Friday, August 11, 2006

How many Canuck Creationists?

Science has a chart showing the results of a survey of belief in evolution in 34 countries. The US is second only to Turkey in creationists. What's worse is that creationists are more common now than in 1985. Currently, only 40% of Americans believe human beings descended from an earlier species of animal.This CBS poll gets the same total result for descent from another species (only 17 per cent of Americans thought evolution occurred without divine help).

Unfortunately, this survey didn't include Canada. That is too bad from our parochial point-of-view, but also as a dencent comparator for the U.S.

A COMPAS poll conducted at the behest of the National Post prior to the 2000 election showed Canadians split 47/53 on creation vs. evolution, but its methodology is criticized here. Reading the critique, the question seems to be really bad, and the number of creationists in Canada is probably less than 20%. Unfortunately, the authors of the critique used their own survey of first year undergraduates at Wilfred Laurier, which, while perhaps useful in distinguishing variants of "creationism", is obviously not representative of the Canadian population.

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