Razib Khan

February 17, 2009

Paul Gottfried observes the Creationist slant of the majority of Americans, and goes on to bemoan the cultural illiteracy of the populace as a whole.  To be fair, it does seem that the young are more inclined to accept evolution than the old, suggesting that the future is not so ignorant. Of course, my first thought when I saw those data was to remember that young people are less religious than the old, so it might be due to the correlation between secularity and youth.  But not so.  I looked in the General Social Survey, and it seems that even among the religious there is a shift upward in acceptance of evolution among the youth.  For a perspective that the populace as a whole is no more ignorant than in the past, I would suggest Gregory Cochran’s What Education Crisis?, from the May 23rd 2005 issue of The American Conservative. That’s my optimism for the week.