Frightening news

Updated Never mind everything you have seen, read, heard, or written about blue and red, urban and rural, coast and midlands, all of it. Forget it. Dump it. This is the real divide, the true divide that overrides all the rest. This is the bottom line. And I am deeply and genuinely frightened.

In an article about Dover, Pennsylvania, which just became the first school district in the country to mandate the teaching of the intellectual fraud called "intelligent design," Tuesday's San Francisco Chronicle mentions two recent national surveys relating to evolution.

A Gallup poll taken November 7-10 came up with these results:

In your opinion, is Darwin's theory supported by evidence?
Supported by evidence, 35%
Not supported, 35%
Don't know enough to say, 29%

Which best describes your views of the origin of life?
Man developed with God guiding, 38%
Man developed with no help from God, 13%
God created man in present form, 45%

And a CBS poll taken November 18-21 was if anything even more disturbing:

Percentage favoring the teaching of creationism instead of evolution
Overall, 37%
Kerry voters, 24%
Bush voters, 45%
Self-described evangelical Christians, 60%

The first question is absurd and even anti-science: Scientific theories are not matters of opinion but of observation, experiment, and prediction. If "Darwin's theory" had insufficient evidence to support it, it never would have become a theory! (Sidebar: "Darwin's theory" is a misnomer for evolutionary theory, since few if any still hold to Darwin's precise formulation; the gathering of knowledge did not stop the instant his book The Origin of Species was published.) So what we're actually talking about here is not evolution but what some people desire to believe about evolution. Not to understand, know, or conclude, but believe.

You don't have to be an evolutionary biologist, you don't have to have read the research papers yourself, to know if evolution (or any principle in science) has evidence to support it. All you have to do is know if there is a general consensus on the matter. You simply have to pay some minimal attention, especially on a question that keeps coming up, like evolution.

The fact that despite that, over a third of respondents say evolution is not supported by evidence (and nearly half are outright creationists) displays a level of know-nothingism in our society, a depth of intellectual torpor, an isolation from knowledge of the world around them, that is chilling.

Certainly the carefully-crafted PR strategies of the creationists (or, as they prefer to be called these days, advocates of "intelligent design"), saying they're only striving for "fairness" and "balance" and even "academic freedom," are part of the reason for this sorry state of affairs. Another is the corporate media, instinctively choosing conflict over resolution: The "controversy" of "intelligent design" v. "Darwin" is much more attractive to, much more fun for, editors, publishers, and reporters than presenting the dull straightforward fact that so-called "intelligent design" is trash, an anti-science pursuit that, whenever it comes up against a question to which it does not already know the answer, throws up its hands, declares "God - excuse me, some intelligent and supremely powerful but (wink, wink) unnamed force - did it," and stops trying to learn. But that doesn't change the underlying fact that scams like "intelligent design" succeed because people want to believe them.

So what's worse is the fact that more than a third of respondents - and a quarter of Kerry voters, you know, the ones who are supposedly "better informed" - want schools to teach creationism instead of - not even in addition to, but instead of - evolution. It's worse because that represents not only an isolation from knowledge but a deliberate rejection of it and one that would be deliberately passed down to the next generation.

So that, my friends, I say is the true divide. Not between red and blue, not between believers and non-believers, but between those who embrace knowledge and those who flee from it, between those who face challenges and those who fear change, between those for who the world is a sun-filled glade full of wonders waiting to be discovered and understood and those for who the world is a dark forest full of snarling beasts waiting to devour them. I suppose in some ways this is like the "reality-based"/"faith-based" divide that's been discussed but I think this is deeper, more profound, and more dangerous. It's a confidence/fear divide, or perhaps even more accurately, a knowledge/ignorance divide.

And like the man in the movie said, "fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy - and needs feeding."

Footnote: While drawing from the famous trial, the play and movie were actually about McCarthyism. And the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a good source for information to defend science against the rightists' onslaught.

Updated to say that in looking through the NCSE site, I learned that the Gallup results are similar to results from previous Gallup polls, some of which date back to 1982. Which means that overall, beliefs haven't changed much over the last 20 years. What we're seeing, if these results are accurate, is not so much a shift in beliefs as increasing political pressure about them. Now I just have to figure out if that makes things better or worse.