For the first time "No Religion" has topped a survey of Americans' religious identity, according to a new analysis by a political scientist. The non-religious edged out Catholics and evangelicals in the long-running General Social Survey.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1% of Americans now claim no religion.
Catholics came in at 23.0%, and evangelicals were at 22.5%.
The three groups remain within the margin of error of each other though, making it a statistical tie. Over 2,000 people were interviewed in person for the survey.
[...] "We are seeing the rise of a generation of Americans who are hungry for facts and curious about the world," she says.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @04:40AM (2 children)
Evolution has everything to do with vaccine development and DNA testing. Researchers need to follow the evolutionary changes of the pathogens closely. If they don't, they cannot properly aim the vaccine at antibody binding sites. If they pick the wrong site, one mutation can render the vaccine useless. Evolution also informs the epidemiological trends of what diseases pop up when.
As for DNA testing, you can't really understand where groups come from without also factoring in the changes of allele frequencies in populations through time (i.e. the definition of evolution). If you want to talk more narrowly, it also helps because children don't get exact duplicates of their parent's DNA, but rather their own mutations. Thus, proper understanding of evolution helps even in the case of simple parental inheritance testing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @05:25AM (1 child)
I did medical research and evolution was totally tangential to it. God/aliens created different species that genetically vary within a survivable range and reused the same general patterns across species. For all practical purposes that is the exact same thing for 99% of medical research.
The only people who think evolution is a big deal for something like vaccines have never actually done that work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @11:01PM
So, you did medical research and didn't give any attention to how the pathogen populations change over time? Not only that, but 99% of the researchers don't either? Guess I've been wrong this whole time. Since evolution doesn't matter, I await your insights as to why there is no vaccine for HIV, or why they do a different flu vaccine every year.