Regarding the widespread agreement, researchers generally accept that the evolution of cooperation requires some kind of informational regularity (Frank, 1998, Henrich, 2004, Nowak, 2006, van Veelen, 2009, Bowles and Gintis, 2011).
Most of us – and I would unashamedly label us as the sensible majority of the population – accept that evolution is the best explanation for the pattern of life that we observe on the planet, both living and fossilised.
A subset of the general public has no problem accepting the idea that allele frequencies change from one generation to the next, but still adamantly refuse to accept that evolution can account for the origin of humans.
That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we're going to get to truth.
Thus, I have found that if evolution is taught as science and that it can be accepted without giving up belief in God (agreeing with Schneider 2005), some students will come to accept that evolution does not violate their faith and begin to accept evolution.
Yet, opinion polls consistently find that large portions of the public do not accept that evolution has occurred and is continuing to occur (Miller et al., 2006).
Only 13.2% of students do not accept that "Evolution is a theory that explains how life began on earth"; 69.6% agree that "evolution is a theory that explains how life began on earth," and 17.3% responded with "Don't know/No reply".
He disagrees: the work of scholars such as Albert Schweitzer "changed the terms of argument in the west: Christians do not take the Old Testament as literally as they did 200 years ago and even creationists accept that evolution is a challenge they have to answer".
These individuals became both more likely to accept that evolution occurs as scientists claim and more likely to agree that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor.
