons remain consistent.
But social scientists know that polls can be very misleading, especially in the way the ques-
tion is framed to force certain responses. For example, the Gallup poll only gives us three
possibilities and loads two of the answers with “God,” which is an obvious bias right from
the start. In addition, there is good evidence to suggest that human evolution is the real stick-
ing point and that most people don’t care one way or another if nonhuman creatures evolve
or not. What if we asked people what they thought about specific scientific ideas, indepen-
dent of emotional issues like “God” and “humans”?
As Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) pointed out:
In 2009, Pew stripped away the religious issues and explicit reference to the age of
the earth by asking people if they agreed that “Humans and other living things have
evolved over time due to natural processes” or alternatively “existed in their present
form since the beginning of time.” Six in ten opted for evolution.
In 2005, when the Harris Poll asked people “Do you think human beings devel-
oped from earlier species or not,” 38 percent agreed that humans did develop from
early species, but in the same survey, 49 percent agreed with evolution when asked:
“Do you believe all plants and animals have evolved from other species or not?” So
explicitly mentioning human evolution led to 11 percent of people switching from
pro-evolution to anti-evolution. In a 2009 survey, Harris asked a Gallup-like ques-