ABSTRACT
Early in our joint investigations of individuals’ cognitions about evolution, a Japanese visiting professor asked a wide-eyed question during a lab meeting: “Excuse me, but did you say that some Americans do not believe in evolution?” His amazement was infectious. When we asserted that somewhat less than 50% of U.S. adults accept evolution (e.g., Miller, Scott, & Okamoto, 2006), we were as surprised by his reaction as he was by the situation. He wanted to know what else there was to accept, so we explained that it was roughly the Old Testament’s Genesis story. When asked what the Shinto creation myth was, he eventually recalled, “Two gods were fighting and people resulted,” but he could recall no particulars of how animals and plants arose. This episode, and less anecdotal evidence, led one of us (Ranney, 1998 & in press) to a conjecture about an answer to an oft-posed puzzle (e.g., Miller et al., 2006), which we will call the U.S. “divergence” question: Why does the United States lag so far behind comparable nations in its acceptance of evolution? The episode also highlights another element of cognition about evolution: human-centrism. The U.S.’s modest embrace of evolution has been salient on the landscapes of both public opinion polls and biology education (e.g., Bishop & Anderson, 1990). Although this may amuse some citizens (even some scientists) from peer nations, the import of the U.S. evolutionary divergence goes well beyond science education (even plausibly engaging global climate change issues; Ranney, in press). This chapter’s central goal is to add richness to our collective knowledge of how people understand (and could understand) evolution. We take two approaches toward the goal, with the bulk of the chapter focusing on the concretely evidential and the rest providing a broad theoretical perspective in support. We first offer novel empirical evidence (two experiments and some survey data) that we hope both problematizes and enlightens discussions
about the cognition of evolution. A conjectural answer to the oft-posed question from above is then explicated in sweeping geopolitical terms. Our empirical results cohere with this conjecture about the relatively modest U.S. acceptance of evolution, but they stand on their own regardless of the conjecture’s veracity. Below, we describe two empirical ventures that address some of the landscape of how U.S. undergraduates think about the complex arena of evolution. Study 1’s experiments address some interesting asymmetries in how undergraduates approach evolution in the realm of plants-compared to that of humans. Study 2 focuses on the relationships between undergraduate views regarding evolution and creationism-and which of these ought to be taught in U.S. schools.
