Steve Shaw

What the thread is about, rather than your obsessive desire to pick holes.

I'm a bit thrown by your complete reversal of your previous position in your post of 18 Sep 12 - 07:27 PM but you'll probably deny any such thing so I'll carry on.

"What the thread is about" is the correspondence, or lack thereof, between Belief in Evolution and National Wealth. As far as I can see, you have never addressed this question in any of your posts.
The idea that 40% of US adults "Believe in Evolution" is indeed alarming but if you look a little closer, it turns out not to be quite like that. The vertical axis of the graph is labelled, "Percentage of the Public that Believe in Evolution" however the side note says "Percentage of adults that answered "true" to the question "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals," From Jon Miller et al, Science, Aug 2006". Nobody was asked "Do you believe in evolution?" and nobody volunteered that they did. The paper in Science is not directly accessible without a subscription but there is an article about it here http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/706-public-acceptance-of-evolution which has links to the text. To be honest, I don't find the question in Miller's paper all that scientific but at least it isn't (quite) treating science as a belief system.

I'll ask again, what is the "substantive matter" that you wish me to discuss? There doesn't seem to be much substance to the linked webpage.

I'm sorry you regard my attempts to explain my view of science as something fundamentally different from religion as a "desire to pick holes". It's the difference between reason and faith, that's all. Don't you think that matters?