Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Confusion Abounds
Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School "has been asking adults if 'human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals' since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word 'evolution' in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48 percent to 39 percent), as has the proportion who accept it (45 percent to 40 percent). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7 percentin 1985 to 21 percent in 2005."
From "Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology," by Liza Gross, a Science Writer for the Public Library of Science.
From "Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology," by Liza Gross, a Science Writer for the Public Library of Science.
