Evolution, and particularly human evolution, is a subject that generates intense interest among the American public. New findings often make the front pages of popular science magazines and the science pages of print and online news outlets. (A science journalist once told me that unless you're working in human evolution or dinosaurs, it's going to be tough to convince people in his field to pay attention to your work.) Despite the prevalence of media coverage of evolutionary discoveries, a near doubling of the number of U.S. citizens with at least some college education between 1995 and 2005 (Verhey, 2005),1 and strong public trust in what scientists say about evolution,2 virtually all national polls indicate that ~40% of Americans strongly reject evolution as a fact-based, well-tested, and robust understanding of the history of life (e.g., Miller et al., 2006). Questions about who we are as a...
University of California Press