In Darwin Anniversary Year, New Zogby Poll Reveals Majority Support for Intelligent Design
Doubts about Darwin Continue to MountSeattle – Just a few months before the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a newly released Zogby poll shows that the American public overwhelmingly rejects Darwinian theory in favor of intelligent design. When asked if life developed “through an unguided process of random mutations and natural selection,” a standard definition of Darwinism, only 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement. But 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.”
“In the Year of Darwin, these figures must represent a terrible disappointment to Darwinian advocates,” commented Stephen C. Meyer, Ph.D., director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, which commissioned the poll. “Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was supposed to be the refutation of intelligent design, yet more than a century later the public has grown increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s claims.”
Dr. Meyer is the author of a new book from HarperOne, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. He suggested the polling data may reflect a growing awareness of recent scientific developments, documented in his book. As word seeps out from the scientific community, confidence in Darwinism has begun to perceptibly erode:
“It’s only in the past decade that the information age has finally come to biology. We now know that biology at its root is digital code. Having advanced to this level of digital technology ourselves, in computer science, we can at last begin to appreciate what is going on inside the cell: the nested coding, digital processing, distributive retrieval and storage systems, the whole operating system in the genome. The cell is doing the same thing a computer’s operating system does, but with far, far greater efficiency.”
Dr. Meyer said it was no coincidence that the public remained fixed in its skepticism of standard evolutionary theories as scientists learned more about the enigma of DNA and its origins: “Undirected evolutionary processes cannot explain what science is revealing. Intelligent design can. Americans are catching onto this.”
Zogby International conducted the omnibus telephone survey of 1,053 likely voters earlier this year, which marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth as well as the anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species. The margin of error for the poll is +/- 3.1 percentage points.