Evolution Denialism in Universities

Chris Hegarty

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I've had a bit of a problem lately. Perhaps I'm becoming more perceptive, but I've noticed a strong rash of evolution denialism at the collegiate level. I'm an undergrad at Purdue University, itself a very science-research school and (one would think) not very likely to harbor many evolution denialists. However, some college Christian fundamentalist group has started spewing large numbers of Jack Chick pamphlets all over the place. Here's a link if you haven't seen it. I say "some college Christian fundamentalist group" because there are a lot of them at Purdue. So, therefore, I have a few questions to field to you all:

1) Have any of you college types noticed an increase in evolution denialism in colleges lately? There was the Cameron Origin of Species baloney a while back, but is this becoming more pervasive?

2) If this movement is becoming more common in colleges and universities, why and how?

3) Are college fundamentalist groups becoming more militant about their "mission"? They seem so to me, but I don't have much of a frame of reference; I'm kind of a spring chicken.

Thanks in advance for your perspectives. I posted my whole story about my "incident" up on my blog because if I posted it here I'd violate RULE TEN fairly badly.
 
Chris Hegarty said:
I've had a bit of a problem lately. Perhaps I'm becoming more perceptive, but I've noticed a strong rash of evolution denialism at the collegiate level.
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Why not show this article to the department head?

South African fossils could be new hominid species

Many scientists regard the Australopithecines as being directly ancestral to Homo but the precise placement of A. sediba in the human family tree is already proving controversial, with some scientists arguing the species may well be a Homo itself.
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It seems to me all rational debate has settled on evolution long ago, and has now proceeded to debate the family tree itself.

The denialists are so behind the times they are missing the current debates altogether.
 
zaphod2016 said:
It seems to me all rational debate has settled on evolution long ago, and has now proceeded to debate the family tree itself.

The denialists are so behind the times they are missing the current debates altogether.
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The problem isn't actual debate on evolution; it is, as you have said, completely settled. The problem is that (at least in my experience) more people at the collegiate level are denying evolution, and I'm wondering why. Is there some societal movement that has caused these groups to become so much more acrid even in the face of mounting evidence?
 
Chris Hegarty said:
The problem isn't actual debate on evolution; it is, as you have said, completely settled. The problem is that (at least in my experience) more people at the collegiate level are denying evolution, and I'm wondering why. Is there some societal movement that has caused these groups to become so much more acrid even in the face of mounting evidence?
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Teh Interwebz.

The same societal movement that has caused other groups to believe that it's perfectly okay to make death threats against US senators or to shoot abortionists in the middle of a church service.

A long, long time ago (I can still remember how that music used to make me,... sorry, I drifted off there) you got most of your information from the same sources that your neighbors did. We all read the Daily Bugle and watched Channel 1 News, and if I wanted to know whether Bigfoot had been instrumental in getting the UFOs to fake evidence of the Holocaust, I'd probably ask my neighbor and he would tell me I was bonkers.

If I wanted to know what D&D was like, I had to wait for someone to hand me a copy of Chick's Dark Dungeons tract.

Today I know that my neighbor is part of the anti-Bigfoot conspiracy sheepie because Google told me so, and I can download all the Chick tracts I like in the privacy of my own parents' basement.
 
Chris Hegarty said:
The problem isn't actual debate on evolution; it is, as you have said, completely settled. The problem is that (at least in my experience) more people at the collegiate level are denying evolution, and I'm wondering why. Is there some societal movement that has caused these groups to become so much more acrid even in the face of mounting evidence?
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It's probably some general reason in the world zeitgeist that will make sense to sociologists in a few decades or maybe a century, but that we're too close to right now to recognize. It's not like the religious resurgence is happening in the US alone.

More to topic, I only came across this once from any students when I was in college (less than a decade ago IIRC) - I specify "students" because we would occasionally have a "preacher" come to the common ground at school and call all the women whores and the men homosexuals, hoping he'd get punched so he could sue.

Anyway, in geography a non-traditional student (female in her 40s) interrupted the professor during the class on the formation of the earth as it related to plate tectonics to inform us all that "the earth was 5000 years old because it said so in the Bible and nobody could tell her otherwise". She spent the rest of the class shaking her head at everything the professor said.

This was a small liberal arts college in West Virginia, for what it's worth.

There was another guy during my freshman year who somehow got had fliers sent to everybody's dorm mailbox about "Communism on Campus" (it had something to do with abortion I later found out - what the connection was I didn't care enough to learn). I think he was placed on academic probation for something unrelated later in the year, or maybe he just dropped out to go blow up Planned Parenthoods.
 
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I think that it is a rebellion against a reality that seems to deny that the human condition is in any way special, and by extension a rebellion against a society in which the subject feels increasingly to be just one of the billions of identical, expendable parts.
 
Polaris said:
It's probably some general reason in the world zeitgeist that will make sense to sociologists in a few decades or maybe a century, but that we're too close to right now to recognize. It's not like the religious resurgence is happening in the US alone.
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Nah, I really think it's just that the nutcases have become more organized.

We saw something like this (at least in the USA) in the early Reagan years with the Moral Majority, which managed to vault itself into national prominence by putting a single voice and spokesman to the disorganized mass that evangelical Christianity has been since the 1920s and the collapse of the big tent revival organizers.

We saw something like this when Rush revitalized talk radio.

On a smaller scale, we saw something like this when Oprah started her book club and all of a sudden the single biggest predictor of book sales was whether Oprah liked it.

The difference in all of these cases, of course, is that they're centralized and rely heavily on conventional mass-media to deliver a particular person's message -- with the Net, nutcases can self-organized on a larger scale. Some people use this for flash mobs, others use it to prove that Darwin was really Bigfoot.
 
drkitten said:
Nah, I really think it's just that the nutcases have become more organized.

We saw something like this (at least in the USA) in the early Reagan years with the Moral Majority, which managed to vault itself into national prominence by putting a single voice and spokesman to the disorganized mass that evangelical Christianity has been since the 1920s and the collapse of the big tent revival organizers.

We saw something like this when Rush revitalized talk radio.

On a smaller scale, we saw something like this when Oprah started her book club and all of a sudden the single biggest predictor of book sales was whether Oprah liked it.

The difference in all of these cases, of course, is that they're centralized and rely heavily on conventional mass-media to deliver a particular person's message -- with the Net, nutcases can self-organized on a larger scale. Some people use this for flash mobs, others use it to prove that Darwin was really Bigfoot.
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Hold on, you think all evangelical christians are nutcases?
 
BenBurch said:
I think that it is a rebellion against a reality that seems to deny that the human condition is in any way special, and by extension a rebellion against a society in which the subject feels increasingly to be just one of the billions of identical, expendable parts.
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I still don't understand why people don't think that this is an awesome and very comforting reality.

Anyway, in geography a non-traditional student (female in her 40s) interrupted the professor during the class on the formation of the earth as it related to plate tectonics to inform us all that "the earth was 5000 years old because it said so in the Bible and nobody could tell her otherwise". She spent the rest of the class shaking her head at everything the professor said.
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There were several trolls in an evolutionary anthropology class I took a while back. Essentially, they would swarm the professor with "well, the bible doesn't say it, so it musn't be true" observations and, after class, they'd attempt to corner other students and tell us exactly why everything the professor said was untrue. They got a little upset when I told them to blow it out their :eek:es.
 
Well my uni's islamic society gave it a go but that was a few years back. Polling suggests that there are a lot of creationists out there. That the UK ones are still not very vocal is something to be relived by.
 
This will tend to happen. It is far, far easier and much more intuitively appealing to accept the idea of Special Creation somehow being important to life; than it is to do all the hard work necessary to find out otherwise.

So, it doesn't surprise me that Evolution Denialism is going to continue to be a problem, for a long, long time.

The funny thing is that it is not all despair and doom: Most creationists actually accept almost all of evolutionary ideas. And, they will often accept most new ones that come about. They just don't realize it. They will simply call them something else ("It's not evolution, because it's just an example of population dynamics"), or they will do a recon to cover their old ideas ("It's not evo/devo: It's front-loading! Yeah, that's it!")

It is still important for most people to learn about how life works, for several reasons: One of which is to have a better understanding of any bio-technologies that come about, and how to handle them effectively.

But, at the same time, most of the actual protesting is fairly thin and superficial. At the end of the day, they will still be forced to accept the findings of evo/devo, even if they call it something else.
 
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Chris Hegarty said:
The problem isn't actual debate on evolution; it is, as you have said, completely settled. The problem is that (at least in my experience) more people at the collegiate level are denying evolution, and I'm wondering why.
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Students or teachers?

If teachers appear to be more anti-evolution than before, I suggest marching to the department head's office and formally complaining. If necessary, start a petition first, to show your fellow students would also like science-based science education.

If students appear to be more anti-evolution, I would second those above who discuss the Internet's influence. I would also suggest our current society encourages a lot of people to go to college who, quite frankly, don't belong there.
 
zaphod2016 said:
Students or teachers?
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There are a lot of undergrads and grad students, but I'm fairly sure that very few of them are in any type of biological science. As for profs, there are a couple, but one's in library science and the other's in political science.

zaphod2016 said:
If students appear to be more anti-evolution, I would second those above who discuss the Internet's influence. I would also suggest our current society encourages a lot of people to go to college who, quite frankly, don't belong there.
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I definitely agree that the Internet is a huge influence; I've read up a little on some websites, and they have an incredibly sophisticated game plan for how, where, and when they will attempt to hook people on creationism.
 
NewtonTrino said:
Hold on, you think all evangelical christians are nutcases?
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And, as usual, Newton demonstrates that he has no reading comprehension skills to speak of.

Are all evangelical Christians evolution deniers? Of course not -- although almost all evolution deniers are evangelical Christians (and nutcases).
 
Chris Hegarty said:
I still don't understand why people don't think that this is an awesome and very comforting reality.
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Because it's not very "special." Everyone likes feeling "special," which is one of the things that a lot of marketing firms have used to their advantage.

How many times have you seen teenage girls on TV walk past the cutest guy in school and then gasp "He smiled at me! He noticed me!" or something equally inane? If you've not watched TV in a while, check out many of the Foxtrot strips involving Paige.

This is people just walking past the universe and trying to convince themselves that "It smiled at me! it noticed me!"
 
drkitten said:
And, as usual, Newton demonstrates that he has no reading comprehension skills to speak of.

Are all evangelical Christians evolution deniers? Of course not -- although almost all evolution deniers are evangelical Christians (and nutcases).
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So everyone who denies evolution is a nutcase?
 
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