Friday, August 8, 2008

Evolution Survey

I recently came across a survey online called 'A Survey of Public Understanding of Evolution'. It's sponsored by the skeptic society and asks questions about people's knowledge, understanding, and attitudes towards the theory of evolution. As a social scientist, I'm interested in what they might find out through this survey (even if it's methodology doesn't exactly adhere to strict standards of scientific rigor). While my worldview probably differs a fair amout from the majority of people who might tune in to the skeptic society from time to time, I do think they have a generally good perspective when it comes to our scientific understanding of the world. My guess is that the sample they get for this survey will probably have far greater numbers of athiests and non-religious people respond, but what they will need are more respondents who have faith of one sort or another in order to balance out the sample demographics. I have nothing to do with the creation of the survey, but am interested in the results and think they could be far more interesting if the sample is somewhat more representative of the real world than say 90% atheist/agnostic. So if you have a few minutes, please take the time to answer their questions (link is embedded in the survey name above). I'll make sure later to let you know what findings they report.

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