Last week was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, and The Economist did a piece on it. Here is a depressing graph of public acceptance of evolution in Europe and the United States:
Only in the U.S. and Turkey does less than 50% of the populace understand evolution to be true. The inverse correlation with belief in God is much referenced, but the article suggests that some pundits (notably Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman) do not believe one causes the other. Rather, they believe that the more "secure" a society is (based on abundant food, national health care, and accessible housing), the more the society believes in evolution and the less in God.
It's sad (to this scientist's brain) that so many interesting hypotheses about human psychology are so difficult to test in a properly controlled manner. How would I do it if I could? I think I'd take a cohort of 10,000 21-year-olds from across the United States and divide them randomly into five cohorts. Every year, I would send each person a questionnaire about their religious and scientific beliefs. I would make it clear to everyone that they would get a check in return for a completed questionnaire each year. People in cohort 1 would get a check for $200. People in cohort 2 would get a check for $1000. Cohort 3 would get $5000 each, cohort 4 would get $25,000, and lucky cohort 5 would get $125,000 each. I think for this to work, we would need to endow the study to give people this amount of money for a long time, perhaps for life. If the hypothesis is correct, we would see a direct correlation between monetary assistance (which should be a reasonable proxy for "security" of basic needs) and belief in evolution.
It would take on the order of $5 billion to ensure this study would work for sixty years. Anyone want to chip in?
Only in the U.S. and Turkey does less than 50% of the populace understand evolution to be true. The inverse correlation with belief in God is much referenced, but the article suggests that some pundits (notably Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman) do not believe one causes the other. Rather, they believe that the more "secure" a society is (based on abundant food, national health care, and accessible housing), the more the society believes in evolution and the less in God.
It's sad (to this scientist's brain) that so many interesting hypotheses about human psychology are so difficult to test in a properly controlled manner. How would I do it if I could? I think I'd take a cohort of 10,000 21-year-olds from across the United States and divide them randomly into five cohorts. Every year, I would send each person a questionnaire about their religious and scientific beliefs. I would make it clear to everyone that they would get a check in return for a completed questionnaire each year. People in cohort 1 would get a check for $200. People in cohort 2 would get a check for $1000. Cohort 3 would get $5000 each, cohort 4 would get $25,000, and lucky cohort 5 would get $125,000 each. I think for this to work, we would need to endow the study to give people this amount of money for a long time, perhaps for life. If the hypothesis is correct, we would see a direct correlation between monetary assistance (which should be a reasonable proxy for "security" of basic needs) and belief in evolution.
It would take on the order of $5 billion to ensure this study would work for sixty years. Anyone want to chip in?
Looking at the limited sample there, I am inclined to believe that the colder a place is, the more likely people are to believe in evolution.
ReplyDeleteI propose an additional experiment. Let's forcibly relocate 10,000 people from colder climates to warmer climates, and vise versa.
An excellent point! Or as a proxy for climate (getting people to relocate might be hard) we might collect 10,000 21-year-olds and put them randomly into two groups where one group has their thermostats set to 73 degrees and the other group has their thermostats set to 67 degrees. Would the colder people believe more in evolution?
ReplyDeleteSo what explains the highly variable quality of the questions asked by pollsters and survey writers? One phrasing http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm leads to the conclusion that less than half of Britons believe in evolution, while the numbers the Economist reprinted indicate that it's more like 75% and one of the highest rates in the world.
ReplyDeleteSo I would suggest that we might be looking at the wrong independent variable. Perhaps the key question is not whether the survey respondents are cold, but whether the authors of the questions are cold. Cold question-writers phrase questions more likely to be answered "Yes" while warm question-writers' questions are likely to elicit more "No"s.
Translation becomes a key issue when considering polls across language regions, certainly. This sort of thing has been replicated quite a number of times rather consistently within a poll (though the absolute percentage can vary from poll to poll depending on wording).
ReplyDelete