Tomorrow belongs to the "Darwinists"?

If we define the "New Atheists" as those godless folk who began pushing back against the modern incarnations of Creationism... why would the lack of change in the public's attitudes toward evolution be relevant?

Most people set in their ways and established in social milieux that encourage one position or another aren't going to be converted regardless of what some upstarts outside their groups say. What matters is what people who are choosing how to construct their identities decide - and that's young people.

The effects of the recent pro-reason advocacy won't be known for a generation.

So in the 18-30 age group in the US there's still no way to get more than a bit over 50% as supporting evolution. That's not terribly impressive. Moreover, this is still very small compared to the general percentage for many other countries. For example, compare this with the numbers in Britain ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/02/charles-darwin-creationism-… ). The questions asked are slightly different which may account for some of the distinction but even given that it looks like the most pro-evolution age cohort in the US is still less accepting of evolution than the general population in Great Britain.

Is there any data available to assess whether the age differences reflect (as you suggest) younger adults truly differing in their beliefs (due to education and public discussion of the topic?), verses a change in attitudes with aging?

(you would need data on what the breakdown was of the older cohorts when they were younger).

It's not an unreasonable alternative hypothesis to explain the data. After all, don't people become a bit more conservative as they age?

I detest being called an atheist (which I am by definition, and very proud of it) because of the negative connotation. Freethinker and Bright are a bit woolly for me too.

I prefer to be thought of as intelligent and sufficiently strong willed to break the programming. Should it have a label? I don't know but I expect not since rather the like the old "The best trick the devil ever pulled..." argument, the best trick believers ever pulled was convincing each other and a large amount of fence-sitters, that being an atheist was tantamount to being a bad person.

To be a "Christian" is a good thing, not=bad - especially in the US it seems. Yet as I worked on my current book (now shelved temporarily for lack of money and I need to eat) I became more aware of how the Mid-East must view the far west. With all the tub-thumping creationists in the US and the way American politicians of both sides seeming eager to profess unerring faith, it's little wonder that some states see them as an evil theocracy - and are therefore, threatened.

While I was, at one point in my life, prepared to accept America as friend, I now find myself slightly repelled by its deeply and frankly idiot clinging to outmoded belief systems.

Curiously, it's been suggested that a good health system sounds the death knell for belief - that the NHS is behind the great decline in belief in the UK. Little wonder then that as soon as that is threatened the idiots come out on telly and assume that Prof. Hawking would have been left to die on the NHS - when in reality, it cared for his every medical need ENTIRELY FREE for 40-some years.

Believe in something you can't prove and then misrepresent a fact that you (and others) easily can? What sort of people are these?

Divalent, there's some evidence which suggests that that isn't the case. See for example: http://www.livescience.com/health/080310-liberal-seniors.html which suggests that if anything people get more liberal as they age. There are problems with that particular study, I'm not so happy with what they think of as liberal as opposed to conservative and there are other issues. However, as far as I am aware every study to look at that question has found either no significant change or a change to the left as people age.

You missed the most interesting demographic: university faculty in the humanities and social sciences. To a man or woman, they will aver a belief in evolution and natural selection, except when it comes to humans. Then virtually every one of them will deny that human behavior has any roots in biology, or that there is any human biodiversity. They are, in effect, special creationists.

Okay, but who were the least Creationist age cohorts twenty five years ago? Is it like vegetarianism, which they've been telling me is the futureâbecause of all the young vegetariansâfor twenty five years as well. It turns out people lapse from vegetarianism as they get older.

It would seem strange for people to buy evolution when they're young, but become creationist as they get older, but not incredibly strange.

The "Darwinist" bit was not what bothered me the most about that headline.

Derek,

I doubt that, and here's why. They've done comparable studies decade over decade on people's general beliefs in woo. People who came of age in the 1930's and 1940's had a low acceptance of woo, while boomers accepted more woo (ufo's, astrology, telepathy) than their parents--significantly more. Happily, new studies on current college students show the woo factor is dropping again.

If that could happen for belief in, say, astrology, there's no reason to believe that it couldn't happen with creationism. Both are equally silly and have been considered so since before the beginning of the 20th century.

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I'm wondering what it was about Catholicism for Gen-X that made it so right-wing. The "odd inversion" of the Gen-X cohort can be seen to be a Catholic phenom. The Gen-X proddies were actually less cretinist (before returning to form). This I can believe because I feel like from the 80's to now, power got to the evangelicals' heads and they really did their best to go off the deep end. (It backfired, natch.) This seems to have worked in counterpoint to a rather marked inflection by Catholics, from believing evolution overwhelmingly, to accepting it quite a bit less, then finally to believing evolution in even higher numbers than before. (And yes, Pope JPII in the 1990's did come out with his doctrine about evolution and souls and god knows what.)

In my own lifetime I've seen the flock seemingly become increasingly right-wing and political to scattering (because of the church sex scandal). I don't know what that's about except that it also seems like a lot of people left (for feminist reasons) and that may have skewed the church to the right for a while.

Maybe someone can enlighten me further?