The belief that the earth was recently created by God remains a persistent thorn in the side of science.
Although no researchers take it seriously, there is enough popular support for it to worm its way into politics, education, and more. Even here in the secular(ish) UK.
As we approach the 209th anniversary of Darwin's birthday, opposition to his ideas still doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
But does human evolution hold the answer to finally killing off creationism?
Reasons to reject evolution
In America, creationism has been annoying science for more than 30 years.
But perhaps what's most interesting is the level of support for creationism has remained consistent over this time (~40% of the population). Why does creationism remain so popular, despite the fact that >97% of scientists disagree. A recent review of research on the topic has identified the prime reasons that drive people away from evolution.
One of the more surprising results (or perhaps obvious, depending on your perspective) is that scientists seem to be pretty bad at explaining evolution. A lot of this stems from the language they use. Much of it implies agency, as though evolution was a concious process. It turns out that talking about an animal developing a particular trait makes it sound like the animal decided to do this. For some strange reason, this confuses people. Tests have found more than 4/5 students have issues comprehending these "concious" processes when phrased with this ambiguous language.
The language used generates several other misconceptions about evolution too. Describing traits as "modern" (or similar) can give rise to the idea that evolution is a ladder, always progressing onwards. It's this sort of ambiguous language that makes people ask "why are there still apes". It turns out my most hated question in the world is a self-inflicted wound.
The list of these sorts of misconceptions created by science (and the media) is surprisingly long. I think the review is free, if you're interested in reading more.
But by far the biggest issue was an external source of misconceptions: religion. A massive predictor of whether an individual accepts evolution or not is whether or not they attend church. As an interesting aside, this held true even for churches that accept evolution. Despite the fact the Pope is totes cool with Darwin, 25 - 75% of Catholics (depending on which Catholics you ask) still reject evolution.
Tricks to kill creationism
The failure of scientists to teach people about evolution is a bit of a downer. But it also means that a lot of the issues surrounding evolution are self inflicted.
If we start using better language to talk about evolution, perhaps we can rectify a lot of this misunderstanding. For example, the author of the review suggests replacing basal and derived for ancient and modern. Not to brag, but I've been talking about archaic and derived traits since this site started.
Other common misconceptions created by people on the side of science (that we can fix) include:
- Survival of the fittest; which implies only the strongest survive.
- A focus on mutations gives the impression the process is entirely random.
- Talking about traits being "needed" implies they were intentionally evolved.
Human evolution to the rescue?
Whilst I can brag about my use of the term derived, it turns out I'm not entirely blameless here. I see myself falling afoul of many of these problems. However, I may be the solution, as well as the problem.
It turns out that people relate best to what they know. They also tend to be a little egocentric. As such, countless studies have shown that teaching science is easier when it's based around people. People are a lot more willing to learn about their own cells than generic cells, even if what's actually being taught about cells is very similar in both situations.
And this trend applies to evolution too. Focusing on human evolution, and using examples from human evolution, make people a lot more interested and accepting of the whole thing. Preliminary studies have found that using this method dramatically increases students' acceptance of evolution, compared to classes that used more generic evolution examples.
In fact, not are they more likely to accept evolution; but they understand it better too. Students who had the human evolution focused class were more likely to think that evolution could also affect behaviours, that humans had evolved, and that it was unguided.
So, with all that in mind I created the ultimate picture to get people interested in (accurately) understanding evolution. The big graph of why are we here:
Actually, I didn't make it specifically for this. That picture is from my Skeptics in the Pub presentation I was recently asked to give in Manchester. I loved doing it (and not just because of the free beer). Please, someone else ask me to come do one. See, the science is saying you should.
Oh, and we should all get better and explaining evolution.
tl;dr
Ask me to do a skeptics in the pub. Pretty please.
References
Pobiner, B., 2016. Accepting, understanding, teaching, and learning (human) evolution: Obstacles and opportunities. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 159(S61), pp.S232-S274.
Werth, A.J., 2009. Clearing the highest hurdle: Human-based case studies broaden students' knowledge of core evolutionary concepts. Journal of Effective Teaching, 9(2), pp.38-53.
