g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
17:14 - Eppur si muove
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2006/08/go_usa_were_2_kind_of.php

(top) link
According to this poll on a Science Guy's Blog with a link to a Robert Fisk book in the sidebar, the U.S. ranks 33rd out of 34 polled countries in acceptance of evolution, edging out only Turkey, with 44%.

Yeah, not too inspiring. Surely great fodder for anyone who would like to use it to demonstrate America's woeful international aspect and endemic stupidity. "It's not that the bear dances well, but that he dances at all!" they'll chortle. And yet... somehow the world keeps turning.

Is there some reason why they didn't poll (or publish the results from) countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Malaysia, Egypt, and India, where perhaps the "acceptance" number might be lower still than America's?

Is there some reason why they didn't poll (or publish the results from) countries like Russia, China, Australia, or Canada, where presumably their "acceptance" numbers would have been a lot higher, and surely poll data would have been easy to obtain?

What about countries like Israel, whose "acceptance" figure might well be pretty damn low—but who somehow manage to keep contributing to the world's scientific and technological wealth far beyond the measure of their population?

I spent my youth being as indignantly anti-religion and self-congratulatingly pro-science as this guy is, and went to the most science-oriented college available accordingly. In the intervening years since I graduated, though, I've learned to let go of the all-too-easy assumption that just because someone is religious, or even that he prefers religious explanations of natural phenomena over scientific ones, means he's an ignoramus or a doofus. A humbling roommate experience will do that to a guy.

Certainly it might help to assuage the inevitable cognitive dissonance that arises from seeing a poll like this and having to face the reality that somehow, despite it all, America is still America. And that maybe it's not despite these facts that it is so, but maybe, in some way, in part, because of them.

No, we won't be shifting to the spiritual metric system anytime soon. But that doesn't necessarily mean we're just too stupid to. Maybe we've got our reasons. They might even be good ones.

Via Daring Fireball.


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