Posted on 04/19/2006 3:57:51 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A new article in PLoS Biology (April 18, 2006) discusses the state of scientific literacy in the United States, with especial attention to the survey research of Jon D. Miller, who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University Medical School.
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory. Over the past 20 years, the proportion of Americans who reject this concept has declined (from 48% to 39%), as has the proportion who accept it (45% to 40%). Confusion, on the other hand, has increased considerably, with those expressing uncertainty increasing from 7% in 1985 to 21% in 2005.In international surveys, the article reports, "[n]o other country has so many people who are absolutely committed to rejecting the concept of evolution," quoting Miller as saying, "We are truly out on a limb by ourselves."
The "partisan takeover" of the title refers to the embrace of antievolutionism by what the article describes as "the right-wing fundamentalist faction of the Republican Party," noting, "In the 1990s, the state Republican platforms in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, Missouri, and Texas all included demands for teaching creation science." NCSE is currently aware of eight state Republican parties that have antievolutionism embedded in their official platforms or policies: those of Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas. Four of them -- those of Alaska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Texas -- call for teaching forms of creationism in addition to evolution; the remaining three call only for referring the decision whether to teach such "alternatives" to local school districts.
A sidebar to the article, entitled "Evolution under Attack," discusses the role of NCSE and its executive director Eugenie C. Scott in defending the teaching of evolution. Scott explained the current spate of antievolution activity as due in part to the rise of state science standards: "for the first time in many states, school districts are faced with the prospect of needing to teach evolution. ... If you don't want evolution to be taught, you need to attack the standards." Commenting on the decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover [Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al.], Scott told PLoS Biology, "Intelligent design may be dead as a legal strategy but that does not mean it is dead as a popular social movement," urging and educators to continue to resist to the onslaught of the antievolution movement. "It's got legs," she quipped. "It will evolve."
Exactly. Of course language evolution was known long before biological evolution.
Nice!
More like 5 or 6!
This is one area where the fundamentalists and radical environmentalists seem to agree. The world would be better off if occasional plagues decimated the population.
Oh?
What we REALLY mean is if all those who oppose die!
We want you dead, your wives, your children to be our slaves, your animals for our food and your land plowed under and salted. We want your feeble names erased from all history and your monuments reduced to dust.
THEN we will be triumphant in our realization of Eden2!
There may be some Chinese folks in prison you could discuss this with.
SHOW ME WHO I CALLED A NAZI!
"There may be some Chinese folks in prison you could discuss this with."
That won't help explain why people in western society think that modern medicine is satanic.
That should obviously have been *some people*.
Andrew seems to believe that only those countries burning fossil fuels as if there was no consequence to doing so should 'heat up'. The term 'Global' climate change doesn't seem to mean anything.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-backroom/1617533/posts?page=1036#1036
Quite a shotgun target, in affirming your agreement by way of a reply to editor-surveyors: the US Government, and it would seem anyone involved in teaching evolution, are the targets of your glib, mindless and flippant slander.
Do you have any conception of how your pathetic 'parallel' between Nazis and teachers must read to the survivors--and there are still millions--who underwent unspeakable nightmares at the hands of Nazis?
Or are you really content to simply spam and bloviate away? Perhaps if you spent as much time thinking about the content of some of your posts as you do with the html formatting, your contributions would be more worthwhile and more welcome.
I though Ross was the palaeontologist on Friends?
There's been more than one????
Well, there was Betsy, and her Japanese cousin, Atta.
Also, there is nothing preventing borrowing words from utterly different languages; the analogous process in biology is much rarer.
Neither is there anything corresponding to natural selection. Language change is all drift and loan words.
A similarity is that the "transitional" languages are what creationists would call "full formed". From Proto Indo European, to Proto Germanic, ... to English, at every step along the way there was a totally usable, communicative, language.
It is hard to imagine how to get smoothly from one language type to another, but it happens.
A very interesting difference is that whereas no biologist doubts common descent from one organism, the corresponding linguistic hypothesis ("monogenesis") is controversial and rejected by most linguists. Joseph Greenberg and others have found evidence for it however: for example, the word for "finger" in Proto Sapiens was something like "tik" or "dik" (English digit, toe, index, decimal), the word for "woman's private parts" was something like "puto" (English p*ssy, Spanish "puta"), etc. Words with similar meanings and sounds are found virtually worldwide, in African, Australian, Amerindian, etc etc. languages.
I recall reading, years ago, about a study of words for numbers -- one, two, three, etc. The idea here is that such words should have remained rather stable during transitions from one language to another. And such is the case for Latin-based languages. But (if I recall correctly) it's totally different for distant language groups, e.g., Japanese.
Or onomatopoiea.
Or onomatopoiea.
thanks, I shouldn't try this sort of thing from memory.
Instead the *grammar* may have singular, dual, trial, paucal and plural instead of a simple singular/plural like English.
Here's Glenn Morton showing the distribution of **tik and **akwa ("water" - which I think may be onomatopoetic gurgling)
And here's a version of Ruhlen's list.
I find all this fascinating.
Notice that the second reference I posted mentions the hypothesis that all extant languages had a common ancestor on the order of 50,000 - 100,000 years ago. This fits nicely with the genetic "bottleneck" 70,000 years ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.