A third of Americans reject the idea of evolution, a new Pew Research Center poll has found, including a majority of white evangelical Protestants (64%) and Republicans (57%).

That means one in three Americans would agree that "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

This is embarrassing given overwhelming evidence that evolution is real (more on that below).

What's particularly disturbing is that the share of Republicans who don't believe in evolution has dramatically increased from 46% in 2009.

Here are the findings:

It's difficult to imagine who could believe such things when faced with the mountain of evidence supporting evolution.

"The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago," notes PBS, in a primer on evolution. "Indeed, many scientific advances, in a range of scientific disciplines including physics, geology, chemistry, and molecular biology, have supported, refined, and expanded evolutionary theory far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined."

We have thousands of human fossils documenting key moments in our own evolution, genetic evidence linking us to other primates, traits (like ostrich wings) that are leftover from previous uses, and behavioral clues that demonstrate how early humans differed from us. We even have a fossil illustrating a key step in the evolutionary process, when organisms began to evolve limbs from fins.

As many God-fearing scientists will tell you, evolution need not conflict with religion.

Credit for thumbnail photo: Reuters/Nikola Solic

