by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It's been almost 150 years since Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species turned the scientific, religious and social order of the Victorians upside down. And yet, a significant chunk - almost 50 per cent - of North Americans still just don't buy into the idea that humans evolved from hairier, stumpier, sloping-browed forebears, a recent study co-authored by a McGill scientist reveals.

Brian Alters, the director of McGill's Evolution Education Research Centre, and Craig E. Nelson, a biology professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, came across the startling find while writing a paper on methods to improve the teaching of evolution at the college and university level. What they found, however, was an alarming lack of scientific knowledge not only among the general public but also among college graduates, including science students.

"In a recent Gallup poll concerning evolution, 45 per cent of Americans chose the responses ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.' Only 35 per cent of all respondents thought ‘the theory of evolution is supported by evidence.' Yet, in the same poll, 80 per cent of respondents considered themselves to be ‘very informed' or ‘somewhat informed' about evolution," the study says.

The rest of the report reveals a shocking lack of knowledge regarding ancient human pre-history. For instance, almost half of respondents believed humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, and only 29 per cent felt that evolution was "‘completely accurate' or ‘mostly accurate.'"

"Coming out of a chemistry or physics class, a student may say, ‘Okay, I don't really understand all of it, but I think it pretty much works,'" says Alters. "But when they come out of a biology class and say, ‘No, I don't buy evolution,' that's just first-class weird. It's a peculiar problem to evolution. And what's peculiar is that not only do students not understand evolution, but they don't even believe it."

Believe, sinners!

Evolution is particularly tricky to teach, Alters says, because it addresses serious metaphysical, religious and personal beliefs about the place humans hold in the universe. "There's no baggage in balancing a chemical equation," he says. But as for evolution, there are fundamental difficulties among the public in overcoming the idea that we are merely (relatively) hairless apes, even among Alters' students, who will one day go on to teach science.

"There's an impression among students and the general public that equates evolution with atheism and anti-evolution with God," he says. "And most people want to be on God's side." He points out, however, that the Catholic Church okayed evolution over 50 years ago.

Alters says that while the level of anti-evolutionist belief in the States and Canada is similar - he does mention that Quebecers accept the theory the most, at 49 per cent - the movement is stronger south of the border. This is due, he says, largely to more access to money and a stronger tendency among Americans to organize in opposition of what they see as affronts to their beliefs.

He also blames the increasingly popular Intelligent Design movement, which has, according to Alters, "opened the tent large enough to interpret any kind of creationism you want, if you want to fight the evolutionary dogma." Intelligent Design, using technical pseudo-scientific arguments, states that the world is just far too complex to have evolved without some kind of grand creator behind it all; thus everyone from Stockwell Day to Raël can be recruited as allies in the fight against evolution.

In light of all this, Alters sees a clear need to improve the teaching of science at all levels. "It's a tough thing," he says. "Now we have to talk to professors who not only don't know how to teach, but are teaching something that is disbelieved by half the student populace."