Over at the Power Line blog, John Hinderaker, who is so perpetually out of breath that his brain has not received any oxygen since Reagan was president, cites the results of a National Science Foundation survey showing that "51% of Democrats do not know that the Earth goes around the Sun once a year!" To me, this seemed high, so I clicked "National Science Foundation," to which he had attached a hyperlink, expecting to be connected to the "study" itself. Instead, I was connected to another blog post about the "study." When I clicked on the hyperlink in that post, I made it to the website of the NSF--and received the message, "The page you tried to access does not exist on our site OR an internal error has occurred."
Yes, an error has occurred.
The blog Hinderaker links to is the Volokh Conspiracy, which is written by a group of right-wing law professors. My theory of the case is that Hinderaker's knowledge of the "study" is second-hand and limited entirely to what he read in this one blog post. So what does the Volokh post say? One thing it doesn't say is who was interviewed and how their political affiliations were determined. One thing it does say, but which Hinderaker chose not to mention, is that 38 per cent of Republicans also failed this solar-system test. Maybe the headline should be more general: "Americans exhibit stunning ignorance of basic scientific knowledge."
Hinderaker also does not report what the "study"--I keep putting it in quotes since I'm not sure it's real--found about Republicans and evolution. From the Volokh post:
The Republican and conservative refusal to recognize evolution is well known, but the extent of it may not be. As if the numbers for all adults (48 percent) aren’t depressing enough, only 28 percent of conservative Republicans believe that humans evolved from earlier species. In the next three spots are 32 percent of Republicans believing in evolution, 34 percent of conservative Democrats, and 37 percent of conservatives. (For comparison, 28 percent of fundamentalist Protestants believe in evolution, as do 27 percent of those who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God.)
At the other end of the spectrum, the political group most likely to embrace evolution is moderate Independents (68 percent), followed by liberal Democrats (66 percent) and liberals overall (66 percent).
It's interesting, I think, that the Volokh author, Jim Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, is plainly appalled by the overwhelming rejection of evolution by his fellow wingers. It's enough, almost, to disqualify him as a winger. He might have added, though, that while it's easy to name prominent Republican politicians who reject evolution, there aren't any Democrats in high places who don't know that our Earth goes 'round the sun--four times in a presidential term.
And, speaking of what Republicans think about evolution, here is John Hinderaker himself on the subject:
Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core. The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition. Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature. All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science. Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.
So, in the world according to Hinderaker, evolution is "pseudo-science," Darwin was not one of the greatest scientists but just a crusading atheist, and those who don't mark their ballots as he marks his have a monopoly on scientific illiteracy.
I only wish he hadn't left us wondering about the identity of the mathematician responsible for having secularized the calculus.
