An interesting story in the New York Times today about the lack of evolution education in US science classes. Not a lot new here, you might think–lots of teachers afraid of offending parents and prinicipals, or not believing in evolution themselves. But the story does make a few interesting points such as the National Science Foundation’s 2001 survey which found that:

Polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools.

Better still are the thoughts of Dr Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who says that the United States lags way behind other industrialized nations when it comes to belief in evolution:

In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution. It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue.

So what kind of a country is this when the New York Times reports that only:

53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.

I think the answer is: God’s country.