An analysis of surveys on public acceptance of evolution shows that American adults are less likely to believe in evolution compared to their counterparts in 32 European nations and Japan.
During the past 20 years, the percentage of U.S. adults accepting the idea of evolution has declined from 45% to 40%. In Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and France, however, 80% or more of adults accepted evolution, as did 78% of Japanese adults.
“We are not moving in the right direction in what we should be believing,” said Jon D. Miller, Michigan State University’s Hannah Professor of Integrative Studies, of Americans’ views on evolution. Miller coauthored the report with Eugenie C. Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and Shinji Okamoto of Kobe University in Japan.
Miller and his colleagues found that the percentage of adults who were uncertain about evolution increased from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005. “This shows the opportunity for education,” Scott explained. “Science teachers and professors can take heart. This is where they can make a contribution.” Basic concepts of evolution should be taught in middle school, high school, and college life science courses, urged the study’s authors.
Miller’s team identified three reasons that help to explain Americans’ reservations about evolution when compared to its broad acceptance in Europe and Japan.
The most significant factor, said Miller, was the influence of fundamentalist religions. “The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution was nearly twice as much in the United Sates, which indicates that individuals who hold a strong belief in a personal God, and who pray frequently, were significantly less likely to view evolution as probably or definitely true than adults with less conservative religious views,” he explained.
Politics is another reason for the global variance in the acceptance of evolution. No major political party exists in Europe and Japan that uses opposition to evolution as a part of its political platform, said Miller. “In the United States, there are people who think it is a political advantage to discount evolution.”
The fact that many American adults lack genetic literacy also plays a role, Miller pointed out. To illustrate this, he and his colleagues note in the study that only a third of American adults agree that more than half of human genes are identical to those of mice, and only 38% of adults recognize that humans have more than half of their genes in common with chimpanzees.
Miller used Knowledge Networks, an online national sample of households selected on a probability basis, to collect the U.S. data. The European Commission primarily used personal interviews to collect the data for the European countries. The Japanese data was also gathered via personal interviews conducted in 2001. All of the data gathered for the study was weighted to reflect actual population distributions and is comparable across countries.
The study appears in the August 11 issue of Science magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.