Finally, to help us wade through America's lagging views on evolution (30% of Texans think humans and dinosaurs coexisted), Scientific American has come up with a way to evaluate individual states' overall attitudes toward evolution: the Miss USA contest!
In an exhaustive and fascinating article, writer Josh Rosenau examines how Miss USA contestants answered the question "do you think evolution should be taught in schools?" during the pageant last month—you can see a video below with all of their responses. Rosenau makes his argument as to why examining their responses isn't a silly exercise: "Knowing how these role models think about evolution is important not just because these women have a bully pulpit, but because they are chosen to represent their states, and it is rare that we can see a national cross-section of how the non-scientist public views evolution."
He explains that while there's no scientific controversy over evolution, it is a political debate endemic of the divide in America, "with about a third of Americans rejecting evolution outright, at least another third deeply ambivalent, and the remainder aligned with the scientific community's view."
So where did Miss New York fall on the scale? She answered, "I personally believe evolution should be taught in schools and I believe religion should be taught in schools." He comes to the conclusion that while New York is the 3rd most evolution-friendly state (based on this study), in treating what's taught in school (and evolution in particular) as a matter of "belief," she only gave the 17th best answer to the evolution question.
There's a lot more data and arguments worth combing over in the article—but it's worth pointing out that his favorite response came from Miss New Mexico, who said: "I think evolution should be taught in schools because evolution is based off of science and I think science is a huge thing that we need to continue to enrich our schools with." All well and good, but we still don't buy into that whole Triassic Period junk.
