Why Does It Matter? 391tion, in which only 29 percent agreed that “Human beings evolved from earlier spe-
cies,” but in a separate question from the same poll, 53 percent said that they “believe
Charles Darwin’s theory which states that plants, animals and human beings have
evolved over time.” Placing the issue in a scientific context, with no overt religious
context, yields higher support for evolution.
The National Science Board’s biennial report on Science and Engineering Indica-
tors includes a survey on science literacy which, since the early 1980s, has asked if
people agree that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier
species of animals.” About 46 percent of the American public consistently agree with
that option, about the same number who back the middle option in Gallup’s surveys.
Clearly, people respond to these subtle shifts in how the question is framed, tak-
ing a harder stance toward human evolution than to the idea that animals and plants
evolve, and stepping away from evolution if it is pitched in opposition to religion.
Pollster George Bishop surveyed the diversity of survey responses in 2006 and con-
cluded: “All of this goes to show how easily what Americans appear to believe about
human origins can be readily manipulated by how the question is asked.”
In 2009, Bishop ran a survey that clarifies how many people really think the earth
is only 10,000 years old. In survey results published by Reports of NCSE, Bishop found
that 18 percent agreed that “the earth is less than 10,000 years old.” But he also found
that 39 percent agreed “God created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon, stars,
plants, animals, and the first two people within the past 10,000 years.” Again, ques-
tion wording and context clearly both matter a lot.
For more evidence that the number of true YECs is fairly small, consider another
question from the survey run by the National Science Board since the early ’80s. In
that survey, about 80 percent consistently agree “The continents on which we live
have been moving their locations for millions of years and will continue to move in
the future.” Ten percent say they don’t know, leaving only about 10 percent reject-
ing continental drift over millions of years. Though young-earth creationists often
latch onto continental drift as a sudden process during Noah’s flood (as a way to
explain how animals could get from the Ark to separate continents), they certainly
don’t think the continents moved over millions of years. This question puts a cap of
about 10 percent on the number of committed young-earth creationists, lower even
than what Bishop found. More people in the NSB science literacy survey didn’t know
that the father’s genes determine the sex of a baby, thought all radioactivity came
from human activities, or disagreed that the earth goes around the sun.This is a very different picture than the Gallup polls suggest. Most people don’t regard plate
tectonics and continental drift as controversial (YECs must deny its existence), don’t have
any problem with the evolution of nonhuman animals and plants, or an earth more than
10,000 years old. On average, this suggests that the true YECs are only about 10 percent
of the American population (31 million people), another 25 percent prefer creationism but
not necessarily a young earth. That’s about 35 percent creationists total, not the 45 percent
Gallup suggests. About 10 percent of Americans (another 31 million people) are nontheistic
evolutionists, another 33 percent or so lean toward evolution, giving us about 35 percent
evolutionists, not the 12 percent suggested by Gallup. The remaining third in the middle
also seem to accept evolution, but believe God or gods were involved somehow. Thus, about