More Americans are coming to accept Charles Darwin's "dangerous idea" of evolution, according to thirty years' worth of national surveys.
Between 1985 and 2010, roughly 40 percent of surveyed adults in the US agreed that "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals". Taking into account the small number of fence-sitters, this suggests much of the nation was evenly divided on the theory.
By 2016, that percentage had, at last, become a majority, reaching 54 percent.
As it turns out, education has played a crucial role in that shift. When researchers began to analyze the demographics of survey respondents over the past thirty years, they noticed the completion of one or more college science courses was the strongest predictor of evolution acceptance.
"Almost twice as many Americans held a college degree in 2018 as in 1988," says Mark Ackerman, who studies collective intelligence at the University of Michigan.
"It's hard to earn a college degree without acquiring at least a little respect for the success of science."
n the current analysis, the proportion of American adults with scientific literacy increased from 11 percent in 1988 to 31 percent in 2019.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...accepting-the-science-of-evolution/ar-AANQU0u
