Polls and Fairytales

I recently came across another blog that summarizes a collection of polls about different scientific and nature issues www.pollingreport.com/science.htm, one issue being evolution. I won't bother to recopy what was written in these two places, but basically it shows that a lot fewer people believe in evolution that the media lets on.

How much does the media influence what we believe?

Could this be a real life example of "The Emperor's New Clothes" by Hans Christian Andersen. For those unfamiliar with this fairy tale, it is about an emperor who is tricked into thinking that is wearing clothes of a special fabric that is invisible to anyone who is "unfit for his office or unforgivably stupid." No one wants to admit that they don't see the clothes, especially the emperor's advisors or the emperor himself, for this would mean they were stupid and unfit for office. It wasn't until a small child exclaims that the emperor is not wearing clothes that everyone felt free to say the same thing.

Perhaps there are prestigious scientists around the world that see the serious flaws in evolution, and yet fear for their careers enough to remain silent. Laymen see this and say that they trust the professionals, and therefore also profess a belief in evolution (kind of like all these fad diets like Atkins). I know from my own classes in biochemistry and neuroscience, that much of lecture personifies the design of biological systems, speaking as if they were planned, organized, and carefully fit together by a design. However at the end of these kinds of statements, the speaker often ends with "Isn't it amazing that this all came about through evolutionary mechanisms?" I wonder if the speaker really believes this, or if s/he is afraid of being labeled an "intelligent designer?"

An interesting book written on the subject of the validity of evolution is "Darwin's Black Box" by author Michael Behe. He does an excellent job of taking complex biological ideas and simplifying them so that laymen can understand.