Harris Poll on ID

_{William Dembski

January 27, 2006

Evolution, Intelligent Design}

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From a colleague:

Harris Poll: http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=581

According to Table 7, belief in Intelligent Design increases with increasing education. (Ditto for evolution.)

According to Table 8, belief in ID is more common among Democrats than Republicans. (Ditto for evolution.)

According to Table 9, belief in ID is more common in the Northeastern and Western USA and less common in the Southern and Midwestern USA. (Ditto for evolution.)

Also, taking into account this report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm
Belief in ID is more common in the UK than in the USA (17% vs 10%). (Ditto for evolution.)

Comments

AVG download... ...Antivirus free downloads_{December 28, 2007
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Polls suck.John Davison_{January 30, 2006
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Of course God ceated man in his present form. It just took millions of year and many individual saltational events to pull it off. That does not mean each step was gradual. Quite the contrary each step, like every genetic change, was instantaneous. They were each just separated in time. I am currently estimating that somewhere between 100 and 300 individual saltations were required to go from Protozoa to modern man; certainly not more than thirty to go from the most primitive primate to modern man. I am thinking of preparing a paper dealing with this question. One thing is for sure. We did not arrive on this planet without animal ancestors all of whom are quite dead.John Davison_{January 28, 2006
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.... Belief in evolution doubles from 17% to 35% as education goes from HS to postgrad. Belief in ID triples from 6% to 17% as education goes from HS to postgrad. .... The % increase for Darwinism is understandable: the more education you get in modern American Universities, the more your brains get beat out with Darwinian demogogury...in EVERY field. The % increase for ID--since ID is shunned in schools across the board--shows that educated people on their own initiative are searching for information, are finding it, and are finding it convincing.Red Reader_{January 28, 2006
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Wow! John Lynch of Stranger Fruit managed to keep the anti-ID hysteria down to something less than frothing at the mouth. Excellent. Way to go, John!DaveScot_{January 28, 2006
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More on polls Over at Uncommon Descent, both Dembski and Dave Springer are highlighting this Harris poll from July of last year (you got to hand it to the ID supporters, they keep up with the literature). Dembski merely makes a number of...Stranger Fruit_{January 28, 2006
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Now this a real interesting tidbit... From Table 7 Belief in evolution doubles from 17% to 35% as education goes from HS to postgrad. Belief in ID triples from 6% to 17% as education goes from HS to postgrad. How about that! This would be particularly disturbing to the self-annointed intelligentsia at Panda's Thumb - if only they knew about it. ;-)DaveScot_{January 27, 2006
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I'm a bit of a poll junkie. The Harris Poll is the third one down in this list http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm#Evolution Poll results can vary a lot for no apparent reason. The most common factors skewing them are different formulas applied to pick out the sample group so it's representative and exact wording of questions. In these polls there are usually many thousands of people actually polled then they select x% catholics, y% jewish, z% hispanic, etc. etc. in trying to get a true representative slice of America in the typical 1000 respondents that are actually used in the final result. The formulas get complicated, the polling organizations are hesitant to publish them (trade secrets), and they vary from organization to organization. Large swings in the answers can also come from seemingly insignificant changes in wording of questions. What's usually done to correct for the above situation is to average the responses to similar questions from all the polling organizations possible. Here we have six polls all with essentially the same question: Man Created By God in Present Form (yes) CBS 51% CNN 53% Harris 64% NBC 57% Gallup 45% Fox 50% --------- Avg. 53% The Harris poll number is significantly above the average on this question. However, one can still say that a majority of Americans believe that God created man in his present form. About the same majority percentage that voted for George Bush in 2004 which is probably not much of a coincidence. Along with a chuckle anytime someone tells me common descent is false I also chuckle anytime someone tells me life happened by accident too. Two things seem clear to me - 1) evolution (descent with modification from a common ancestor) happened and 2) it happened by design. I reckon' that puts me into a minority so small it gets one of those footnotes "less than 1%". :-)DaveScot_{January 27, 2006
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Over and over I have to remember Davescot mentioning that Dr. Dembski almost seems to be replying to recent comments with these very timely posts. Uncanny. On the polls, it's interesting that the post grad is three times as likely (17% to 6% ... ok, I rounded a little) to believe ID than is the person with a highschool education or less (the corrsponding increase for the evolutionist is only 2:1, although they still outnumber the IDer by a similar margin).Charlie_{January 27, 2006
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