In the wake of news concerning the “missing link” fossil, an internet poll was recently released by OneNewsNow asking the question “Do you believe you evolved from an ape-like creature?”. With the site geared toward a predominantly conservative Christian audience, the results were overwhelmingly negative. PZ Myers, a biology professor frustrated with the poll, posted the following article on ScienceBlogs.com, entitled OneNewsNow.com makes the most truly stupid polls:
Would you believe what kind of inane question they’re asking now?
Do you believe you evolved from an ape-like creature?
Yes – 7.10%
No – 91.07%
Unsure – 1.83%Gaaaah. I am an ape-like creature. My mother and father are ape-like creatures, as are my brothers and sisters and grandparents and distant relatives and ancient ancestors, going back tens of millions of years. And I’m proud of them all, every one of them, except for the lackwitted atavisms who squat in squalid ignorance at Christian news sites, congratulating each other on how their ancestry is only 6,000 years old…and every one of their parents was a similarly mindless blob with no connection to the deep history of life on earth.
Following the article’s posting, ScienceBlogs.com readers started going to the OnewNewsNow poll to change the results. One commenter said: “… we rock. Just sat there and clicked refresh on the poll for a couple of minutes. Watching yes creep up and no creep down.” followed by “Awesome, the poll is currently crashing at a rate of 2%/min…”, “almost 50/50 now…”, and ” “Boy, that handy ‘refresh’ thing they have under the poll is great. You can watch the numbers change practically in real time. Right now, it looks like it’s moving at about .01% toward ‘Yes’ every second. Wheee!” By the end of the day, the poll had swung from over 90% “no,” to over 80% “yes.”
Internet polls are notoriously unreliable, and quite prone to yielding skewed results like these (click here to find out how a 21-year-old college dropout named Christopher Poole was voted the most influential person in the world on a Time Magazine poll), thus it comes as no shock that the poll was affected in this way. It does however serve as a snapshot of the larger conflict going on with regard to human origins.
© M. French for Voice of Revolution, 2009. | Permalink
