Latest Gallup Creationism Poll

Published by Steven Novella under Creationism/ID, Evolution

Surveys are always tricky because how you ask a question can have a dramatic impact on how people answer. But it is useful to ask the exact same question over a long period of time, because that can indicate how public attitudes are changing. This is one of the benefits of Gallup, which was founded in 1935 and is dedicated to high quality and representative polls. They have been asking the following question since 1982:

“Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?”

It’s an imperfect way to ask these questions – the “less advanced life forms” is not really accurate, and the questions all assume or imply the existence of God. But by asking “which one comes closest” it does capture the essence of this issue. Option 3 is basically young-Earth creationism, option 2 is pure scientific evolution, and option 1 is everything else. From my view as a skeptic and science communicator, the results of this survey are dismal but also encouraging. At the start of the survey in 1982 the numbers were stark: 1 – 38%, 2 – 9%, and 3 – 44% (the rest undecided). Therefore 82% of Americans endorsed some form of creationism, and only 9% were willing to say that life resulted from evolution acting all by itself.

The most recent poll from this perspective is encouraging: 1 – 34%, 2 – 24%, and 3 – 37%. There is still a plurality endorsing young-Earth creationism, but those endorsing scientific evolution is up to 24%. These numbers also track with surveys on religion in the US. The young-Earth creationism figure is about the same as the number of Americans who identify as some kind of evangelical (something between 30 and 39%). Admittedly, this number can be squirrely depending on how you define “evangelical” and ask the question, but broadly defined, the numbers track. The scientific evolution numbers also track with those who answer on surveys that they are religiously unaffiliated, also now in the 20’s.

One way to look at these numbers is that, on this specific issue, science education and communication may be entirely irrelevant. How you answer this question may be entirely due to your religious affiliation. But this can also mean that two thirds of Americans are open to the concept of evolution and could benefit from science communication on this topic. I also find that discussing claims surrounding creationism and evolution is a great way to teach science and critical thinking.

So let me pivot to a brief summary of why, as a scientific question, there is little doubt that life on Earth is the result of organic evolution. What I mean by this is that once life arose on Earth (the origin of life is a distinct but related question), a combination of variation followed by differential survival lead to evolution of living forms over time, including speciation, and resulting in a nestled hierarchy of branching relationships, resulting in all life that we see today on Earth. Variation derives from genetic mutations and recombination, while differential survival results from selective pressures and “survival of the fittest” but also genetic drift and possibly other factors.

Creationists (now using the term to broadly refer to all forms of evolution denial) have attempted to prove that evolution in this way is impossible or cannot work, but all such attempts have completely failed. Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics (because the sun is inputting energy into the biosphere), is capable of generating an increase in information (through gene duplication and mutations), and does not have a problem with “irreducible complexity” (a concept that fundamentally misunderstands how evolution works).

Meanwhile the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, especially for the basic concept that all life is related through a nestled hierarchy of evolutionary relationships. We see this evidence when we look at the pattern of living things and how they are spread throughout the world. It’s not random – there is a reason, for example, that marsupials dominate in Australia. We see this in the fossil record, which extends our observations of anatomical patterns not only in space but time. The fossil record also fills in many gaps in the “tree of life”, revealing transitional species and the pattern of what evolved into what. l

Perhaps most powerful, however, is the molecular evidence. Genes evolved from other genes, and we can see this pattern as well, which nicely overlaps with species relationships. We see the same overlapping pattern when we look at protein structures, and at genetic sequences. We even see this pattern when we look at viral inclusions – bits of viral DNA that get stuck in the genome and get passed down. Species with shared ancestors tend to have shared viral inclusions as well. There is simply no possibility that the molecular patterns we seen in proteins and genes is a coincidence. You also cannot explain these clearly evolutionary patterns away by invoking function – we see these evolutionary patterns even when function is not involved, like in silent mutations and viral inclusions.

There is also evidence from developmental biology, as creatures develop in a pattern that reflects their evolutionary history. Develop does not exactly follow prior evolutionary forms, because there is no reason it should, but the stamp of evolutionary history is still clearly seen. The bones in our inner ear, for example, were previously part of the jaw, and when mammals develop these same bones migrate from the jaw to the inner ear.

Also, many times creationists point to “gaps” in the fossil record, eventually paleontologists find fossils that fill in those gaps. We now have an extensive record of bird and whale evolution, for example – previous favorite examples of creationists.

Most importantly, evolution as a scientific theory has proven to be extremely useful. It makes and has made many predictions about what we will find when we look at fossils and study living things, and these predictions have been remarkably successful. There is also no competing theory that can come close to explaining and making sense of all the evidence.

Creationism does not and cannot do this. If you drill down past all the noise and diversion, what creationists ultimately say about the evidence is that God simply chose to make life that way, for whatever reason – in essence God chose to make life look exactly as if it had naturally evolved. This, of course, is an unfalsifiable claim, which is part of the reason why creationism is not science. What creationists do is present a master class in deception, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies. They really have no choice. They reject for purely ideological reasons one of the most successful and powerful scientific theories that humans have come up with, one that is supported by a mountain of evidence.