Okay, Pew, not surprisingly, happily released the partisan breakdown for all parts of its evolution question. It also offered a useful “accounting” that addressed (as only it was in a position to do!) what it admitted was a “puzzle” in its report–viz., how the proportion of Republicans “disbelieving” evolution could go up while the proportions of Democrats and Independents as well as the proportion of the general population “believing” in it all stayed “about the same”?
So now I’ll offer up some reflections on what the significance of the “Republican shift”—the 9 percentage-point increase in the proportion of Republicans who indicated that they believe in the “creationist” response and the 11 percentage-point decrease in the proportion who endorsed either the “Naturalistic” or “Theistic” evolution responses to Pew’s “beliefs on evolution” item. CONT.
Dan Kahan, Yale Law School