Public attitudes toward evolutionary science are shaped in part by the instruction that young adults receive in universities and colleges. However, new students do not arrive as a tabula rasa. The students’ receptivity to the teaching of evolutionary science will be influenced by beliefs acquired from their families, schools, communities and religious organisations. As will be detailed below, what little is known about the views of university students is limited in the main to a handful of relatively short-term surveys scattered across time and institutions.

The present paper reports a secondary analysis of the cumulative results of a poll of Australian university students in a first-year biology course concerning their broad beliefs about human evolution and creationism. The ongoing poll has been conducted annually for 32 consecutive years between 1986 and 2017. The intent of the poll has been pedagogical. First, it has provided the lecturer with a basic understanding about the level of commitment among incoming students to creationist beliefs which could interfere with their receptivity to evolutionary science. Depending on the outcome of the poll, the ways in which the science of evolution is taught might need revision. Second, analyses of the results of all previous polls conducted in this course have provided an opportunity to assess how student views, on average, are or are not changing over time. In lectures given subsequent to the one in which the poll is run, the results of the anonymous survey for their class and those of all previous years have always been openly presented to the class for the interest of all students.

When our poll was first conducted in 1986, we had no idea what proportion of students embraced creationist convictions that god(s), rather than natural evolutionary processes, were responsible for the existence of humans. In a 1986 census of the general Australian public, 75% of adults claimed a nominal identification with a religion, mostly some form of Christianity (73%) (Anon 1994). However, what proportion adhered to the belief that humans were created by god(s) was not assessed.

Unlike the United States, debates in Australia about the teaching of evolutionary science in schools and the injection of creationism into school biology classes have not gained much public traction. The official biology curriculum for both state-based public schools and church-run schools in New South Wales has consistently reflected conventional evolutionary science and not creationism (Anon 2013). Discussion of creationism has, however, been regarded to be appropriate for courses about religion. Accordingly, to determine the distribution of incoming students’ views in the first-year biology course in UNSW, we first implemented the poll in 1986 and conducted it every year thereafter.

Reports of long-term trends in views about the origins of humans are rare and in most cases limited to surveys of adult populations in the USA. Plutzer and Berkman (2008) amalgamated findings from several polls, most notably the results of a Gallup poll about American values and beliefs conducted periodically since 1982. Newport (2014) has reported results of the same Gallup poll that accumulated between 1982 and 2014. These have been further supplemented by analysis of the results from the 2017 Gallup poll (Anon 2018a). Twenge et al. (2015) reported results based on ‘General Social Survey’ data spanning 1972 to 2014 for change over time in religious orientation among adolescents in the USA. Twenge et al. (Twenge et al. 2016) similarly reported an analysis of changes in adult religious participation in the USA based on the same survey data.

Relevant to our poll in UNSW, one of the Gallup questions asked respondents, in demographically-weighted samples of > 1000 American adults, to select one of four statements that best reflected their beliefs about human origins. The options included: (1) a creationist statement that a god had created humans a few 1000 years ago; (2) a theistic evolutionary statement that humans evolved over several million years but the process was guided by god; (3) a non-theistic statement that humans evolved without any guidance from god; and (4) a statement that the respondent had no opinion about the matter.

Over the period assessed, there have been only modest changes in American responses which in the main endorse one of the god-caused/guided options. The overall percentage of respondents choosing the creationist option has fluctuated between 42 and 47%, dropping to 38% in 2017. The percentage selecting theistic evolution has been lower but still substantial, fluctuating between 31% and 40%, and 38% in 2017. Although relatively few tended to select the non-theistic option, the percentage who did having risen slowly from 9% in 1982 to 19% in both 2014 and 2017. Finally, the undecided/no-opinion option was chosen by only 5–9% of the respondents over the same period.

Unfortunately for the purposes of direct comparison, Newport (2014) did not provide a demographic breakdown that would enable us to make direct comparisons with the results of our long-term survey of university students. However, two studies that were conducted in the United States, the two separated by 39 years, used a similar question answered by substantial numbers of students. In the first study, Bergman (1979) polled 442 undergraduates at a state university in Ohio. Among the respondents, 43% endorsed creationism, 46.4% endorsed theistic evolution, 7.9% endorsed non-theistic evolution, and 2.7% endorsed “other”. More recently, students were surveyed at three small Midwestern institutions (N = 591) (Barnes et al. 2008). Among these students, 41.6% endorsed creationism, 21.6% endorsed theistic creation, and 36.2% endorsed non-theistic evolution (it is unclear from the publication what declaration if any was made by the remaining 0.6% of those surveyed).

These two studies suggest that support for creationism among students in the USA held steady in the 40% range, a level consistent with that of support in the general population over approximately the same time span. On the other hand, support for theistic evolution appears to have fallen away. In the 1979 study, 46.4% of the students endorsed theistic evolution (Bergman 1979) which appeared to be similar or possibly even higher than that seen in the general population. However, in the 2008 study, only 21.6% of the students supported theistic evolution. Conversely, student endorsement of non-theistic evolution showed a commensurate rise to 36.2%, well above the level of 14% in the general population in 2008.

Although this pair of findings is intriguing, they only provide snapshots of the underlying trends over the two widely separated times. They do not reveal what variation between them may be due to sampling error plus any subtle differences arising from the wording of the questions or the administration of the survey. Further, the results are only based on the attitudes of some students at American universities at specific points in time.

Accordingly, by analyzing the accumulated responses to our poll, we aimed to provide a more continuous picture of what trends and variation have occurred among successive cohorts of students over 32 years at a large state university in Australia. Our poll had the advantage of being conducted in a consistent fashion using the same question always administered in the same way by the same person (M. Archer) explaining the same reasons for the survey to the students at the same time in the course. Factors limiting our ability to generalise the results of this poll are noted in the Discussion section.