What I have noticed about these debates...

Hi Allison!I agree with TB that the uneducated, uninformed and biased populate both sides in great numbers, but I agree with you that those representing the two sides at discussion boards like this are clearly different in their degree of familiarity with science. And I think I know why.On the one hand, uneducated but sincerely religious people who accept the Creationist perspective are frequent visitors to discussion boards because of the perceived threat of evolution to their religious beliefs. On the other hand, the main reason evolutionists come here is because of the perceived threat of Creationism to science and/or science education, and it takes a certain degree of scientific knowledge and interest just to perceive this threat. This means that on average, at discussion boards like this the number of evolutionists with good scientic backgrounds will always well outnumber Creationists with equally good backgrounds.I don't believe that one can conclude from this that in the general population those who accept Creationism are in general less informed about science than those who accept evoution, because this is just one little bit of evidence. You'd need more evidence from broader sources to reach the more general conclusion.--Percy

Are these the stats you were referring to? I had to poke around the site a bit before finding them at Beliefs of the U.S. public about evolution and creation:

Belief system	Creationist view	Theistic evolution	Naturalistic Evolution
Group of adults	God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.
Everyone	47%	40%	9%
Men	39%	45%	11.5%
Women	53%	36%	6.6%
College graduates	25%	54%	16.5%
No high school diploma	65%	23%	4.6%
Income over $50,000	29%	50%	17%
Income under $20,000	59%	28%	6.5%
Caucasians	46%	40%	9%
Afro-Americans	53%	41%	4%

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1997-NOV data is little changed. Note the massive differences between the beliefs of the general population and of scientists:

Belief system	Creationist view	Theistic evolution	Naturalistic Evolution
Group of adults	God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation.	Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.
Everyone	44%	39%	10%
Scientists	5%	40%	55%

If one assumes that increased education correlates with increased knowledge, then this information appears to indicate that the less you know the more likely you are to accept Creationism.While I have no sources in front of me, my recollection is that similar correlations have been found between educational levels and the acceptance of other forms of pseudo-science like mind-reading, UFOs, communication with the dead, etc.--Percy

Let's take an informal poll of people here who've received college degrees, me first:

Biology was not required in my program, hence no mention of either evolution or Creationism. But I first heard of Creationism while in college from several friends who were evangelicals. So I guess I could argue that while in college I heard nothing at all about evolution, and only positive things about Creationism.

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I had biology freshman year of high school. Evolution was touched on briefly, Creationism was never mentioned.

--Percy

Gish's job is to rally the faithful by citing supposed boneheaded views in biology, paleontology and geology to audiences consisting primarily of evangelicals. At this he is very successful. His goal is not the advancement of science but of religion, so naturally he doesn't care about the accuracy of the science. When he finds an argument effective with evangelical audiences, no matter how fallacious, he will repeat it as often as he can. He knows that only at very few whistle stops will there be anyone knowledgable and articulate enough (these aren't synonyms, by the way) to successfully contradict him. I bet he "wins" 80-90% of his "debates".Probably I should have been using the past tense with Gish - I don't think he's active anymore, at least not as a travling debater. But he had a long and successful career with ICR, and as frustrating as he was because of his cavalier treatment of scientific facts, you have to admire him for how effective and successful he was at what he did.--Percy

Hi Brian,I agree with most of your post, but I have a different opinion about experimentation and Creationism.First, I don't believe any science should be excluded that doesn't lend itself to classroom experimentation.And second, I think there *are* experiments Creationists could do. They could build models of the ark and put them in wave tanks to study seaworthiness. They could do animal studies on consumption and excretion to understand the problems of keeping the animals on the ark. They could build model terrains and flood them in order to study the effects. They could churn sediments that include tiny fossil models to see how orderly they settle out. Unfortunately the results of such experiments would tend to contradict their religious beliefs, but they could still do them. --Percy

In a word, no.I'm not sure how you're defining macroevolution, but for the sake of discussion let us say that it is evolution from one species to another. Speciation not only isn't defined as a gain of information, it isn't even defined in terms of information in any way. Not only that, but assuming you're using a definition of information from either Gitt or Spetner, your definition of information is completely unrelated to actual information theory. This isn't the right forum to get into an explanation of what information theory really is (perhaps it will come up in another thread), but suffice to say for now that Gitt and Spetner are actually talking about semantic meaning or knowledge, not the mathematical concept of information introduced by Claude Shannon and upon which modern information theory is based.Speciation occurs when a reproductive boundary arises between previously identical or nearly identical populations of organisms. If you compare the number of nucleotides in the genome of the original species with that in the new species you will find that in come cases it increases, in other cases it decreases, and it might even stay the same. Some genes are the same, some are different, some are new, and some no longer are present.The important point is that you can't determine whether there's been species change by comparing genomes (though certainly if the genomes are different enough then assuming different species can be a safe assumption).--Percy