Yesterday’s New York Times had an interesting article on a recent poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The poll has some interesting findings: “John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection.”

Let’s take a closer look at the data to understand why Mr. Green might have been surprised.

Of the 53% of Democrats who believe that humans evolved over time, fully 20% believe that evolution was “guided by a supreme being.” For Republicans the numbers are 40% and 18% respectively. In other words, given the survey’s margin of error, the exact same percentage of Democrats as Republicans believe in “Intelligent Design” (ID). (Republicans do outnumber Democratic Creationists, 51% to 38%.)


When the filter is ideology, there is a similar parity. The poll looked at four “ideological” categories, Conservative Republicans, Moderate/Liberal Republicans, Conservative/Moderate Democrats, and Liberal Democrats. Of these four categories, the percentage of each that believe in ID are respectively 19%, 19%, 22%, 17%, just about within the margin of error. There are more Conservative Republican Creationists than Liberal Democratic Creationists (59% to 29%), but in the middle there are just about no differences: 37% Moderate/Liberal Republican Creationists, 41% Conservative/Moderate Democrat Creationists. I’m not surprised to see where there are more Creationists, but I am surprised at the relative numbers in each category.

There are some other interesting findings in the data, such as similar support across party lines for “teaching creationism instead of evolution” (R = 43%, D = 37%) and “teaching creationism along with evolution” (R = 67%, D = 61%). And there are some pronounced differences according to party identification, such as “who should have primary responsibility for deciding how evolution is taught” (Teachers? R = 19%, D = 35%; Parents? R = 51%, D = 35%). But even here the differences are not as large as one might think (or, at least as much as I would have thought).

Bottom line: These data support the thesis that there is more going on in contemporary politics of science than one political party, or even its most ideological elements (and feel free to place Democratic or Republican parties wherever you’d like in this statement depending on your predilections), seeking to undercut science and the other political party rising to its defense. It really makes for a good story, but it’s too bad that it is just not true. It may be that discussions of science policy/science politics are becoming Ann Colter-ized and Michael Moore-ized, which I suppose would be the ultimate result of partisan ideologues waging their wars via the politicization of science.