Just another reason to be proud to be an American. When it comes to Evolution only one other country is dumber then we are.

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.

Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."

Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.

The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.

This ridiculous argument has probably done more harm to science then any other. The idea that science can be trusted to make better medicine, create better technologies, but is somehow suspect when it is applied to the origins of mankind is obviously flawed.

And the further charge made by Christian Fundamentalists that there is a conspiracy in science to detroy faith in God is also full of shit. What the scientist says is that if the evidence supports the existence of a supreme being then great, but if it does not then we have to look for alternative answers to our questions. And so far the evidence for a supreme being is lacking.

However the evidence to support evolution is literally under our very feet. There are more and more discoveries being uncovered in Anthropology and Biology every day. It is truly a shame that so many young Americans will not be exposed such an exciting fields of study due to fear and primitive superstitions.