Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Read It and Weep

What do witchcraft, the seven dwarfs, the Three Stooges, Darwin, and Copernicus have in common? It's all here. What isn't hear, sadly, is reason.

10 comments:

Cheryl Cato said...

Purely pitiful!!! ...and scary as all get-out!

Sylvia K said...

I couldn't agree more! Pitiful, stupid and definitely scary as hell!

Sylvia

Roy said...

Eh! Polls... I take 'em with a large grain of salt.

Leslie Parsley said...

I'm not poll crazy either but posted to my FB anyway. Wonder how many of my southern kin will go for it.

Anonymous said...

What do HL Mencken, PT Barnum and Karl Rove all have in common ? The belief that Stupidity is as American as baseball, apple pie and Kenny Lay.

K. said...

If a pollster selects a thousand people a random and it is a true random sample (which isn't hard to do), the numbers should be pretty solid. The questions also have to be phrased properly.

Not only that, these polls don't reflect issues where movement in numbers is susceptible to external influences like advertising. So, pathetically, it is likely the case that 61% of Americans either don't accept Darwin's theory of evolution as scientific or don't know whether it is -- something roughly akin to 61% of Americans either not believing or being unsure that the world is round.

Peter Tibbles said...

Yikes, I thought we had some crazies here in Australia but they have nothing on yours.

Darlene said...

I'm weeping. How did education fail so completely?

K. said...

Darlene, I don't know that it's a failure of education so much as a general disinterest and the sheer number of things that are expected for our schools (while the NEA is demonized).

Some things I am at a loss to explain. I know that I left public school with a grasp of and respect for the scientific method even I didn't take more in high school than first year biology. I've actually read opinions from ID?Creationist types who think that the scientific method ought to be changed, apparently because it leads to ungodly results.

Re teaching Darwin, there are "programs" that help parents unteach him at home. What has always gotten me about that is the assumption that their faith and religion is so weak that it can't accommodate scientific fact.

I'm carrying on now, but...I once engaged someone over a mistaken assumption that the word "theory" implies that Darwin simply held an unproven opinion. That in itself show what the forces of liberalism are up against, because I had to respond with a nuanced explanation of the uses of the word in a research/scientific context v. the vernacular.

We're in this surreal world in which people simple do not wish to learn -- in fact, they're against learning because it might alter their opinions.

Ima Wizer said...

What's to become of us!!!!