Who Believes in Evolution?

This chart comes from a new Pew Research Cen­ter study that looks at the world­wide accep­tance of evo­lu­tion 150 years after Dar­win’s On the Ori­gin of Species by Means of Nat­ur­al Selec­tion. At least in the Unit­ed States, only a minor­i­ty of the pub­lic believes in evo­lu­tion, large­ly because evan­gel­i­cal protes­tants (a large por­tion of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion) resist Dar­win’s think­ing far more strong­ly than oth­er world pop­u­la­tions. (The chart makes that sim­ple fact fair­ly clear.) A piece new­ly pub­lished by the Pew Cen­ter goes on to add:

Recent pub­lic opin­ion polls indi­cate that chal­lenges to Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion have sub­stan­tial sup­port among the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Accord­ing to an August 2006 sur­vey by the Pew Research Cen­ter’s Forum on Reli­gion & Pub­lic Life and the Pew Research Cen­ter for the Peo­ple & the Press, 63 per­cent of Amer­i­cans believe that humans and oth­er ani­mals have either always exist­ed in their present form or have evolved over time under the guid­ance of a supreme being. Only 26 per­cent say that life evolved sole­ly through process­es such as nat­ur­al selec­tion. A sim­i­lar Pew Research Cen­ter poll, released in August 2005, found that 64 per­cent of Amer­i­cans sup­port teach­ing cre­ation­ism along­side evo­lu­tion in the class­room.

For more infor­ma­tion, see the Pew Cen­ter’s larg­er web col­lec­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the Dar­win debate. Also see a new Gallup poll that puts Amer­i­can belief in evo­lu­tion at 39%.

via The Dai­ly Dish