The U.S. lacks belief in evolution in reference to the rest of the West. Why?

[Speakpigeon]

This graph from Pew in 2007 suggests people are becoming less likely to move over the past 60 years which agrees with my intuition that we are about as likely today to wind up within 25 miles of our origins as people were 10k years ago.

Yes, that's a trend I've been aware of for some time (Europe has probably been trending in the opposite direction since one of the founding principle of the EU is the free movement of people within the EU combined with large scale disparities in wealth and economic opportunities leading to higher levels of migration, plus schemes for studiants to go study in another country in the EU). One side effect of people moving less in the U.S. should be a lessening of the integration of all Americans in one big melting pot as was the case in the past. Instead, you now have whole regions developing their own brand of what it means to be American. There are opposite influences for sure but one's sense of identity is largely based on one's geographical location and neighbourhood of people. It's certainly a pachtwork. People in isolated regions may move less than people in big cities and you don't need to move much inside a city to meet people who have a very different culture and outlook than yourself. Another aspect of this evolution is the urban sprawl that makes people more gregarious and communities more homogenous culturally. It's not bad in itself, you could say it's even a necessary mechanism for the local society but it's also a mechanism to goes against big countries like the U.S. staying politically united. So, I would have expected the current ideological coming appart that's been developing since at least the middle of the 60's I think. And it's not just red v. blue, progressist v. conservative, religious v. secular, it's truly multidimensional. Potentially, any pair of opposite ideas can worm their way into communities and divide the people and you'll have multiple oppositions going into even what appears on the outside as united communities. The demise of big television and the rise of the Internet just make things worse.

It's probably reversible. People in Europe are moving around more than in the past but not everything is good in that since it at least partially explains the rise of the far right throughout the EU. And you have places like Poland which has a drastic shortfall of national workers because they have moved in droves to the U.K. in search of better paid jobs. Still, one positive is that young people seem to develop of European identity (the young in the U.K. voted massively for remaining in the E.U.).

So you win some, you loose some.

It's called 'life' but it's really about life and death.
EB

 

[J842P]

This graph from Pew in 2007 suggests people are becoming less likely to move over the past 60 years which agrees with my intuition that we are about as likely today to wind up within 25 miles of our origins as people were 10k years ago.

Yes, that's a trend I've been aware of for some time (Europe has probably been trending in the opposite direction since one of the founding principle of the EU is the free movement of people within the EU combined with large scale disparities in wealth and economic opportunities leading to higher levels of migration, plus schemes for studiants to go study in another country in the EU). One side effect of people moving less in the U.S. should be a lessening of the integration of all Americans in one big melting pot as was the case in the past. Instead, you now have whole regions developing their own brand of what it means to be American. There are opposite influences for sure but one's sense of identity is largely based on one's geographical location and neighbourhood of people. It's certainly a pachtwork. People in isolated regions may move less than people in big cities and you don't need to move much inside a city to meet people who have a very different culture and outlook than yourself. Another aspect of this evolution is the urban sprawl that makes people more gregarious and communities more homogenous culturally. It's not bad in itself, you could say it's even a necessary mechanism for the local society but it's also a mechanism to goes against big countries like the U.S. staying politically united. So, I would have expected the current ideological coming appart that's been developing since at least the middle of the 60's I think. And it's not just red v. blue, progressist v. conservative, religious v. secular, it's truly multidimensional. Potentially, any pair of opposite ideas can worm their way into communities and divide the people and you'll have multiple oppositions going into even what appears on the outside as united communities. The demise of big television and the rise of the Internet just make things worse.

It's probably reversible. People in Europe are moving around more than in the past but not everything is good in that since it at least partially explains the rise of the far right throughout the EU. And you have places like Poland which has a drastic shortfall of national workers because they have moved in droves to the U.K. in search of better paid jobs. Still, one positive is that young people seem to develop of European identity (the young in the U.K. voted massively for remaining in the E.U.).

So you win some, you loose some.

It's called 'life' but it's really about life and death.
EB

I don't know. From what I understand, regional distinctions are tending towards diminishing in the US. I think what is happening in that graph is the tail end of a century long move from rural areas to cities. Less people are moving relative to the past because the 20th century was characterized by a movement of people form "small town America" towards metropolitan centers. Most people now live in a large city, or in the sprawling suburbs surrounding it.

 

[ronburgundy]

In my experience the largest group of people who don't accept evolution don't understand evolution. They don't accept evolution because you can treat a chimp like a human from birth but it will will never be a human. Duh! Or you can't get a chicken to turn into a duck. Double Duh!!

Another group simply has no need for understanding evolution. What has evolution got to do with me having a good time "goin' muddin'" in my truck or being able to find a good paying job? And in truth, just about zip. It likely will never bring about your owning a better cell phone.

We have a lot of those two groups in the U.S., and I think their numbers will grow.

The understanding of Evolution is an intellectual pursuit primarily. It has payoffs for everyone but not everyone needs to understand it anymore than your typical steelworker needs to be a metallurgist.

Add to that the anti-religious association and I think its easy to understand why the U.S. lags behind. Lots of americans aren't proud of their poverty, but they are damn proud of their ignorance.

I realize that is an intuitively appealing answer but there are studies showing little to no difference in the accurate understanding of evolution between those that accept it and those they do not.

While it is true that most Americans that reject it don't accurately understand it, it is equally true that those who accept it also don't accurately understand it. The few who do understand it do overwhelmingly accept it, but they are such a small % of the population that they explain very little of the difference between acceptance or rejection in the overall population.

Also, contrary to how popular it is to knock US education, Science education in the US is still better on all relevant measures than that in most of the nations in that OP graph, yet we still reject evolution more than all but Turkey.

The answer is much more about the harmful effects of religion on honest rational thought. Faith, by definition, is to disregard the evidence and believe according to emotion. So, the more people value and rely upon faith as a method of belief, the more their beliefs with be at odds not only with reality, but even with their own knowledge.

While better understanding of evolution is good and important, that won't fix the problem of so many Americans choosing to reject belief in that science whenever it conflicts with their entrenched faith. Although, better education about the basic nature of science in general and why it is the most valid approach to evaluating the relative accuracy of ideas could indirectly nudge along the demise of religious faith, and then in turn increase evolution acceptance.

 

[abaddon]

While it is true that most Americans that reject it don't accurately understand it, it is equally true that those who accept it also don't accurately understand it.

Yeah, depends on which group they identify with. People tend to parrot what they hear among their peers.

The answer is much more about the harmful effects of religion on honest rational thought. Faith [is to] believe according to emotion.

Or is it biological nature to conserve calories and prefer opinion over knowledge? Opinion is easy, knowledge takes work. Also, there’s the need to belong to one's ingroup.

I see people offering opinions on things they don’t know all day long, every day. It takes incentive way beyond merely wanting "accuracy" to buck this and expend the calories and put one’s ego and standing on the line in doing it.

While better understanding of evolution is good and important, that won't fix the problem of so many Americans choosing to reject belief in that science whenever it conflicts with their entrenched faith

They won't alter their entrenched identity, found in whatever group and its ideology. People will align their values differently when there's a better reason than some Mr. Spocks saying "what you most identify with, love even, is all wrong. Here I have some 'facts' for you to replace all that with".

 

[ronburgundy]

Yeah, depends on which group they identify with. People tend to parrot what they hear among their peers.

The answer is much more about the harmful effects of religion on honest rational thought. Faith [is to] believe according to emotion.

Or is it biological nature to conserve calories and prefer opinion over knowledge? Opinion is easy, knowledge takes work. Also, there’s the need to belong to one's ingroup.

I see people offering opinions on things they don’t know all day long, every day. It takes incentive way beyond merely wanting "accuracy" to buck this and expend the calories and put one’s ego and standing on the line in doing it.

That would only account for not believing evolution in a pre-modern world where it was just a fringe notion.
Today, the idea is all around them and they could just as easily settle on the opinion that evolution happened, without actually working to verify its accuracy.
They already trust scientists for 99.9% of things they don't bother to verify themselves, everything from how all tech works (including cars, elevators, and planes that they trust with their lives) to 99% of medicine, etc.. It actually takes a lot of effort for them to go out of their way to single out a couple scientific ideas (evolution, climate changes, biology of homosexuality, etc..) to reject and invent all kinds of conspiracy theories why the same scientific community they trust for everything else is suddenly the enemy engaged in worldwide atheist plot (something the vast majority of evolution deniers convince themselves of to explain away scientific consensus).

To account for rejection of evolution in a modern context requires a strong biased motive to want to form and protect an opinion that they know all of science and much of their own experience contradicts, thus forcing them to engage in effortful rationalization. That motive is that special creation is more emotionally satisfying because it coheres far better with the pleasing notions of a human-centric God, a soul, and an afterlife.
Also, to pull of the self-deceit and extreme internal logical contradiction of rejecting evolution but accepting 99% of science they need the aid of an epistemology that promotes going against basic logic and evidence no matter how clear cut and sticking with emotion as though wanting it to be true is somehow evidence it is true. That is the very nature of faith, and thus why all theism promotes faith as a virtue.

While better understanding of evolution is good and important, that won't fix the problem of so many Americans choosing to reject belief in that science whenever it conflicts with their entrenched faith

They won't alter their entrenched identity, found in whatever group and its ideology. People will align their values differently when there's a better reason than some Mr. Spocks saying "what you most identify with, love even, is all wrong. Here I have some 'facts' for you to replace all that with".

First, they aren't just rejecting what "Mr. Spock" says. They are rejecting their own rational thoughts and experiences which imply the physicality of mind (and thus lack of soul and afterlife), the animal nature and primate-family membership of humanity, and their observable reality of trait variation and environmentally-contingent reproductive success which are the only things needed to make evolution a logical certainty. IOW, they are not just ignoring "experts" but ignoring most of their own mind and thoughts.

Also, most accepters of evolution also love and identify with the feel-good notions that creationists believe. Most of them would prefer that evolution wasn't true and the special creation was. The difference is that the accepters, for whatever reason, also identify with being an honest and reasonable person. This, compels them to begrudgingly accept evolution even though they also would prefer it wasn't true. The rejectors are people who not only value what the idea of special creation brings, but they also do not value being an honest or reasonable person. In fact, they value the exact opposite of reasonableness, faith, because they were successfullly indoctrinated by a religion to think that faith is a virtue and that somehow being rationally honest is a form of human arrogance.

What we need more and more of is to promote being reasonable as a moral virtue and to undermine the notion of faith as a virtue and highlight what it is, which is a method of dishonesty, self-delusion, cowardice, and the primary method used by authoritarians trying to manipulate people to do and think things that cannot be supported by rational thought.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

What we need more and more of is to promote being reasonable as a moral virtue and to undermine the notion of faith as a virtue and highlight what it is, which is a method of dishonesty, self-delusion, cowardice, and the primary method used by authoritarians trying to manipulate people to do and think things that cannot be supported by rational thought.

But "faith" is easy. That's the point. It's as easy as having an opinion or a favorite color or a favorite religion or a favorite football team. Faith is just knowing what you like despite what others say. Evolution conflicts with what a lot of people like, it conflicts with generations of natural selection for not accepting evolution.

Maybe what it will take to convince people that evolution is real is to experience an antibiotic crisis where lots of people die because the microbes have "evolved." Of course the people in the robes will continue to conjure up their evil spirits to explain such calamities. But presently there is nothing to dissuade someone from being "anti-evolution" that actually matters in their daily lives. People still like their magic.

 

[Speakpigeon]

It also occurs to me that the idea of evolution doesn't support ideologies that ones actions could be better justified morally than that of other human beings. The idea of evolution promotes the idea that all organisms are equally justified morally. This effectively deprives many people of one pretext to discriminate against other human groups. And discriminating against other people seems very basic in human behaviour. The episode of Nazi Germany and WWII may have taught European the hard way how damaging discrimination can be for all. The U.S. was largely spared that experience. The vast majority of people in the U.S. during WWII had only the faintest of ideas of the consequences of the Nazi ideology. European elite moved quickly toward European integration after WWII as an effort to avoid any repeat of the event. Contrary to Europe, in the U.S., it was easy for the elite to just ignore the lesson by interpreting the war as typical not of humanity but only of Europeans.

Consistent with that perspective, there's also a possible link with so-called racism. White people may want to reject the theory of evolution so as to feel morally free to discriminate against Black people, and vice versa, in a country where the population was divided along racial lines very early. The discriminatory reflex so entrenched in American culture would have lingered along trying to survive against new ideas. The rejection of the idea of evolution would be not only natural to these people but also would look necessary to their own survival. I think there is something really desperate in the rejection of the idea of evolution. You have to pay the price of having to opt for an irrational attitude. It's potentially a life-changing decision. It's somewhat like opting for the Dark Side of the Force, so to speak.
EB

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

It also occurs to me that the idea of evolution doesn't support ideologies that ones actions could be better justified morally than that of other human beings. The idea of evolution promotes the idea that all organisms are equally justified morally. This effectively deprives many people of one pretext to discriminate against other human groups. And discriminating against other people seems very basic in human behaviour. The episode of Nazi Germany and WWII may have taught European the hard way how damaging discrimination can be for all. The U.S. was largely spared that experience. The vast majority of people in the U.S. during WWII had only the faintest of ideas of the consequences of the Nazi ideology. European elite moved quickly toward European integration after WWII as an effort to avoid any repeat of the event. Contrary to Europe, in the U.S., it was easy for the elite to just ignore the lesson by interpreting the war as typical not of humanity but only of Europeans.

Consistent with that perspective, there's also a possible link with so-called racism. White people may want to reject the theory of evolution so as to feel morally free to discriminate against Black people, and vice versa, in a country where the population was divided along racial lines very early. The discriminatory reflex so entrenched in American culture would have lingered along trying to survive against new ideas. The rejection of the idea of evolution would be not only natural to these people but also would look necessary to their own survival. I think there is something really desperate in the rejection of the idea of evolution. You have to pay the price of having to opt for an irrational attitude. It's potentially a life-changing decision. It's somewhat like opting for the Dark Side of the Force, so to speak.
EB

Good point, that being anti-evolution serves prejudice and racism. And religion is racism. Sure, for some people the skin color doesn't matter anymore, but that skin has to have a cross on it or it is inferior. Understanding why the U.S. is behind really isn't difficult.

 

[fromderinside]

Does really need to actually flex one's missiles to prove one isn't behind joedad?

 

[Speakpigeon]

Good point, that being anti-evolution serves prejudice and racism. And religion is racism.

I prefer to think of discrimination rather than racism. Any convenient criteria for discriminating against some people will do. Skin colour is very convenient because it is very visible and people can't change it. But we see that the characters used for discrimination are varied and many. Kids do it at school without much need for prompting. It seems ingrained in many of us. Perhaps there's a triggering factor needed, like having a score to settle with society or something like that, perhaps from bad childhood experiences. So religion is also not racism. But it does offer a ready opportunity for discriminating against non-believers (inclusing believers in other religions). Catholicism is supposed to be universal, i.e. non-discriminatory, so I see the fact that catholic people are nonetheless often discriminatory (perhaps less than others, though) an indication that there's a natural mechanism that favours discriminatory attitudes, even in the face of a universalist message.
EB

 

[J842P]

It also occurs to me that the idea of evolution doesn't support ideologies that ones actions could be better justified morally than that of other human beings. The idea of evolution promotes the idea that all organisms are equally justified morally. This effectively deprives many people of one pretext to discriminate against other human groups. And discriminating against other people seems very basic in human behaviour. The episode of Nazi Germany and WWII may have taught European the hard way how damaging discrimination can be for all. The U.S. was largely spared that experience. The vast majority of people in the U.S. during WWII had only the faintest of ideas of the consequences of the Nazi ideology. European elite moved quickly toward European integration after WWII as an effort to avoid any repeat of the event. Contrary to Europe, in the U.S., it was easy for the elite to just ignore the lesson by interpreting the war as typical not of humanity but only of Europeans.

Consistent with that perspective, there's also a possible link with so-called racism. White people may want to reject the theory of evolution so as to feel morally free to discriminate against Black people, and vice versa, in a country where the population was divided along racial lines very early. The discriminatory reflex so entrenched in American culture would have lingered along trying to survive against new ideas. The rejection of the idea of evolution would be not only natural to these people but also would look necessary to their own survival. I think there is something really desperate in the rejection of the idea of evolution. You have to pay the price of having to opt for an irrational attitude. It's potentially a life-changing decision. It's somewhat like opting for the Dark Side of the Force, so to speak.
EB

This seems unlikely to me. The idea of evolution has been used, rightly or wrongly, to justify discrimination for a long time.

 

[Speakpigeon]

This seems unlikely to me. The idea of evolution has been used, rightly or wrongly, to justify discrimination for a long time.

Anything, any idea, can and will be used to support discrimination. Evolution as a scientific idea does undercut any notion of moral justification to discrimination but it also leads to the idea of a natural order of species being more or less evolved, which some will use to support discrimination just because they can.
EB

 

[ronburgundy]

This seems unlikely to me. The idea of evolution has been used, rightly or wrongly, to justify discrimination for a long time.

Anything, any idea, can and will be used to support discrimination. Evolution as a scientific idea does undercut any notion of moral justification to discrimination but it also leads to the idea of a natural order of species being more or less evolved, which some will use to support discrimination just because they can.
EB

Agreed. As a scientific theory, evolution has no moral implications on its own.
Even the possibility of evolved differences in psychological or behavioral tendencies among different races has no moral implications, unless one adds completely non-scientific notions of what traits have moral worth. That is why all notions of moral objectivism are absurd, especially when the pretend to rely on evolution and deny their roots in purely subjective moral preferences. Also, the degree of such group differences is greatly limited by evolutionary facts of common ancestry, the relatively recent and incomplete geographic "isolation", and the timescale on which evolution occurs.

In contrast, the idea that God made different races combined with the core theistic notion that God determines the moral worth of all things he created, lends itself directly to different moral worth of different races. And God could make races completely different in every psychological way in the blink of an eye, even how their brains work at the most basic level.

Plus, if acts deemed "immoral" differ between races due to biological differences, that actually undermines moral judgment by undermining the degree to which those differences are due to free will choices that reflect one's "soul". So, even if sound science established a biological cause for differential rates of physical aggression that would actually undermine the primary motive of racism to justify mistreatment of a group due to its lesser moral worth, much like science supporting a biological basis of homosexuality has done.
Of course, people could and have taken such ideas and used them to support racism, but only by adding non-scientific notions of moral worth they get mostly from religion.

The hard core most extreme racists who comprise a minority in most modern secular societies were the overwhelming majority and unquestioned norm in almost every pre-secular society. The strong correlation that exist between cultures and within cultures over time between scientific secularism supplanting religious influence and a decrease in racist assumptions and ideologies is no coincidence.

 

[J842P]

This seems unlikely to me. The idea of evolution has been used, rightly or wrongly, to justify discrimination for a long time.

Anything, any idea, can and will be used to support discrimination. Evolution as a scientific idea does undercut any notion of moral justification to discrimination but it also leads to the idea of a natural order of species being more or less evolved, which some will use to support discrimination just because they can.
EB

How does the scientific idea of evolution undercut a moral justification for discrimination? The moral case against discrimination seems to me to be completely independent of the phenomenon of how populations evolve.

 

[ronburgundy]

What we need more and more of is to promote being reasonable as a moral virtue and to undermine the notion of faith as a virtue and highlight what it is, which is a method of dishonesty, self-delusion, cowardice, and the primary method used by authoritarians trying to manipulate people to do and think things that cannot be supported by rational thought.

But "faith" is easy. That's the point. It's as easy as having an opinion or a favorite color or a favorite religion or a favorite football team. Faith is just knowing what you like despite what others say. Evolution conflicts with what a lot of people like, it conflicts with generations of natural selection for not accepting evolution.

Maybe what it will take to convince people that evolution is real is to experience an antibiotic crisis where lots of people die because the microbes have "evolved." Of course the people in the robes will continue to conjure up their evil spirits to explain such calamities. But presently there is nothing to dissuade someone from being "anti-evolution" that actually matters in their daily lives. People still like their magic.

True, we will never change the fact that faith is the easy way out, or that people like magic. But many of the people who accept evolution and reject faith as legitimate also share those desires. But they also desire to view themselves as intelligent, and reasonable, and honest. Faith is the anti-thesis of all those things, but centuries of dogma touting faith as a virtue has obscured that fact and allows people who want to view themselves as having those traits to still knowingly rely upon faith and not see the conflict. That is why I am saying that we need to expose the hypocrisy that faithers hide behind via a very deliberate effort to erode the "faith is a virtue" dogma and promote "reason is a virtue".

People also prefer all kinds of things but don't do them, or limit them, and/or do the harder thing to do because of the consequences those things have on other more long-term desires such as the kind of person they can claim to be.

IOW, it isn't about changing what is easy or that people prefer easy, but limiting their ability to take the easy, selfish, ignorant, and immoral way out (believing whatever feels good), and yet still claim to be intelligent, reasonable, virtuous people.

BTW, the notion of believing what you want and ignoring reality being a virtue doesn't even make sense within most faithers own ethical system. It is an incoherent mantra they just blindly accept. In contrast, there is a very coherent moral argument for reason as a virtue. Namely, the morality of all your actions is determined by their impact on others, and evidence-based reason is how we know that impact. Thus, you cannot act morally unless your actions are accompanied by reasoned beliefs about their causal impact.

 

[ronburgundy]

Anything, any idea, can and will be used to support discrimination. Evolution as a scientific idea does undercut any notion of moral justification to discrimination but it also leads to the idea of a natural order of species being more or less evolved, which some will use to support discrimination just because they can.
EB

How does the scientific idea of evolution undercut a moral justification for discrimination? The moral case against discrimination seems to me to be completely independent of the phenomenon of how populations evolve.

See my post above yours. While moral and scientific questions are distinct, factual assumptions are virtually always used to rationalize moral stances and racism. Most people need to believe they are good and righteous, so racism and the self-serving discriminatory acts it justifies is always couched in assumptions of fact that put the other group outside the sphere of humanity where fairness and basic decency are expected to apply. Evolution and the facts around it greatly limits one's ability to put other human groups far enough outside those moral boundaries, without having to engage in a arduous amount of work to deal with the cognitive dissonance and cover-up one's intellectual dishonesty. In contrast, without evolution, there really is no such thing as "humans" who are any more in the same group (and thus moral sphere) than person is with a fly. It means each race can be viewed as independently created by God with any surface similarities being only superficial. It makes an act of killing off a whole race because you want their land no more a moral problem than killing a herd of buffalo. That's a lot harder to pull off psychologically if you view all people of all races as ultimately distant cousins from the same family whose humanity is determined by genes and those genes are less different between the racial groupings that racist ideologies focus on than differences within those groupings (such as Europeans being more similar to many "native" Africans than those Africans are to other "native" Africans.

 

[Underseer]

America has greater religiosity, and is therefore more anti-science.

 

[Rayschism]

There is a culture of anti intellectualism, specialness, and religious belief in America.

Lots of people in America don't like feeling dumb, and people who are smarter than makes them feel dumb.
Lot's of people want to feel special, and do what feels good. Science is bland and boring. Lots of big words.
Religious people hate science and don't understand it.

Just my two cents.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Religious people hate science and don't understand it.

Approximately half of all the people working in research of all the sciences are religious, of one flavor or another. They understand it just fine.

Undereducated people do not understand science and if they are religious, they are the natural prey of people who will offer to tell them everything they need to know about science.

 

[untermensche]

What is the goal of USA "culture"?

I say it is to remain a self absorbed child for as long as possible.

What movies do Americans watch?

Comic book movies.

Where do they live?

With their face glued to their cellphones as the world moves around them.

A population lost in delusion.

Therefore even scientists in the US can keep their childish delusions and remain happy and find like-minded children to share their time with.