How Bad is the Ignorance Problem in the United States?

I see where CarlM gets your fixation on correlation, and it's inequality to causation.

-=T=-

If those numbers hold true, then we are truly in a sad state of existence. It's not like information (of any variety) is hard to come by these days. I think people have become accustomed to passive entertainment and education. In other words, I think people let others think for them. Which is a dangerous thing when in the wrong hands. I've also wondered if an abundance of information causes intellectual apathy (providing that there is such a term).
On a side note: Darwin was a brilliant man.

I should be clear. It is here where I understand what CarlM was talking about.

(Notice he hasn't said anything here.)

-=T=-

“All I did in this post is present actual poll data, without coming to any conclusions about what particular cause led to an outcome.”

:) You're learning.

But, at the risk of being accused of ganging up on you (I really hope this isn't how you perceive my earlier responses), I should point out that the title of your post implies that an ignorance of evolution is evidence of wider ignorance. As has already been pointed out by cooperati, this doesn't necessarily follow. I find that people are woefully ignorant about basic mathematics (there are college students who are not comfortable with fractions). In comparison to THOSE skills, an understanding of evolution is hardly necessary to live a productive life. Even the mathematical understanding that I think everyone ought to have is (obviously) NOT a prerequisite to being a productive member of society. Furthermore, ignorance of this mathematical content does NOT imply ignorance of things that are more important to these individuals. This is why those evolution polls show such a high number of people with no opinion. They just don't care and would rather state that they have no opinion than come down on the wrong side of a topic that they just don't care about.

Apart from a comment about statistics (see below), I agree wholeheartedly with cooperati's long post below.

I prefer to think of the problem in terms of “denial” instead of ignorance. People that decide to comfortably educate themselves in Creationism (in it's different forms) have to first deny the fossil evidence of evolution.

On the other hand, in many instances, Creationism is just a mask for a practice in “Faith”, which maintains that you must believe in something that cannot be proven. Having evidence, such as “Lucy” and “Chuck”, presents an observational obstacle that must be leaped over blindly to invest “faith” into Creationism.

In some ways, this goes against Biblical teaching. Creationism is an abstract “Golden Calf”, which people are not allowed to worship in the way they worship God.

from wikipedia:( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_calf )

“…the Ten Commandments to the Israelites, which included the Second Commandment regarding the prohibition against idolatry, that is, the making of images (similitudes) to be used in the worship of Yahweh.”

(Maybe only I see it this way.)

Ancillary, even contemporary items are overtaking and underscoring the primary goals and morals taught in the Bible, yet this is done by fringe extremists. True, if left unchecked, unanswered, they do proliferate.

The last true hurdle for society in their absorption of Evolution is that they, in large part, have no use for it. Besides being human with all it's prior presumptions and instincts drawing emotionally rationalized conclusions, the average member of society has no use for, or interest in, the information concerning our actual origins. I consider this a loss.

But the net gain is in those who do share the truth, and conduct irrefutable research towards a better understanding of all real sciences.

And, ultimately, a vast majority of those researchers, in my opinion, are members of one religious demographic or another. They call themselves “Christian”, “Muslim”, “Buddhists”, no matter what disqualifiers can be made where they don't fit into a unrealistically confining definition of “religious”.

Here, I see no correlation. This data, as presented, is artistically subjective. For example: “The Majority of Republicans Doubt the Theory of Evolution | Gallup, 2007″ was a polling of 1000 people over three days. Too small a pool to make a generalization covering the views of the nation.

With so much being said, I'd like to leave behind a note of hope: in March 2009, The Vatican in Rome hosted a symposium called “Biological Evolution Fact and Theories: A Critical Appraisal 150 Years After The Origin of Species”. ( http://www.evolution-rome2009.net/ ) Hopefully more will be discussed, exposed, and clarified to humanity's benefit.

One thing is for sure, in this case, they aren't shutting the doors on the truth facing them. For them, this is a test they face to see if denial and ignorance are left at the door. If the Church is so much of a cause of such ignorance, then so much the greater is the credit due to those who have so much to lose in this endeavor.

-=T=-

ps: another worthwhile contemporary early evolutionist of Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the scientist who was onto the idea of evolution before Darwin, also celebrates his 200th anniversary.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/lamarck.html

That he is an obscure figure who died in poverty, despite his accomplishments, shows how hard it is for general society to accept the theories being presented to them.

Nice post .. I have a couple of comments.

(1) A sample of 1000 (if it is well selected to represent the population [RANDOM selection works best]) is enough to give pretty solid results in a survey like that one. Perhaps counterintuitively, it turns out that the population size is largely irrelevant in cases like this. 1000 from a population of 1 million gives almost exactly the same precision as 1000 from a population of 100 million.

(2) Lamark suffered the fate of a talented and hard working scientist who got it ALMOST right, but you're right. He desreves to be remembered as more than the guy whose hypothesized mechanism for evolution turned out to be wrong. The fact is, he was using the scientific method and it takes time for theories to be fine tuned.