Death Anxiety Prompts People to Believe in Intelligent Design, Reject Evolution, Study Suggests

ScienceDaily (Mar. 30, 2011) — Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Union College (Schenectady, N.Y.) have found that people's death anxiety can influence them to support theories of intelligent design and reject evolutionary theory.

Existential anxiety also prompted people to report increased liking for Michael Behe, intelligent design's main proponent, and increased disliking for evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

The lead author is UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens.

Published in the March 30 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, their paper is the first to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 per cent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design. And in Canada, for example, Alberta passed a law in 2009 that may allow parents to remove children from courses covering evolution.

British evolutionary biologist Prof. Dawkins, like the majority of scientists, argues that life's origins are best explained by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. However, intelligent design advocates such as Prof. Behe, a U.S. author and biochemist, assert that complex biochemical and cellular structures are too complex to be explained by evolutionary mechanisms and should be attributed to a supernatural creator.

"Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life," says Tracy. "For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn't offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions."

The researchers carried out five studies with 1,674 U.S. and Canadian participants of different ages and a broad range of educational, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.

In each study, participants were asked to imagine their own death and write about their subsequent thoughts and feelings, or they were assigned to a control condition: imagining dental pain and writing about that.

The participants were then asked to read two similarly styled, 174-word excerpts from the writings of Behe and Dawkins, which make no mention of religion or belief, but describe the scientific and empirical support for their respective positions.

After going through these steps, participants who imagined their own death showed greater support for intelligent design and greater liking for Behe, or a rejection of evolution theory coupled with disliking for Dawkins, compared to participants in the control condition.

However, the research team saw reversed effects during the fourth study which had a new condition. Along with writings by Behe and Dawkins, there was an additional passage by Carl Sagan. A cosmologist and science writer, Sagan argues that naturalism -- the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design -- can also provide a sense of meaning. In response, these participants showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality.

Tracy says, "These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful."

Similar results emerged in the fifth study, carried out entirely with natural science students at graduate and undergraduate levels. After thinking about death, these participants also showed greater support for the theory of evolution and liking of Dawkins, compared to control participants.

The researchers say these findings indicate a possible means of encouraging students to accept evolution and reject intelligent design.

"Natural science students have been taught to view evolutionary theory as compatible with the desire to find a greater sense of meaning in life," says Tracy. "Presumably, they already attain a sense of existential meaning from evolution."

The study received support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110330192201.htm

Evolution: Not Only the Fittest Survive

ScienceDaily (Mar. 29, 2011) — Darwin's notion that only the fittest survive has been called into question by new research published in the journal Nature. A collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the UK, with a group from San Diego State University in the US, challenges our current understanding of evolution by showing that biodiversity may evolve where previously thought impossible.


Bacteria growing on a Petri plate. (Credit: iStockphoto/Monika Wisniewska)

The work represents a new approach to studying evolution that may eventually lead to a better understanding of the diversity of bacteria that cause human diseases.

Conventional wisdom has it that for any given niche there should be a best species, the fittest, that will eventually dominate to exclude all others.

This is the principle of survival of the fittest. Ecologists often call this idea the `competitive exclusion principle' and it predicts that complex environments are needed to support complex, diverse populations.

Professor Robert Beardmore, from the University of Exeter, said: "Microbiologists have tested this principle by constructing very simple environments in the lab to see what happens after hundreds of generations of bacterial evolution, about 3,000 years in human terms. It had been believed that the genome of only the fittest bacteria would be left, but that wasn't their finding. The experiments generated lots of unexpected genetic diversity."

This test tube biodiversity proved controversial when first observed and had been explained away with claims that insufficient time had been allowed to pass for a clear winner to emerge.

The new research shows the experiments were not anomalies.

Professor Laurence Hurst, of the University of Bath, said: "Key to the new understanding is the realization that the amount of energy organisms squeeze out of their food depends on how much food they have. Give them abundant food and they use it inefficiently. When we combine this with the notion that organisms with different food-utilizing strategies are also affected in different ways by genetic mutations, then we discover a new principle, one in which both the fit and the unfit coexist indefinitely."

Dr Ivana Gudelj, also from the University of Exeter, said: "The fit use food well but they aren't resilient to mutations, whereas the less efficient, unfit consumers are maintained by their resilience to mutation. If there's a low mutation rate, survival of the fittest rules, but if not, lots of diversity can be maintained.

"Rather nicely, the numbers needed for the principle to work accord with those enigmatic experiments on bacteria. Their mutation rate seems to be high enough for both fit and unfit to be maintained."

Dr. David Lipson of San Diego State University, concluded: "Earlier work showed that opposing food utilization strategies could coexist in complex environments, but this is the first explanation of how trade-offs, like the one we studied between growth rate and efficiency, can lead to stable diversity in the simplest possible of environments."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110327191044.htm