In a print-only (so far) (NOW AVAILABLE ONLINE HERE) article in Skeptical Inquirer (March / April, 2015), “When don’t the Highly Educated Believe in Evolution,” Charles Reichardt and Ian Saari, researchers at the University of Denver, identify a troubling trend in a survey of Republicans. They divide their survey participants into those who believe the Bible is the word of God (“Bible-Believers”) and those who don’t. The disturbing trend is that, as those in the former group acquire more education, as measured by academic degree, they become less likely to accept the standard scientific theory of human evolution (those in the latter group trend opposite to this). A similar trend is seen with standard cosmology, and with Republicans and anthropogenic climate change.
They confess themselves bemused. Several hypotheses are ruled out from other facets of the collected data; then they put together several possible hypotheses as candidates, but due to lack of data they admit they cannot select one. I will omit explaining them in respect to the authors.
I thought they might have missed a bet. My impression of what passes for a conservative movement these days is that it is quite hierarchical; I would suggest that those at the bottom, i.e., those with the least educational attainments, are more likely to accept the assertions of those in higher societal positions; and as they may have equal resentment & respect for those with more educational attainments, they may be more likely to accept the standard scientific theory. As they climb the educational ladder, they feel they can select their own beliefs rather than those above, at least from the non-believers.
A second bet is that the more highly educated may feel a need to have “street cred”, as it were, with those they associate with, so they convince themselves of the truthfulness of the current conservative ideologies. While the conservative can seem quite raucous at times, the truth of the matter is they really see this as a team game; thus, the origin of the acronym RINO. This bet may be linked to my first bet, of course.
They state the Bible-believers do not lack understanding of the scientific method or are ignorant of the facts on which these theories are based. I suppose, if I were an atheist, I could just shrug this off as one more example of irrationality, but I’m agnostic, and I’m appalled that otherwise educated men and women could selectively put ideology ahead of rationality, when a very central core of their lives is built around the tenets of rationality.
