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Americans' Evolution Knowledge Isn't That Bad, If You Ask About Elephants

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: February 15th, 2016, 3:00pm UTC

sciencehabit writes: In 2014, a poll showed that just 49% of Americans agreed with the statement: "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." But it's difficult to tell whether those numbers measure ignorance about science, because belief in human evolution is closely tied to religious belief, especially in the United States. Yesterday, researchers at the annual meeting of AAAS, previewed data from a recent poll showing that when the word "human" is replaced with "elephant" in the evolution question, 75% of Americans agree mdash; about 25 percentage points higher than before. Plus, the new elephant question does a better job of predicting general science knowledge than the human question, especially among those who say they don't believe in evolution. So it seems that America's dismal performance on past evolution polls can be blamed at least partially on this disbelief, rather than a lack of knowledge.pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Americans'+Evolution+Knowledge+Isn't+That+Bad%2C+If+You+Ask+About+Elephants%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1Xts0sj"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F16%2F02%2F15%2F1849259%2Famericans-evolution-knowledge-isnt-that-bad-if-you-ask-about-elephants%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/15/1849259/americans-evolution-knowledge-isnt-that-bad-if-you-ask-about-elephants?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/16/02/15/1849259/americans-evolution-knowledge-isnt-that-bad-if-you-ask-about-elephants?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/fUL3cqFMw70" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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