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Poll: Republicans increasingly reject evolution

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These days many Americans would be rooting against Spencer Tracy
These days many Americans would be rooting against Spencer Tracy

In the 1960s smash Stanley Kramer film “Inherit the Wind” Spencer Tracy played pro-evolution lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March played his creationailst his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady. It fictionalized the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial which eended John T. Scopes’s conviction for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to his high school science class. When the movie came out, it was a “given” that the audience would root for Drummond and that Brady represented 19th century thinking.

Now many Americans would root for Brady. A new poll finds one third of Americans don’t believe in evolution — and that number is rising among Republicans:

One-third of Americans reject the idea of evolution and Republicans have grown more skeptical about it, according to a poll released on Monday.

Sixty percent of Americans say that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” the telephone survey by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project showed (Click here for the full survey).

But 33 percent reject the idea of evolution, saying that “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time,” Pew said in a statement.

Although this percentage remained steady since 2009, the last time Pew asked the question, there was a growing partisan gap on whether humans evolved.

“The gap is coming from the Republicans, where fewer are now saying that humans have evolved over time,” said Cary Funk, a Pew senior researcher who conducted the analysis.

The poll showed 43 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats say humans have evolved over time, compared with 54 percent and 64 percent respectively four years ago.

Political de-evolution?

OTHER REACTIONS:
–-Liberaland:

That’s because the Republican Party has moved to the right and away from science.