A recent study investigates the relation between evolution acceptance and evolution knowledge using largish numbers of students (mostly enrolled in biology related university programs) from many European countries. The authors are European researchers from many universities, supported by EU funding.

The main result of the study is that evolution acceptance is highly determined by religious faith. The attitude towards evolution depends on the country of origin, level of knowledge, and even sex. In the end though it is the religion (no matter the denomination) that explains most of the variation. This reminds me of another study showing that religion creates robust superordinate identities that transcend geographical boundaries.

Personally I am quite sanguine about the destructive capacity of religion at all the levels of a society. Moreover, there does not seem to be any decent solution to this problem. This study shows that, as always, the fish stinks from the … education. And it should be very beneficial to have teachers and curricula sensitive to students’ cultural particularities. So, let us teach religion to … teachers. I do understand that this could be dangerous, but maybe worth a try. With all this religious indoctrination of students the future is dire in our part of the EU.

One thing that makes me curious are the particularities of the outliers in the figure above: France, Czech Republic and Finland. Those are important countries from a Romanian perspective. France provides the model for many of our institutions. Finland is often viewed as the ideal for education frameworks. Finally, the czechs have successfully dealt with the same recent, communist, past. But here we see that copying solutions is often dangerous and copying results is probably impossible.