A couple of polls that I've just become aware of have some interesting data on evolution denial as a function of political (and also religious) stance. In the 12 January 2007 issue of
Science, there is a letter from Allan Mazur that links to a survey from 2000. Mazur writes:
In Fig. S1 , the percentage of respondents believing in human evolution is plotted simultaneously against political view (conservative, moderate, liberal), education (high school or less, some college, graduate school), and respondent's religious denomination (fundamentalist or not). Belief in evolution rises along with political liberalism, independently of control variables.
The figure mentioned is a pdf apparently freely available -
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/315/5809/187a/DC1/1 - I'm not computer-savvy enough to get it to post here. A couple of the things that made me go "hmmm" on the graph were:
1) Of respondents with some college that identified as fundamentalists, 23% of political conservatives and 36% of liberals agreed with the statement "Human beings evolved from earlier species of animals."
2) Of "some college/not fundamentalist" respondents, 40% of conservatives and 82% of liberals agreed with that statement.
Similar results are reported in a 2005 poll from Harris:
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PI...
Their Table 8 addresses Democrat/Republican as well as lib/con leanings.
Now I fully understand the religion/origins and education correlations. but I'm not sure that I get the politics/origins - particularly as the first poll separates political stance from religious affiliation. Any ideas?
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In Social Issues, perhaps?
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