In a supposedly “post-truth” era, we need to be ever mindful of threats to scientific or evidence-based ways of thinking about the world. And one of the ongoing and continual threats to a scientific worldview is “science denial”, the rejection of core accepted scientific paradigms like evolution … right?

Many see the rejection of evolutionary science as a marker of religiosity or hard-line conservativism. There is a widespread assumption that religious people will find it hard to reconcile evolutionary science, and by extension science as a whole, with their religious beliefs. However, our new research turns some of this thinking on its head.

As part of a larger study, we worked with YouGov to conduct a representative survey of adults in the UK and Canada to better understand public attitudes toward evolutionary science and how this might relate to religious identity. Detailed research of this type is surprisingly scarce, especially outside the USA. Therefore, most discussions of creationism and evolution outside of the US tend to be based on anecdote or assumption.

The good news is that we found that the majority of adults in both countries accept evolutionary science. What’s more, both religious and non-religious people are, to varying degrees, more likely than not to find it easy to accept evolutionary science in relation to their own beliefs. We did find a small minority of ‘creationists’ in both countries – those who agreed that “Humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form.”

However, the number of people endorsing this “creationist” position in the UK was lower than previous surveys have indicated. Only 9% of UK respondents selected this “creationist” option and in Canada the figure was also relatively low at just over 15%. Furthermore, only a minority in both countries reported that they found it somewhat difficult, difficult or very difficult to accept evolutionary science in relation to their own personal beliefs (12% in the UK and 20% in Canada). So, it appears that levels of religious concerns over evolutionary science are lower than some might fear.

over 1 in 3 of Canadian atheists, and nearly 1 in 5 UK atheists also felt human consciousness could not be explained by evolutionary processes

Importantly, of those who did say it was difficult to accept aspects of evolutionary science, a significant majority still expressed an interest in science based subjects, including new ideas and discoveries in genetics and genomics (59% in the UK and 57% in Canada). And curiously, whilst only a minority in this group said experts in evolutionary science were reliable (28% in the UK and 38% in Canada) many in this group also felt that experts in all other areas of scientific research were reliable. Even more unexpectedly, 70% in the UK and 69% in Canada who expressed some personal difficulty with evolution also said they felt experts in genetics were reliable, even though genetics is a fundamental part of evolutionary scientific research.

We clearly need to be careful not to assume that when people say they are rejecting “evolutionary science”, they are rejecting all scientific research or indeed all of what we might think of as evolutionary science. ‘Evolution’ as a term has gained a mishmash of cultural baggage over the years, not least a strong association with ‘New Atheist’ movements. Some may just reject it out of hand because they assume you have to be an atheist to accept evolutionary science. Our data suggests that ‘genetics’ doesn’t appear to have this baggage.

Furthermore, doubts about evolutionary science frequently appear to be related to the perceived limitations of evolutionary science-based explanations for human origins and human consciousness. For many respondents it appears that genetics can be more easily divorced from these bigger questions. Although we found that it was much more likely that religious or spiritual people would express doubts about aspects of human origins and evolution, doubts were also to a lesser degree expressed across non-religious or non-spiritual people - including atheists. This was most noticeable when we asked about evolutionary explanations for the existence of human consciousness. Just over half of religious or spiritual people in both countries thought human consciousness could not be explained by evolutionary processes. Astonishingly, we also found that over 1 in 3 of Canadian atheists, and nearly 1 in 5 UK atheists felt the same.

It seems rejection of, or doubts about, aspects of evolution are not necessarily just an issue of religious belief versus evolutionary science. People across all faiths and none seem to have universal questions about what it means to be human, what human consciousness even is, or indeed the ability of science as a whole to answer these kinds of questions. In many cases, a rejection of aspects of evolutionary science does not mean a rejection of the whole of science, even often including fields like genetics, which scientists would see as inextricably linked to evolution.

The debate about acceptance of evolution is often framed as a clash between a non-religious ‘elite’ worldview and a religious ‘fundamentalist’ one. But the evidence suggests we should avoid simplistic ‘us’ and ‘them’ thinking when it comes to public views of evolutionary science. Most religious people in our study don’t reject evolutionary science or scientific research. And our results show that questions about who we are, why we are here and where we are going as a species, clearly affect all of us.

Even as a lifelong atheist I can see it is entirely disingenuous and unempirical to deny that we are in some ways different from the other species with which we share our planet. And perhaps, fundamentally, it is this continual quest and ability to question our place in the world and the universe that truly makes us human.

Dr Fern Elsdon-Baker is the Principal Investigator of the ‘Science and Religion: exploring the spectrum’ project at Newman University. She studied environmental sciences before going on to complete her doctoral studies in the history and philosophy of evolutionary theory. Her ongoing research interests focus on the history and communication of theories of heredity in relation to Darwinism and neo-Darwinism from the mid-19th century to the present day.