Polls on Evolution and Education

The Washington Post has this piece by Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center in the Sunday Outlook section.

The Discovery Institute has this page with the results of several recent polls on teaching the controversy regarding evolution.

An article on the Pew Research Center website with actual poll results can be found here.

While I was a little surprised by some aspects of these polls, I am not surprised by the results regarding teaching about evolution in public schools. The American people simply recognize that neutrality toward the various perspectives is a better paradigm for interpreting the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment than a rigid separation that would give a clear governmental endorsement to an historical theory that has obvious and profound philosophical and religious implications, and which can never be proven with the same degree of certainty as theories in the operational sciences.

What is more surprising is how gullible the mainstream media is in swallowing the pablum by the Darwin Only lobby, despite the cogent criticism of Darwinian orthodoxy by prominent intellectuals. Many in the mainstream media seem to want to take us back to a fictional 1925 and stay there.