Evolution and Unrealpolitik

Over at Click Opera, Momus has an interesting discussion (with charts and everything) of different societies' beliefs about evolution (and other things). The US, unsurprisingly, scores low on the belief-in-evolution scale. But what is striking is how rapidly this seems to have emerged:

The researchers, who found that American anti-Darwinism is growing quite quickly (from 7% of skeptics to 21% in the past 20 years), blamed "widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States" for the difference between the US and Europe and Japan.

As he points out, however, this is not the only way in which US culture is exceptional.

I'm not so sure that the connections he draws are necessarily the right ones (such as with Israel), but they are worth thinking about.

It is, furthermore, hard to argue with this conclusion:

Isn't there something tremendously dangerous in this combination of stubborn irrationality and tremendous geo-political power? Unrealpolitik, we could call it.