Atheism to be taught in Irish schools

September 27, 2013 • 10:54 am

Some days most of the news is about atheism vs. faith, and I suppose today is one of those days. But this time the news is good. According to the Guardian, mandatory lessons that include instruction in atheistic thought will soon begin in Irish primary schools:

In a historic move that will cheer Richard Dawkins, lessons about atheism are to be taught in Ireland’s primary schools for the first time.

The lessons on atheism, agnosticism and humanism for thousands of primary-school pupils in Ireland will be drawn up by Atheist Ireland and multi-denominational school provider Educate Together, in an education system that the Catholic church hierarchy has traditionally dominated.

Up to 16,000 primary schoolchildren who attend the fast-growing multi-denominational Irish school sector will receive tuition about atheism as part of their basic introduction course to ethics and belief systems, including other religions.

From September 2014 children could be reading texts such as Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality, his book aimed at children, according to Atheist Ireland.

Do note the gratuitious mention of Dawkins. He’s not the only person who will be cheered!

Well, I suppose this is good news, although I’m in favor of this only if it avoids indoctrination, that is, if such instruction is part of a general course in the diversity of religious belief. And that’s what it appears to be. I know Dan Dennett is enthusiastic about such courses, but I’ve always worried that it would be difficult to teach religion even in a “survey” course, for believers could easily squabble about how to present the the “essential doctrine” of their faiths (imagine Sunni vs. Shia Islam, for instance). But if they’re teaching religious thought, then they should teach nonreligious thought as well. On balance, it’s good.

Now before you get all excited, note that 93% of all primary schools in Ireland are run by the Catholic Church, where this curriculum won’t apply. Nevertheless, according to Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland (who, along with his organization, deserve kudos for pushing this through), even Catholics will have access to the materials:

But Michael Nugent, Atheist Ireland’s co-founder, stressed that all primary-school pupils, including the 93% of the population who attend schools run by the Catholic church, can access their atheism course on the internet and by downloading an app on smartphones. He said these would be advertised and offered to all parents with children at primary schools in the state.

I doubt that the Catholic nuns and priests who teach in these schools, or Catholic parents, will rush to make the materials accessible to who are offensively called as “Catholic children.”

Here’s how the system will work:

“There will be a module of 10 classes of between 30 to 40 minutes from the ages of four upwards. It is necessary because the Irish education system has for too long been totally biased in favour of religious indoctrination. And if parents whose kids are in schools under church control want to opt their kids out of learning religion (as is their right these days) then they can use our course as an alternative for their children to study,” he said.

Nugent added: “Religion isn’t even taught properly as an objective subject with various religions and their origins examined and explained. The teaching is to create faith formation first, not objective education. We see our course as a chance for young Irish children to get an alternative view on how the world works.”

The upshot: it’s a good start, though the opportunity for de-brainwashing “Catholic children” will be limited. What surprises me is that this is taking place in Ireland at all.

Here are some fun facts about Ireland’s schools from the Guardian piece (my emphasis):

The Catholic church’s near monopoly of influence in education means that the ultimate power in each school is the local Catholic bishop.

In Dublin the city’s archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, is patron of about 470 primary schools. He is responsible for the management of the ethos of those schools, for senior appointments and is the one who can be sued when legal action takes place.

The Irish taxpayer, and not the church, pays the bills for all the schools the hierarchy controls.

There will be a palliative cat later.

h/t: Rev. Al

Radio debate: Dan Barker vs. Casey Luskin on the Ball State case

June 3, 2013 • 9:19 am

Michael Medved, a conservative radio host of the Rush Limbaugh stripe, hosted a 20-minute “debate” on his show the other day between Dan Barker (co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, or FFRF) and Casey Luskin, creationist and research director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, an intelligent design “think” tank. (The “thought” is obviously not scientific, but about how to make up stuff to hide the lack of evidence for ID.)

The debate dealt with the case of Eric Hedin, the professor at Ball State who teaches a science class for honors students that is heavily infused with his love of Christianity. I brought Hedin’s proselytizing for Jesus to the FFRF’s attention, and their lawyers wrote to Ball State University saying that Hedin’s activities may constitute a First Amendment violation and, at any rate, are certainly not “science.”

I was initially asked to debate Luskin on this show, but had to teach at that time—thank Ceiling Cat!! Barker is a much better debater than I, and you can hear on the PodoMatic recording how coolly and calmly he responds to Medved’s constant interruptions and Luskin’s overheated rhetoric. The debate is 20 minutes long followed by 15 minutes of audience questions. (I haven’t had time to listen to the questions.)

Medved is obviously not an unbiased moderator, and I found out with a few strokes of the keyboard that he is in fact a Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute. That’s unbelievable: Medved has no scientific training whatsoever. I guess the Discovery Institute just wants his name. In their announcement of Medved’s appointment as a Senior Fellow, the Discovery Institute said this:

“Michael Medved is an intellectual entrepreneur, a political and cultural polymath with great insights, judgment and wit. We are delighted to have this new relationship with him,” said Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman.

. . . Chapman saluted Medved “as the national radio host—make that ‘media host’—who is best able to understand science issues, including the current conflict over Darwinism and intelligent design. He’s very smart, quick and resourceful. Yet he also is respectful of those he disagrees with.”

“Over the years, I’ve greatly appreciated Discovery’s scholarship and advocacy in many areas,” Medved commented. “We may not agree on every issue, but I often have been struck by how much our worldviews overlap. It has been my pleasure to have Discovery fellows on my show as guests, including Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, and David Klinghoffer. Formalizing the relationship will, I’m sure, only deepen the feeling of collegiality I already have with my friends at Discovery. I look forward to working with Discovery on future projects.”

Oh, and Barker makes a slip of the tongue around four minutes in, when he says I teach “biography” at the University of Chicago. I think he meant “biology.” But he does a remarkable job of keeping his cool in trying circumstances.

Is there any hope for people like this?

April 27, 2013 • 7:16 am

Stuff like this shows up every day in my inbox, and I usually don’t let it through, but I suppose it’s salutary from time to time to let readers see it. This post came with the reader’s name:

Hassan Badr : ) commented on Talk in North Carolina next week

Dear Evolutionists,

I stand before you here today to discuss how evolution is not true. evolution is based on development and people say that we all came from one living thing. Ask yourself, what is this one living thing? No one will be able to answer this question because its not true and everyone who supports evolution is just saying that because they think humans were apes or something like that. We all have to use our common sense and understand how evolution did never happen. Maybe things got smaller by time, but they never got an exact answer till this very moment in the 21 century.

Thank You
Hassan Badr (American International School of Egypt)

My response:

Dear Mr. Badr,

By any chance are your foolish criticisms of evolution based on religion? If so, then your views are based not on science but on faith People like you often say that we all came from one celestial God. Ask yourself, what is this one God? Is it Allah, Brahma, the Abrahamic God whose son was Jesus, Zeus, or something else? No one will be able to answer this question because it’s not true and everyone who supports creationism via a god is just saying that because they were taught to by their parents, by some book or mullah, or because they simply find false ideas comforting. We all have to use our common sense, and when we do so we see that evolution is simply true, supported by thousands of facts from all areas of biology and geology. (Have you read my book by any chance, Mr. Badr?) The Qur’an is supported by nothing but wishful thinking.

One thing is certainly true: your own God, if that’s what you so believe, is getting smaller over time, and will soon disappear, for there is far more evidence for evolution than for a god.

Thank you
Jerry Coyne (University of Chicago)

p.s If your opposition to evolution is based not on religion but on ignorance, then you need to read my book all the more.

If you want to respond to Mr. Badr, who after all is at a university, do so below and I’ll call his attention to the responses. Be nice.

I’ve assume that Mr. Badr is Muslim, though I’m perfectly aware that other religions are present in Egypt. But it’s a pretty good guess that his opposition to evolution springs from faith.

For those readers who are sympathetic to Islam, and find it no more invidious than other religion, my studies on resistance to evolution show that it is far more pervasive in Islamic than in Western countries, for many Muslims tend to accept the Qur’an literally. And even those evolution-friendly Muslims, including high-school science teachers in Canada and Pakistan, exempt humans from the working of evolution. That’s because the Qur’an says our species were created.

“Science” course at Ball State University sneaks in religion

April 25, 2013 • 5:37 am

Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana, is a public university (i.e., part of the state university system). As such, it must abide by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been interpreted as disallowing religious viewpoints (or religiously based theories) in public-school science classes. It is of course kosher to teach courses on the history of religion, or on the relationship between science and religion, but those must not pretend to be “science” courses, and must present balanced views—they can’t push a particular religious viewpoint.

But it’s come to my attention that a science course at Ball State University—actually two courses, because it seems to be cross-listed—is little more than a course in accommodationism and Christian religion, with very little science. It’s my firm opinion that teaching this course at a state university not only violates the First Amendment, but cheats the students by subjecting them to religious proselytizing when they’re trying to learn science.

The course is taught by Eric Hedin, an assistant professor at Ball State’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. In one of its guises it’s an “honors” course, “Inquiries in the Physical Sciences,” which fulfills the science requirement for students as part of the University Core Curriculum:

Apparently the same course, or a similar one, is cross-listed in the Physics and Astronomy department as Astronomy 151: “The Universe and You,” but the syllabus, which you can download, and which is virtually identical to the syllabus of Honors 296 (the department chair has verified this for me), calls it “The Boundaries of Science.” To see the nature of this course and its infusion with religion (and notable lack of hard science), I’ll simply reproduce the 3.5 pages of the syllabus. By no stretch of the imagination can this be seen as a course that fulfills a science requirement:

Note the numinous implications, especially the course objective to consider the implications of physics, life, and consciousness for “indications of the nature and existence of God.” As you’ll see, the syllabus is clearly slanted to show that scientific phenomena do indeed provide evidence for God.

Note that on page 2 (below), the course outline itself, the students are to discuss theistic evolution, intelligent design, irreducible complexity, and, for crying out loud, “miracles and spirituality!” There’s also “Beauty, complex and specified information, and intelligent design: what the universe communicates about God.”

Now you tell me: does this sound like an objective appraisal of the scientific evidence? No, for the last bit presupposes the existence of God. What is being taught here is, in essence, intelligent design, and you’ll recognize many of their tropes (“complex specified information,” “fine-tuning,” “no free lunch,” and so on).

But what is really sad—it would be amusing if this were not fed to students as “science”—is the reading list. Have a gander at this:

Can you believe that? It’s all pro-religious, and heavily larded with the works of Intelligent Design advocates (Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe), old-earth creationists (Hugh Ross!), and scientists who are Christian or religious (Guy Consolmagno, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies).

The syllabus for the cross-listed Honors course, which the chair of the department verified to me as accurate, is even worse, for it includes Francis Collins’s book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Anthony Flew’s There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, and Polkinghorne and Beale’s Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions About God, Science, and Belief.” As the ultimate insult, the Honors syllabus further includes C. S. Lewis—his book Miracles! What is going on here? C. S. Lewis in a science course?

You’ll have noticed, of course, the absence of any counter-accommodationist books like The God Delusion, Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing, or any of Victor Stenger’s books on physics and religion.

This is all religion and intelligent design. The optional readings continue the theme:

One might suspect that Professor Hedin is using this course to proselytize students for religion—probably Christianity, Indeed, that is supported by students’ reviews of Hedin on the RateMyProfessors site, where Hedin gets a generally positive review but is called out by several students (3 out of 15) for using his science classes to push a Christian viewpoint:

It looks as if Hedin has been pushing God, creationism, and science in his classes for at least seven years. The “constant” proselytizing is unconscionable, and it appears that Hedin “doesn’t believe in evolution”, which is probably why he makes his students read so many books on Intelligent Design but none on straight evolutionary biology.

When this came to my attention, I wrote to the chairman of Ball State’s Physics and Astronomy Department, Dr. Thomas Robertson:

Dear Dr. Robertson,

Although I’m not at Ball State, it’s come to my attention that one of your faculty members, Dr. Eric Hedin, is teaching a senior Honors course that is heavily infused with creationism and religion. The course is Honors 296, “The Boundaries of Science,” and to my understanding is listed as a science course, which students take for science credit.

I have a copy of last year’s syllabus, which is apparently the same as this year’s, and I attach it. Have a look, and you’ll see that it is basically a course on the religious implications of science. The reading list tells the tale: there are books by old-earth creationists (Hugh Ross), advocates of intelligent design (Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer), and various people who comport science and faith.

As as scientist, I find this deeply disturbing. It’s not only religion served under the guise of science, but appears to violate the First Amendement of the Constitution. You are a public university and therefore cannot teach religion in a science class, as this class appears to do. Clearly, Dr. Hedin is religious and foisting this on his students, and I have seen complaints about students being short-change[d] by being fed religion in a science course.

Could you please confirm for me that this course is indeed being taught in your department, and that this is indeed the sylllabus?

Perhaps you are not aware of this, in which case I’m calling it to your attention as chairman of that department.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne

I am not at liberty to reproduce Robertson’s answer, as he didn’t want it put on this site (no wonder!), but he verified that the syllabus I sent (the Honors one that included Flew, Lewis, and Polkinghorne) was the one currently in use, that the course content was known to the Dean and Associate Dean of the Honors College as well, and that the course was appropriate because it enabled discussion of the relationship between science and religion. He added that the course was useful in helping students challenge the ideas and beliefs that came with them to college.

Challenge? Really? What kind of “challenge” does a passel of Christian and religious literature pose to students? If you want to challenge them, let them read Dawkins, Hitchens, and Stenger as well. There is no challenge here, but an affirmation of the students’ religious beliefs (except, of course, for nonbelieving students).

Perhaps this would be appropriate as a sociology or philosophy course, but even then it would be intellectually deficient, as it simply fails to present any alternatives to the pro-accommodationist, pro-Intelligent Design viewpoint. As far as I can see, Hedin comes pretty close to teaching religion and creationism in a science class. His shoving of Christianity and religion down the throats of science students must stop. I will do my utmost until it does, or until I fail.

When I got Robertson’s response, I wrote him a final email with my response, which I reproduce below:

Dear Dr. Robertson,

Thanks very much for your response.

I will put the syllabus and course information on my website, and am wondering if I can reproduce both my email to you and your response, which seems to me a reasonable and official response to my question. Lacking your permission, I will simply paraphrase your response, but I’d prefer to reproduce your email to eliminate any misunderstandings. I’m quite concerned that the course seems to be completely weighted in favor of religion, creationism, and intelligent design; I see no hard science nor responses from those on the “other” side of the debate. In other words, the students, who are undoubtedly largely religious to begin with, aren’t being challenged at all! Yet this course is billed as a science/astronomy course. You are aware that C. S. Lewis wasn’t a scientist, that Dembski and Meyer are intelligent-design creationists, and Hugh Ross is a straight-out Biblical creationist. There are no nonreligious scientists, nor evolutionary biologists, so I can’t see what “challenge” is posed. Rather, the course seems engineered not to challenge students, but to propagandize them into thinking that religion is completely compatible with science, and, perhaps, to think there is merit in creationism and intelligent design. As an evolutionary biologist, I find this very distasteful.

Cordially,
Jerry Coyne

Robertson simply responded that he didn’t want his email put on this site, so I’m abiding by his wishes. What I want to say here is that I tried to register a complaint—a complaint that, I think, is completely legitimate—and was rebuffed by Hedin’s chair.

This has to stop, for Hedin’s course, and the University’s defense of it, violate the separation of church and state mandated by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (“freedom of religion”) and which has been so interpreted by the courts. It’s religion taught as science in a public university, and it’s not only wrong but illegal. I have tried approaching the University administration, and have been rebuffed.

This will now go to the lawyers.

Kansas public school mandates “Creation Truth Foundation” assemblies

April 22, 2013 • 12:54 pm

by Greg Mayer

According to The Raw Story,

Hugoton [Kansas] Public Schools invited Creation Truth Foundation’s founder Dr. G. Thomas Sharp to teach the “Truth about Dinosaurs” at two assemblies next week. At least one of the assemblies will be mandatory for all students and teachers.

You’ve probably never heard of the Creation Truth Foundation or its founder, but you’ll learn all you need to know about them within the first 30 seconds or so of this video:

The ACLU has rather gently told them to cut it out, pointing out that the courts have repeatedly held that teaching religious beliefs as science, no matter how you try to hide it, is unlawful. The brand of religion trumpeted by Sharp, unlike that promoted by intelligent design creationists, isn’t the least bit hidden; from their website:

Creation Truth Foundation has many programs, presentations, books and videos that can effectively edify the faith of your church family. Our President, Dr. G. Thomas Sharp, has spoken in ten different countries, and all across the United States in revival meetings, church camps, conferences and educational forums.

His expertise in apologetics especially based in Genesis has been used in colleges, universities, television and radio programs as well as preschools and kindergartens. You will be excited to have him come to your church family with either one of his many presentations about Biblical Creation, or the Biblical Family.

CTF also has a remarkably exciting program that has been seen by more than 115,000 since September of 1998. This program called The Truth About Dinosaurs is presented in the company of twenty-eight of the world’s most exciting fossils. This is a must have for churches across the U. S.! …

Creation Truth Foundation has a host of support materials and services to aid your delivery of a sound science curriculum based in Biblical Creation. The Truth About Dinosaurs program is an excitingly spectacular presentation of the Biblical view explaining the origins, extinction and possible existence of dinosaurs.

Incredibly, the school superintendent insists that the program will be, “completely and totally school appropriate.” I’ll keep an eye out for the results of legal action.

(Note for UK readers: “public schools” are state-supported schools, subject to the Constitutional mandate of non-establishment of religion.)

h/t C. Mayer

Latest Gallup Poll on U.S. acceptance of evolution: flatlined, as usual

April 10, 2013 • 9:57 am

This Gallup poll is about ten months old, but I don’t think I’ve posted it before, and I like to update the statistics since the same poll is given every year. The question, too, is always the same (see below) and deals specifically with human evolution. Here are the overall data:

Gallup’s summary is this:

Gallup has asked Americans to choose among these three explanations for the origin and development of human beings 11 times since 1982. Although the percentages choosing each view have varied from survey to survey, the 46% who today choose the creationist explanation is virtually the same as the 45% average over that period — and very similar to the 44% who chose that explanation in 1982. The 32% who choose the “theistic evolution” view that humans evolved under God’s guidance is slightly below the 30-year average of 37%, while the 15% choosing the secular evolution view is slightly higher (12%).

The bad news is that young-earth creationists still comprise nearly half of Americans, while 2/3 of the remainder accept a form of theistic evolution (and “God’s guiding” probably means, to most of them, a direct intervention of God in creating humans rather than a deistic view that God set up the physical conditions, and maybe the Ur-organism, and then it run. Fewer than one in six Americans accept evolution as scientists do: a materialistic, unguided process with no supernatural intervention. The unguided evolution stats are up a bit over the past 30 years—nearly 50%—but it’s still a fraction of what it should be in an enlightened country.

Here are the data broken down by church attendance. The tend is clear, as always: the more you go to church, the more likely you are to be a creationist and less likely to believe in naturalistic evolution. Curiously, theistic evolution is found more frequently among those who go to church less often:

No surprise here: Republicans are far more likely to be young-earth creationists, and less likely to be naturalistic evolutionists, than are Democrats. Nearly 60% of Republicans are young-earth creationists with respect to humans (remember, the question is how humans came to be). I think it’s fair to conclude that most Republicans are deluded when it comes to science. They should not be trusted to run our country.

And, as usual, the more educated you are, the less likely you are to be a creationist and the more likely you are to be a naturalistic evolutionist (or a theistic evolutionist!):

Here’s the Gallup conclusion, carefully hedged:

Despite the many changes that have taken place in American society and culture over the past 30 years, including new discoveries in biological and social science, there has been virtually no sustained change in Americans’ views of the origin of the human species since 1982. The 46% of Americans who today believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years is little changed from the 44% who believed this 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question.

More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago.

All in all, there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins.

Most Americans are not scientists, of course, and cannot be expected to understand all of the latest evidence and competing viewpoints on the development of the human species. Still, it would be hard to dispute that most scientists who study humans agree that the species evolved over millions of years, and that relatively few scientists believe that humans began in their current form only 10,000 years ago without the benefit of evolution. Thus, almost half of Americans today hold a belief, at least as measured by this question wording, that is at odds with the preponderance of the scientific literature.

The summary of the statistics is fine, but the implication that Americans can’t understand human evolution is ludicrous. True, maybe many Americans can’t understand the “latest evidence and competing viewpoints” on human evolution, but really, they can see and understand clearly the evidence that humans did evolve from arboreal small-brained, big-teethed primates. The evidence is in my book, for crying out loud, and isn’t hard to grasp!

Further the “competing viewpoints” idea, while formally true (we’re not yet sure, except for Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the latest fossils, which species are on the direct line to modern Homo sapiens, and which are side branches that became extinct), has the sinister implication that there’s dissent about whether humans evolved at all. They should add as well that “relatively few scientists believe that God guided the evolution of humans.”

The summary is somewhat of a sop to evolution-deniers, unworthy of a respectable poll.

Acceptance of evolution vs. religiosity in the U.S.

April 7, 2013 • 9:44 am

This Thursday I’m giving a talk at Oakland University in Michigan on the evidence for evolution and the reason why Americans reject it. Drop by if you live in the area, and I’ll be glad to sign copies of WEIT (books will be on sale there). There will also be a secret word, announced later, that will get you a cat drawn in your book.

In my talk I’ll show the following slide, which reveals a negative correlation between belief in God and acceptance of evolution among 30 European countries, Japan, and the U.S. The correlation is highly significant and, as you see, the U.S. is second lowest in accepting evolution, with only Turkey below us. I’ve shown this figure here before, and won’t dilate on it again. You can find the relevant data, statistics, and discussion in my Evolution paper from last year about the relationship between evolution, science and society (free download).

Here’s a plot of the data on acceptance of human evolution by country; the figure is from Miller et al. (2006; reference below). The arrow shows the U.S. at the bottom, deeply shamed by our position relative to Japan and the countries of Northern Europe.

This got me wondering whether there was a similar correlation between religiosity and acceptance of evolution among the states in the U.S. I felt that there must be, simply because religiosity (as is well known) is higher in the southern U.S. than in the north, and the south also contains more people who reject evolution. Doing a bit of Googling, I found data on acceptance of evolution by state at Subnormal Numbers. Whoever writes that site took raw data from a 2010 Pew Forum survey and converted them into a bar graph similar to the one above for countries. (I haven’t dug up the original data yet.) Here it is:

Just to check my intuition, I found a “State of the States” Gallup Poll from 2009 that broke down American religiosity by state, and also listed the ten most and ten least religious states. The survey assessed “religiosity” by asking the question, “Is religion an important part of your daily life?” Of course states vary widely: at the top for non-religiosity are states like Vermont (only 42% “yes”) and New Hampshire (45% “yes”), while southern states like Mississippi and Alabama are highly religious (85% and 82% “yes,” respectively). I then put colored arrows representing the ten most religious states (red) and ten least religious states (blue) on the “acceptance of evolution” bar graph.

You can see the results above: there’s no overlap between the arrows. The least religious states show the highest acceptance of evolution, while most religious states show the most denial of evolution. This is, of course, statistically significant just by a ranking test: the chances that the arrows would separate into two such non-overlapping groups by chance is minuscule. I’ll eventually do a full correlation when I get my hands on the raw evolution data.

The figures among states clearly aren’t independent, for there is geographic correlation of religiosity (and evolution denial, which comes from religion), so each state does not represent an independent test of the question “Is there a correlation between religiosity and acceptance of evolution among American states?” Nevertheless, these data do support a “yes” answer to that question, and that answer in the expected direction: the more religious a state, the higher the proportion of its inhabitants that reject evolution.

The correlation is no surprise, of course because all opposition to evolution stems from religion. But it was still surprising to me how strong these data are. (The correlation for the 32 countries at the top is correlation is −0.608, and the probability that this could arise by chance less than 0.0001).

Along with everything else that religion poisons, we can include acceptance of evolution. That holds not just across the globe, but also within the U.S.

____________

Miller, J. D., E. C. Scott, and S. Okamoto. 2006. Public acceptance of evolution. Science 313:765-766.

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