Controversial? The Theory of Evolution is among the most studied and sound concepts in science. The only people who think it is controversial are either people who don’t understand biology or those who want to push a religious agenda under the guise of science.
Gallup Poll 2007 May 21-24
Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?
Yes 49
No 48
Undecided 2
Can you get more divided than that?
By the way, for Republicans it was 30% yes and 68% no. The only reason it came close to even overall was the typical oversampling of Democrats.
No, cynics have a very valid point: humans could not have evolved from natural selection alone in the timeframe they did. And many evolutionists simply can't handle the truth. The evolutionary pressure that drove human evolution, while leaving the evolution of other animals untouched, is tribal warfare. Many academians cannot accept that modern humans are violent war makers by nature any more than cynics can accept natural selection caused intelligent humans to pop out of the background so fast. Until scientists do the math and discover that humans are fundamentally nasty creatures and that eglatarian socialism could never work, the theory of human evolution is flawed.