It would be interesting to see if the poll had any questions to see if those polled made any distinctions about “micro-evolution” v. “macro-evolution”.
_________
the only folks I’ve ever seeen/heard/read making that distinction are creationists and IDers. Not trying to raise anyone’s ire, just calling it like I see it.
Your are quite wrong. Any serious student or scientist involved in evolutionary research will not simply state "there is only one evolution and it covers everything".
I am a research scientist who has studied evolution (as a student) and has performed research using evolutionary algorithms.
As a process that maximizes the survival of entities within different environments and multiple "colonies", by the propogation of a common set of "selfish genes"; it is incredibily powerful process and able to 'create" new types of macro-level beings that had not previously existed but survive better under certain conditions than previous "beings".
What seems impossible is for things to evolve purely randomly into what we have today. But it is not a random process there is a forcing function that selects successful/unsuccessful beings in every generation and passes on the successes, speeding up the advancement exponentially.
In a way it is likely distilling out the failures, keeping the partial successes, mixing them up and then testing the resulting new beings, measuring the best, killing off the rest and begin again...and so on.
That process does absolutely exist in nature, and I am a bible-thumping evangelical Baptist.
However, in the minds on so many who do not wish to understand, they believe the word "evolution" explains "creation", the origins of life to begin with, and the creation of the soul of man, and the rapid onset of mans culture and intelligence. It certainly does not.
Origins of life is a totally different set of theories. They cannot simply be appended to a more substantiated theory of "evolution" and gain credibility because of it.
No evolutionary scientist can adequately explain the rapid development of mankind within the last 50,000 years or so either.
Not even Richard Dawkins, the high priest of atheist religion and godfather of evolution can explain why mankind suddenly developed a supreme intellect, spirituallity, and culture that has propelled the species into the ost advanced species ever created, by far. Nor caqn he explain the origins of life.
mankind is the pinnacle of evolutionary development yet those very factors which make it so successful for passing on the "selfish gene", the prime motivation behind evolution, does NOT appear in any other species!
Evolutionary theories suggest other species should also have acquired to some substantial degrees at least some of the myriad characterisitics that have made humans so wildly successfull. They haven't.
The belief in God is one of the single most important characteristics man has acquired. It has been the motivating power behind the advancement of culture and societal structures. It has driven man to cooperate together, as teams, as companies, as socieities, to build mutually beneficial systems., where before they killed each other off at tribal/family levels as potential competitors just like animals. The idea of liberty for all men is a purely God-given belief. yet it has been a powerful influence in survival of the certain cultures.
Atheism is a throwback to animalistic characteristics, which have proven so unsuccessful by comparison.
So the theory evolution is not just one theory and it does not explain "everything" it is composed of many competing theories.
Of course there are micro- and macro- forms of evolution. Richard Dawkins also coined another type of cultural evolution based on the "meme" (as opposed to the gene).
I have developed software code using micro-evolution (and genetic algorithms). it works great. I have solved scientific problems using micro-evolution. Evolution did not create the components of the software which evolved (the basic building blocks that came together to form the entity)
The Creationists are absolutely correct when they state that there are no scientific theories that have explained the origins of life with any degree of confidence.
All the scientific theories of creation rely on vast amounts of hand-waving, and wild presumptions about the conditions of the early earth.
The theory that life was initiated on earth by an "outside" influence has scientific credibility, and a probabity of being correct higher than most any other theory. (since it opens up the possibility of life being created in any one of an almost infinite number of different environments outside the earth, then brought here through any number of possible processes. mankind has already brought life to the moon, possibly to mars, by contamination)