indessed roscivs

A recent poll revealed that about half of Americans don’t “believe in evolution”. (Interestingly enough, a quarter of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism are correct.)

But such polls always make me wonder how they’re worded. “Evolution” is a very vague word that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I’d much prefer a different sort of poll where people were given statements like these and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one. I wonder if we’d see a considerably different picture of the American populace?

• The earth is (at least) millions of years old
• Life has been present on this earth for (at least) millions of years
• Strata dating is generally accurate
• Radiometric dating is generally accurate
• Fossils of species show up in different eras of the fossil record,
  with more complex species appearing later
• All life on earth is based on the same DNA=>RNA=>Protein transcription
  process
• All change between generations within a species is due to mutation,
  crossing over, and similar DNA recombination (i.e. other theories such
  as Lamarckism [heritability of acquired characterists] are false)
• Within a single species, there can be different “subspecies” which could
  interbreed but do typically not
• The ability of subspecies to interbreed is not transitive; in other
  words, there exist subspecies A, B, and C such that A and B can
  interbreed, B and C can interbreed, but A and C cannot interbreed
• Over time, two subspecies that could previously interbreed lose (for
  various reasons) the ability to interbreed and become different species
• The more recently two species split, the more of their DNA they generally share
• Vestigial structures (such as limbs on snakes and whales or degenerate
  eyes on cave-dwelling fish) give us clues to the ancestry of species
• It is theoretically possible to explain all the complexity of life
  (e.g. eyes, bat sonar, etc.) through some process of genetic variation
  and selection
• The theory currently with the most evidence that explains the origin
  of the species is that all species of life on the planet evolved from
  single-celled organisms

Do you “believe in evolution”? Are there any statements above that you disagree with?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 11:22 am and is filed under politics, biology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.