Priming People to Think About Small Change Over Long Time Periods

Here are the choices from a Gallup poll that periodically asks people about their beliefs in religion and evolution:

Which one of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?

A) God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

B) Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation.

C) Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.

Over the past 25 years or so, Gallup has given a poll with this question, and the answer with the most respondents has always been A, consistently between 40-50% of the population.

First of all, I think it's strange that they use the more neutral term "human beings" in the question, and "man" in the answers, but I'm not sure how much that's skewing responses.

What I was thinking about was the extent to which responses would differ if you primed people to think about small changes over geological time periods. For example, I'd like to see one group which was first asked a question or series of questions such as:

Which one of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin of the Grand Canyon?

A) God created the Grand Canyon pretty much in its present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.

B) The Grand Canyon has formed over millions of years by the natural processes of erosion, but God guided this process.

C) The Grand Canyon has formed over millions of years by the natural processes of erosion. God had no part in this process.

You could vary it up slightly, and use other geological or astronomical entities, like Mount Everest or Mars, but I think you get the idea.

I'd hypothesize that people on the whole would be more accepting of the idea of gradual change over long spans of time without the intervention of god if presented with a less personal example than the origin of humans. I think this priming would then shift opinion when people were asked about the origins of humans.

I don't have time to do it, but it would be a fun and informative experiment. Anybody out there think that there would be no difference in the answers between such groups?

Thinking in Deep Time

So we made it to DC in one piece. I'm here, and I'm tired, but after a good night's rest I promise to try to do a decent job of blogging the CogSci conference. I've got my packet and the schedule looks like it has some interesting stuff.

Anyway, I was just reminded of one of the dumb arguments creationists use, which is when they concede that they believe in microevolution (i.e., small changes) but not macroevolution (i.e. speciation). Sure dogs and trees and mosquitos change over time...but they're still dogs and trees and mosquitos.

To this I say: learn to think in longer time spans, people.


Sure mountains and canyons and lakes erode and change shape over time. But they're still mountains and canyons and lakes, right? I mean, who has ever seen a mountain actually thrust up from the earth's crust? That must mean that mountains and canyons and lakes were created exactly as they are, right? Because we've never seen one form before our very eyes. Because one has never been created in the laboratory.

As with geological formations, so it is with biological species. It takes a while to evolve from a single-celled individual to a complex, bilaterally-symmetrical, multicellular organism. But guess what? That's what happened.

Anyway...off to a find a decent restaurant in the area.

Hitchens Discovers Blind Salamanders While Watching TV

This article, in which Christopher Hitchens thinks he has stumbled across some sort of creationist silver bullet, is pretty funny. He was watching an episode of Planet Earth, and they came to a part about cave-dwelling animals that had lost such traits as pigmentation and eyes. This is a very old example of how species evolve, not only by increasing in complexity, but as in this case, simplifying.


I guess this is Hitchens first encounter with such an idea, though you'd think if he were fairly well-versed in evolution this wouldn't come as some kind of epiphany. He dashed off an email to Richard Dawkins, and got this reply:

Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.

If Hitchens' point is that vestigial traits are evidence for evolution, then of course it's been written down...about a million times. I'm not sure what the heck Dawkins is talking about. If his point is different from this, I don't know what it is.

So as for being some kind of novel argument against creationism, I'm afraid it's as old as the debate itself. It's a good argument...but it's nowhere near new. And it's certainly not a silver bullet. Creationists can always give some version of "if god wanted to make a salamander with useless eyes, then that is what he did." This is on par with saying that the devil buried dinosaur bones, but its silliness doesn't keep people from employing it.