The Belfast Newsletter has printed an article on the poll that found that the highest percentage of creationists in the UK are in Ireland. They write:
The poll found that 42 per cent of those surveyed in Northern Ireland believed that God had probably or definitely created the world within the past 10,000 years, known as young earth creationism (YEC). The next most popular location for YEC was London with 39 per cent, the East Midlands with 37 per cent and Yorks and Humber and Scotland, both with 36 per cent.
The article then quotes from a professor of medical genetics, Norman Nevin, who, in the course of the quote shows that the badly conceived New Scientist cover has come home to roost:
Prof Nevin said that evolution depended on the idea that mutations in genes created beneficial effects for animals.
"But I have spent much of my life working with patients who are suffering from such mutations," he said.
"The vast majority of mutations are harmful, some are neutral and those which are considered beneficial do not prove that one species can evolve into another.
"We live in a finely tuned universe and we are not just the random consequences of a big bang."
He said that debating the age of the earth was "a sterile argument" and that Darwin's idea that all life came from a common ancestral tree had recently been disowned by the New Scientist magazine, with a front page cover titled Darwin was wrong.
What were they thinking... Darwin got it wrong only in that the tree was not bushy enough. And somehow "Bush of Life" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
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