Recently, we have been discussing the (probably true) claim that Americans are less likely than others to believe Darwinism. As I noted in earlier discussions, American society gives its citizens greater rights than many other societies do to disagree with the elite and the privileged. And what may be the consequences of that?:
“In the final episode of PBS’s television series, the narrator states that for decades after the 1925 Scopes trial “Darwin seemed to be locked out of America’s public schools.†When the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, according to the narrator, Darwin was restored to the curriculum and “long-neglected science programs were revived in America’s classrooms.†Yet during the supposedly benighted decades between 1925 and 1957, American schools produced more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of the world put together. And in physiology and medicineâ€â€the fields that should have been most stunted by a neglect of Darwinismâ€â€the U.S. produced fully twice as many Nobel laureates as all other countries combined. Obviously, biomedical science does just fine without Darwinism.” (Getting the Facts Straight: A Viewer’s Guide to PBS’s Evolution (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2001), Chapter 7. Online April 2006 at www://www.reviewevolution.org/ )
The above is quoted from Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism, on which I have provided brief comments.