Why Evolution Is True Read Free

from other creatures? Evolution is also thought to erode morality. If, after all, we are simply beasts, then why not behave like beasts? What can keep us moral if we’re nothing more than monkeys with big brains? No other scientific theory produces such angst, or such psychological resistance.
    It’s clear that this resistance stems largely from religion. You can find religions without creationism, but you never find creationism without religion. Many religions not only deem humans as special, but deny evolution by asserting that we, like other species, were objects of an instantaneous creation by a deity. While many religious people have found a way to accommodate evolution with their spiritual beliefs, no such reconciliation is possible if one adheres to the literal truth of a special creation. That is why opposition to evolution is so strong in the United States and Turkey, where fundamentalist beliefs are pervasive.
    Statistics show starkly how resistant we are to accepting the plain scientific fact of evolution. Despite incontrovertible evidence for evolution’s truth, year after year polls show that Americans are depressingly suspicious about this single branch of biology. In 2006, for example, adults in thirty-two countries were asked to respond to the assertion “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” by answering whether they considered it true, false, or were unsure. Now, this statement is flatly true: as we will see, genetic and fossil evidence shows that humans descend from a primate lineage that split off from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago. And yet only 40 percent of Americans—four in ten people—judge the statement true (down 5 percent from 1985). This figure is nearly matched by the proportion of people who say it’s false: 39 percent. And the rest, 21 percent, are simply unsure.
    This becomes even more remarkable when we compare these statistics to those from other Western countries. Of the thirty-one other nations surveyed, only Turkey, rife with religious fundamentalism, ranked lower in accepting evolution (25 percent accept, 75 percent reject). Europeans, on the other hand, score much better, with over 80 percent of French, Scandinavians, and Icelanders seeing evolution as true. In Japan, 78 percent of people agree that humans evolved. Imagine if America ranked next to last among countries accepting the existence of atoms! People would immediately go to work improving education in the physical sciences.
    And evolution gets bumped down even further when it comes to deciding not whether it’s true, but whether it should be taught in the public schools. Nearly two-thirds of Americans feel that if evolution is taught in the science classroom, creationism should be as well. Only 12 percent—one in eight people—think that evolution should be taught without mentioning a creationist alternative. Perhaps the “teach all sides” argument appeals to the American sense of fair play, but to an educator it’s truly disheartening. Why teach a discredited, religiously based theory, even one widely believed, alongside a theory so obviously true? It’s like asking that shamanism be taught in medical school alongside Western medicine, or astrology be presented in psychology class as an alternative theory of human behavior. Perhaps the most frightening statistic is this: despite legal prohibitions, nearly one in eight American high school biology teachers admits to presenting creationism or intelligent design in the classroom as a valid scientific alternative to Darwinism. (This may not be surprising given that one in six teachers believes that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years.”)
    Sadly, antievolutionism, often thought to be a peculiarly American problem, is now spreading to other countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom. In the UK, a 2006 poll by the BBC asked