Amanda Glaze: Teaching Evolution in the South

Vox has an interview with Amanda Glaze, a professor at Georgia Southern University, about what it is like to teach evolution in the south.  Sean Illing writes:

Earlier this year, she produced a video for sciencefriday.com about the challenges she’s encountered as a science educator. 

Teaching science, evolution in particular, can be a thankless job in this part of the country. In some communities, you’re colliding with a culture and a worldview that is both central to the identity of people and deeply threatened by scientific materialism.

“It is such a deeply personal and gut-wrenching reconstruction of identity,” Glaze says, “and you really have to be empathetic to that personal restructuring experience to understand why so many people reject evolution in spite of knowing a lot about it.”

One of the principle comments that she makes is that, while we suspect that evolution rejection is higher in the south, we really don’t know for sure:

I am hoping that with the national study data we’re assembling now I can finally answer the question as to whether people in the South are more resistant to evolution than others. As of right now there has not been a study to look at this nationally. So what we are going on is based on the breakdown of small studies that suggest that religiosity is a big factor, more so in some places than others, and that literal interpretations of creation are one of the leading points of contention.

It might turn out that there are other regions that are just as likely to accept or reject, but right now we don’t have data to represent those areas. We are making inferences based on the different data sets that are out there and the things that they appear to point to as we learn more. That is precisely why this national study is important.

What we do know is that, at the very least, the South seems to be the region that is the most widely vocal in their anti-evolution positions. It will be very enlightening to see what happens now that we have, and are continuing to collect, data from around the country.

I would be most curious to find out this as well. Given that I have never lived anywhere in this country outside the south, I have no perspective on this, unfortunately. Read the whole thing.