Posted on 02/01/2009 5:11:28 PM PST by Baladas
Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, according to a survey.
The poll found that 25% of Britons believe Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is "definitely true", with another quarter saying it is "probably true". Half of the 2,060 people questioned were either strongly opposed to the theory or confused about it.
The Rescuing Darwin survey, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, found that around 10% of people chose young Earth creationism – the belief that God created the world some time in the last 10,000 years – over evolution.
About 12% preferred intelligent design, the idea that evolution alone is not enough to explain the structures of living organisms. The remainder were unsure, often mixing evolution, intelligent design and creationism together. The survey was conducted by the polling agency ComRes on behalf of the Theos thinktank.
A spokesman for Sense about Science, an independent charitable trust, said it was important for scientists and educators to disentangle religious belief from evidence.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
or sex education, or PE for girls.
What is the muslim belief concerning god’s purpose in creating apes?
Obama wrote it down.
You see the problem Darwin had with this one ~ BTW, in Darwin's day Europeans were fairly familiar with the Koran and the Haditsh (sayings of the Prophet).
BTW, this is a testible hypothesis. You see how much the human benome (and it's operating system) has in common with non-ape primates, and then see if apes have as much in common.
If men are closer to monkeys than they are apes, you kinda' gotta' accept the idea that maybe apes evolved from men!
Aha.
THat hypothesis assumes, though, that men did indeed evolve from non-ape primates.
What if apes evolved(de-evolved?) from men, and monkeys evolved from apes? THen if you hypothesized that the sequence was monkey-man-ape...when the unknowable truth was actually man-ape-monkey...would it be possible to erroneously conclude that the sequence was monkey-ape-man?
“in Darwin’s day Europeans were fairly familiar with the Koran and the Haditsh (sayings of the Prophet).”
I find that surprising.
If you start conquering people you can make much more money off the deal if you try to understand their motivators.
Although your peasants in the field might not know anything about the Koran, the leadership elites in the European countries found it to their profit to know and did so.
Darwin lived in a world where he had regular contact with those elites.
I said it was a testable hypothesis given modern technology.
In fact, the other day there was a little article about how a "control" gene from a human genome was inserted into the genome of a rat and it worked ~ did exactly what it was supposed to do. However, when it was inserted into the genome of a chimpanzee, a supposedly far closer human relative, it didn't work.
The idea in that test was to see what real differences there are between people and chimps. The first test showed our control genes don't work in chimps but they do in rats.
I immediately thought of Mohammad's bizarre claim.
Now, for the second test.
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