I Did Not Know That
Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln — two of the most vilified historical figures in the South and not anywhere else* — were both born on the same day: exactly 200 years ago today. Don’t tell Malcolm Gladwell!
* fixed it for you – love Uncle.
February 12th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
I would hope the southwest US is considered “the south.” No lovelost for either of those 2 gents from me.
Jason
III
February 13th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Well, to be fair, only 39% of all Americans believe in evolution.
Personally, I have never understood why the two are treated as being mutually exclusive.
As for the tall dude… nobody likes tall people.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Thanks, Unc! 🙂 But I think the fix only works for Darwin. Lincoln hatred is generally restricted to the South, in my experience.
Linoge:
Yeah, that’s scary stuff. File it under “Stupid, Americans Are.” Even scarier is the number of fence-sitters (almost as many Americans claim to have “no opinion” as claim to believe in it). Of course, there’s a silver lining in the broken-down results: non-believe in evolution is strongly correlated with age. The younger generations are far more likely to believe it and far less likely to deny it, despite constant efforts to short-circuit our educational system to prevent this.
February 13th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Darwin was actually a very religious person, but you wouldn’t know it by way of the anti-evolutionists.
February 13th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
*shrug* Fence-sitters do not bother me, as most pollsters would probably qualify me as one, given I believe in both creationism and evolution. As for the younger generation, I am not sure their belief in anything has a bolstering effect on the topic in question…
February 14th, 2009 at 12:10 am
Darwin was rather religious, and Alfred Wallace — whose valuable work predated Darwin and wasn’t obsessed with LaMarck (see : pangenesis) — preferred to describe the origin of human awareness as a purely spiritual matter. Some, although not all, churches tend to go for a similar analysis as Wallace.
Of course, Darwin also assumed that the arms and legs have as much of a vote on the outcome of progeny as the genitals, so if people were asked if they believed his theory rather than general evolution they’d be rather accurate in saying he was pretty far off.
February 14th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Theistic evolution still counts as evolution belief, as far as I can tell. But how the questions are asked will tend to skew the outcome.
gattsuru:
That’s a fair statement. But he had the general framework correct. And in many cases, he’s been vindicated about stuff that he was assumed to have been wrong about. His version of the theory was far from perfect, of course (today’s isn’t, either), and has undergone numerous adjustments in the last century and a half, but the overall idea has held up remarkably well.
February 15th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
“The younger generations are far more likely to believe it and far less likely to deny it, despite constant efforts to short-circuit our educational system to prevent this.”
“Theistic evolution still counts as evolution belief, as far as I can tell. But how the questions are asked will tend to skew the outcome.”
think “how the questions are asked” and those “constant efforts” are related?
jtc