Originally published at: Evolution finally now accepted by majority of Americans, 150 years after Darwin | Boing Boing
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So is that how long it will take for over 50% of Americans to believe in vaccines?
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According to lead researcher Jon D. Miller, it’s all about (gasp) education
Conservative: Ah, my old nemesis, we meet again…
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Hey Darwin, how many years before we see the headline:
“Coravirus vaccine finally now accepted by remaining Americans”
?
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Maybe we should just start with heliocentrism and work from there.
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Our thinking has evolved on this.
Darwin: What? That makes no sense.
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I didn’t see a link to the article in the Boing Boing post, so if anyone else has problems finding it, here it is: Study: Evolution now accepted by majority of Americans | University of Michigan News
Upshot: it’s still only 54%, but that’s far higher than in past decades when it was running around 30%. Hope for the future? Who knows. The loudest dumb asses seem to still dominate our culture and our responses to everything despite them holding a minority viewpoint.
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Pshaw, evolution is one thing, but now you’re telling me that a glowing sky orb influences our oceans? I’ll believe that when I see…oh, nevermind. /s
More OT, 150 years is a long time, but not insanely long. Changes in medicine and education often take up to a hundred years to go from pretty well-proven theory to wide-spread industry acceptance. And that’s within the industry, not the general public. 
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Well, what with the covid deaths among the unvaccinated, we are seeing evolution in action… So, if there is a correlation between people who don’t believe in evolution, and the people who don’t believe in modern medical science, we will witness the rare occurrence of the evolution of ideas…
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At this rate we’ll be extinct before we even get to 80%.
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The wording used in the study is “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals”, which matters (some people believe that other species evolved through natural selection, but that god created humans as is).
figure 1 showing history of response to whether humans developed from other animals:
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Not until we get kids dying. Most deaths are still after reproductive age, so no impact on evolution.
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That would be a good excuse if the rest of the western world (and large portions of the rest of the world) didn’t have much better numbers.
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I know several people who don’t believe in purely “random evolution”, they do think that God is behind it all although they accept the geological and astronomical evidence for the age of the earth and the universe.
I don’t really have any problem with that, it’s the earth-is-6000-years-old folks whom I want out of the textbooks.
So I’m not sure what this survey really means by “does not believe in evolution”.
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Yeah, I didn’t really mean it as an excuse. More as an example of how slow to change humans are (seemingly, especially USians.)
People gonna dumb. 
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Well, the whole point of evolution is that it is not, in fact, random. There are various forces pressuring development of species in one direction or another. If a climate changes, so that it is slightly more muddy, then critters with slightly bigger paws will be slightly less likely to sink into the mud, and so be slightly more likely to get away from a predator, (or catch a tasty smaller critter to eat), and thus be slightly more likely to live long enough to raise babies. So, over time, there will be more and more of them with the slightly larger paws. And the paws will get bigger and bigger over generations until some sort of equilibrium is reached (the advantages of bigger paws balance out with whatever the disadvantages may be)
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When I read this earlier, my first reaction was to wonder if it’s only happened because the evangelicals have been spending so much of their time and energy brainwashing congregants on things like Trump (and politics) and the coronavirus that they’ve been neglecting to keep brainwashing them about evolution.
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"Good... USE your higher education, boy! Let the accrued knowledge flow through you to make more intelligent choices!!"
Thats easy: 150 years.
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Depends on how quickly the unvaccinated die off.
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