A comparative study of the acceptance and understanding of evolution between China and the US

Abstract

Prior work has found that Americans’ views on evolution are significantly and positively related to their understanding of this theory. However, whether this relationship is cross-culturally robust is unknown. This article extends earlier work by measuring and comparing the acceptance and understanding of evolution among highly educated individuals in China and the United States. We find a significantly higher evolution acceptance level in the Chinese sample than in the US sample, but no significant difference in their average levels of evolution knowledge. Our analysis also shows that accepting evolutionary theory is related to understanding in both the US and the Chinese samples. These results provide evidence for the robustness of the relationship between understanding and acceptance of evolution across different cultural contexts. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to comprehensively test understanding of evolutionary theory within a Chinese sample and to compare these results with the US sample.

Keywords

acceptance of evolution cross-cultural comparison evolution knowledge public understanding of science understanding of evolution

1. Introduction

How to promote evolution acceptance is a problematic issue worldwide (Miller et al., 2006). Although the majority of earlier research into this issue focused on the United States (e.g. Shtulman and Calabi, 2008; Kahan, 2017), an increasing number of studies have been conducted in other countries, such as Turkey (Deniz et al., 2008), Greece (Stasinakis and Athanasiou, 2016), Indonesia (Aini et al., 2020), Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (Silva and Mortimer, 2020). Recent studies also found that understanding of evolution is correlated with acceptance in samples such as undergraduate students in Brazil (Tavares and Bobrowski, 2018) and preservice teachers in Turkey (Deniz et al., 2008) and Greece (Athanasiou and Papadopoulou, 2015).

To contribute to this global perspective on public acceptance of evolution, the current study focused on individuals in China. As the world’s second largest economy, China is increasingly undergoing pressure about public participation in socially relevant science issues, including genetically modified food, the pollution risk of new chemical plants, air pollution, and food safety. Existing studies on these topics in China focus on issues such as biotechnologies (Lü, 2009; Liang et al., 2019), vaccination (Ren et al., 2014), the promotion of scientific literacy in general (Jia and Liu, 2014), and efforts of scientists to communicate with the general public (Hu et al., 2018). Prior comparative research has also investigated differences in attitudes toward science and technology between China and other countries (Pullman et al., 2019).

However, previous work has not fully examined Chinese public understanding of scientific theories that are often seen as controversial, such as evolutionary theory. To our knowledge, there have only been three surveys on the Chinese public’s acceptance of evolution. The first was the Chinese National Surveys of Public Scientific Literacy, in which demographically representative samples of Chinese adults were asked whether the following statement is true or false: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.” According to the results of nine surveys conducted between 1992 and 2015 using this question, between 64.9% and 77.3% of Chinese respondents accepted the statement as true (Zhu et al., 2020).¹ The second was the British Council’s Darwin Now poll conducted in 2009. This survey presented respondents with five options: (1) Life on earth, including human life, was created by a God and has always existed in its current form; (2) Life on earth, including human life, evolved over time in a process guided by a God; (3) Life on earth, including human life, evolved over time as a result of natural selection, in which no God played a part; (4) I have another view on the origins of species and development of life on earth, which is not included in this list; and (5) Don’t know/no view. This survey (Elsdon-Baker, 2015) found that 66.7% of Chinese respondents agreed with the third option (naturalistic evolution) and 6.6% agreed with the second option (theistic or God-guided evolution). The third survey was part of a 2010 online survey conducted by Ipsos for Reuters News, in which 64% of Chinese respondents agreed to be referred to as “evolutionists” and believed that human beings were in fact created over a long period of time of evolution growing into fully formed human beings they are today from lower species such as apes (Ipsos, 2011).

However, these surveys only asked about acceptance of evolution. To our knowledge, no systematic attempts have been made to measure the Chinese public’s understanding of evolution. This is an important issue because people’s understanding of evolution has been shown to relate to their acceptance of it. For example, Shtulman and Calabi (2008, 2012) found a link among undergraduates who had taken courses on evolution: Increases in knowledge of evolution were associated with increases in acceptance. Recent work with a demographically representative sample in the United States also found that higher levels of knowledge of evolution were associated with greater acceptance (Weisberg et al., 2018). By contrast, Reichardt and Saari (2015) found that among those who regarded the Bible as the word of God, people with more formal education were less likely to accept human evolution than those with less education. They called this phenomenon the “Bible-believers” effect. However, higher levels of formal education are not necessarily linked with higher levels of understanding of evolution. Hence, Reichardt and Saari’s (2015) study does not directly speak against the claim that higher levels of understanding of evolution are associated with higher levels of acceptance of evolution in general.

Since most of these studies have focused on Western countries, especially the United States, it is unclear whether the relationship between understanding and acceptance of evolution is cross-culturally robust. Given this, it is important to test whether such a relationship still holds in a different cultural context.

Evolutionary thinking in China has traditionally been deeply political. Previous historical research found that the acceptance of evolution in China has been influenced not just by science education, but also by many ideologically motivated methods of evolution exposure (Zhu et al., 2020). For example, evolutionary theory has been thought to provide the best natural science basis of dialectical materialism, which is an important part of Marxism as understood in China. Given the dominant status of Marxism in the ideological field of China after 1949, the link between evolutionary theory and dialectical materialism greatly promoted the public’s acceptance of evolution. In spite of this, one may still wonder whether, and to what extent, epistemically relevant factors, such as understanding of evolution, general science knowledge and reasoning skills, and understanding of the nature of science, can play a role in Chinese public’s acceptance of evolution. However, the lack of quantitative research on public understanding and acceptance of evolution in contemporary China does not allow us to draw clear conclusions about these questions.

In this article, we thus aim to compare China with the United States on acceptance of evolutionary theory and possible influences on acceptance, including understanding of the theory and general science knowledge. This study is closely based on Weisberg et al. (2018), which addressed these questions with a demographically representative sample of the US public. Here, we measured acceptance and understanding of evolution among highly educated individuals in China and the United States to replicate the findings of Weisberg et al. (2018) about relations between acceptance of evolution and other factors in a different cultural context. Since highly educated people, especially college and graduate students, are more likely to be exposed to evolution in the course of their education, a preliminary study focusing on this group may help us estimate the upper limit level of understanding of evolution among the general Chinese public. The current study can also serve as a basis for later work on a demographically representative sample.

The importance of examining public acceptance and understanding of evolution in China is not limited to the fact that China is a “leading influence” in the global organization or that a substantial proportion of Chinese nationals seem to accept evolution even as a substantial proportion of US citizens seem to reject it. International comparative research such as this may help generate insights into how and why public acceptance and understanding of evolution differ across cultural and national contexts. In particular, cross-cultural comparison may help us test whether the relationship between acceptance and understanding of evolution is robust in different cultural contexts.

2. Method

Participants

This study collected data from two samples, one from China and the other from the United States. The survey questions used in China and the United States are the same, but they are presented in different languages. The English version was translated to Chinese by a English-Chinese bilingual research assistant, and then was back-translated to English by another English-Chinese bilingual research assistant. The final version was decided through discussion by the authors based on the back-translated version and the original English version. The Chinese version was used in China, while the English version was used in the United States.

For the Chinese sample (N = 963), we made advertisements with information including our research purpose, procedure, risks and benefits, compensation, confidentiality, and our contact information. We handed out these advertisements to students at a university in Shanghai during the break of two courses, with the permission of their instructors. One course is called “Introduction to the Dialectics of Nature,” which is a required course for all graduate students; the other is called “Science and Technology in World History,” which is an elective course open to all undergraduate students. Students who were interested in the survey contacted us and were provided with a paper questionnaire to complete. The respondents were all college or graduate students, and they came from 28 of 31 provinces and municipalities in mainland China. The undergraduate students were either sophomores or juniors, and the graduate students were all in their first year and came from different departments. We administered paper surveys to a total of 976 students, but 13 participants were removed from final analysis for failing to answer the evolution acceptance question or responding “I don’t know.”

Study subjects from the United States (N = 659) were drawn from the demographically representative sample of the US population (total N = 1100) collected for Weisberg et al. (2018), which was obtained by contracting with the polling firm YouGov. The subset that we consider here consisted of people who reported having at least a college-level education, to provide a more direct match for the Chinese sample. These people are not necessarily currently in school, but they have taken at least some college-level classes at some point.

For the US sample, the demographic data include political-party affiliation, political ideology (liberal to conservative), religion, degree of religiosity, age, employment status, and level of education. For the Chinese sample, we collected their age, gender, major, and place of birth.

Acceptance of evolution

Previous work has shown that small changes to the phrasing of the acceptance question can lead to different response patterns (e.g. Miller et al., 2006; Bishop et al., 2010a, 2010b). For example, the Pew Research Center experimented with questions about evolution using “humans and other living things” versus “animals and other living things.” These surveys found that individuals were much more likely to accept evolution when they were asked about non-human living things, and also that the effect of this slight change in question wording on evolution acceptance varied among different religious populations (Pew Research Center, 2019; see also Weisberg et al., 2021).

With this in mind, and following Weisberg et al. (2018), our acceptance question asks about “animals and plants” and does not mention humans explicitly. This question has four answer options to capture nuances about God’s role in evolution (an important consideration for the US public, for which this question was developed). Specifically, this question asks participants to choose which of the following options best describes how they think animals and plants came to exist on earth: (a) animals and plants were created by God in more or less their current form (creationism); (b) animals and plants developed through natural processes, which were guided by God the entire time (theistic evolution, or God-guided evolution); (c) animals and plants developed through natural processes, which were set up by God but continued on their own (deistic evolution); and (d) animals and plants developed entirely through natural processes (naturalistic evolution).

After answering this acceptance question, participants rated the extent to which various factors shaped their beliefs about the theory of evolution on a scale of 1 (not at all important) to 4 (very important): the quality of the scientific evidence, the theory’s conflict or consistency with their religious beliefs, their education, and their family’s beliefs.²

Understanding of evolution

We measured the respondents’ understanding of evolution by using a new evolution knowledge battery developed by Weisberg et al. (2018), which was designed to capture variance in levels of knowledge present in the US public. This test consists of 17 questions. Fifteen of these questions are multiple-choice questions, each of which has only one correct answer. The respondent gets one point when selecting the correct answer. The other two are multiple-select questions, each of which has multiple correct answers. For multiple-select questions, we regard each option in the list of possible answers as independent items which are either true or false. The respondent gets one point for selecting a correct option or excluding a false option. The maximum score on this task as a whole is 26.

The Darwin Now poll asked participants how well they understood the term “evolution.” In response to this question, 44.8% of Chinese participants chose the options “I have a very good understanding of the term evolution/I have a fairly good understanding of the term evolution/I have some understanding of the term evolution”; 28.8% chose “I have heard of the term evolution but have no understanding about what it means”; and 25.6% chose “I have never heard of the term evolution” (Elsdon-Baker, 2015). Based on these results, we predicted that Chinese people’s scores on our evolution knowledge battery would be generally low.

Other measures

In addition to assessing whether respondents’ understanding of evolutionary theory plays any role in their degree of acceptance, we tested the impact of several other factors on evolution acceptance, including general science knowledge and reasoning skills, understanding the nature of scientific theories, and criteria for belief. We chose to include these measures because Weisberg et al. (2018) found that these were all significant predictors of evolution acceptance.

General science knowledge and reasoning skills

We used the second version of the “Ordinary Science Intelligence” scale (abbreviated as OSI_2.0) developed by Kahan (2017) as a measure of general science knowledge and reasoning skills. This test also includes measures of basic numeracy and a version of the cognition reflection test. Scores on this test are constructed by summing the number of correct answers (maximum of 18).

Nature of science

We also presented participants with two statements about the nature of scientific theories. The statements were, “Once a scientific theory has been established, it is never changed” and “Scientific theories are just scientists’ guesses.” Participants rated their agreement with these statements on a 5-point scale, from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). For each question, a higher rate (stronger disagreement) reflected better understanding. We averaged the participants’ responses to these two questions, which produced a measure of understanding of the nature of scientific theories.

Criteria for belief

Participants reported whether they think that “There is good scientific evidence for it” and “I feel it is true in my gut” are good criteria to believe something. Participants rated whether each is an excellent (coded 5), good (coded 4), okay (coded 3), bad (coded 2), or terrible (coded 1) reason to believe something.

3. Results

Throughout this section, we conduct tests using both a more stringent definition of evolution acceptance, considering only individuals who accepted naturalistic evolution (88% of the Chinese sample and 36% of the US sample), and a more broad definition of evolution acceptance, considering individuals who selected any of the three options that included some form of evolution (evolution tout court, 97% of the Chinese sample and 79% of the US sample).

What are Chinese and American respondents’ views about evolutionary theory?

We found that 88% of Chinese respondents accepted naturalistic evolution, 7% accepted deistic evolution, 2% accepted theistic evolution, and 3% held creationist views. By contrast, 36% of American respondents accepted naturalistic evolution, 27% accepted deistic evolution, 16% accepted theistic evolution, and 21% held creationist views. A chi-square test found a significant difference in these response tendencies between populations (χ²(3) = 483.29, p < .01). Specifically, participants in China show a significantly higher level of acceptance of naturalistic evolution (χ²(1) = 474.74, p < .01). These participants also show a significantly higher level of acceptance of all three evolutionist options combined (χ²(1) = 141.31, p < .01).

Comparing the level of acceptance of naturalistic evolution between the US general public (34%, measured with the larger sample of the same survey) and our highly educated sample (36%) shows no significant difference (χ²(1) = .86, p = .35). Comparing the level of acceptance of any of the three evolutionist options between the US general public (74%) and our sample (79%) shows a significantly higher acceptance of evolution overall in the highly educated sample (χ²(1) = 4.06, p = .04).

The acceptance level for the general Chinese public is 66.7% according to the Darwin Now poll (Elsdon-Baker, 2015), 68.2% according to the Chinese National Survey of Public Scientific Literacy in 2015, and 64% according to a 2010 survey conducted by Ipsos for Reuters News. Using the average of these three survey results to estimate the level of acceptance in the general population (66.3%) and comparing this with the level of acceptance of naturalistic evolution in our survey (88%) shows that a significantly higher percentage of Chinese students accept naturalistic evolution (χ²(1) = 80.1, p < .001). The same result obtains using acceptance of all three evolutionist responses (97%; χ²(1) = 253.13, p < .001). This suggests that people with higher levels of education have higher levels of acceptance of naturalistic evolution only in China, though acceptance of evolution tout court is higher in the more educated samples in both countries.

In terms of reasons for acceptance, “quality of the scientific evidence” was rated as significantly more important in China (mean = 3.79, SD = 0.52) than in the United States (mean = 3.38, SD = .83), t(1612) = 12.43, p < .001. Conversely, “conflict or consistency with your religious beliefs” was rated as significantly more important in the United States (mean = 2.46, SD = 1.15) than in China (mean = 1.62, SD = .78), t (1612) = −17.37, p < .001. Level of agreement with “your education or what you learned in school” did not significantly differ between samples (China mean = 3.03, SD = 0.78; US mean = 3.05, SD = 0.91; t(1614) = −.44, p = .66). Finally, “your family’s beliefs” was rated as more important in the United States (mean = 2.52, SD = 1.09) than in China (mean = 2.30, SD = .89), t(1613) = −4.38, p < .001.

What do Chinese and Americans know about evolutionary theory?

The mean evolution knowledge score of the Chinese respondents is 15.05 (out of a maximum score of 26; SD = 3.37). This is not significantly different than the mean score of the US respondents (15.29, SD = 4.54), t(1620) = 1.27, p = .206.

Although there are no significant differences in the average level of understanding, the shape of the distribution of scores is quite different in the two populations (see Figure 1). The percentage of highly educated people in the US sample whose evolution knowledge score is higher than 20 (14.9%) is significantly higher than that of those in the Chinese sample (1.3%; exact proportions test, p < .001). But, in addition, the percentage of people in the US sample whose evolution knowledge score is lower than 10 (10.9%) is also higher than that of those in the Chinese sample (6.7%; exact proportions test, p = .004).

Figure 1.

Scores on the evolution knowledge battery in China and in the United States.

When just comparing the respondents who accept naturalistic evolution, the mean evolution knowledge score of the Chinese sample is 15.45 (SD = 2.89), while the mean evolution knowledge score of the US sample is 16.78 (SD = 4.51). Knowledge scores among individuals who accept naturalistic evolution in the US sample are significantly higher, t(1080) = 5.46, p < .001.

When just comparing the respondents who accept any of the three evolutionist options, Chinese participants score an average of 15.16 (SD = 3.25) and the US participants score an average of 15.91 (SD = 4.56). Here again, the US participants who accept evolution score significantly higher, t(1451) = 3.64, p < .001.

Is there a relation between acceptance and understanding of evolution?

In the US sample, individuals who accept naturalistic evolution have a significantly higher mean score on the knowledge scale (16.78, SD = 4.51) than individuals who do not (14.47, SD = 4.32), t(657) = −6.46, p < .001. In the Chinese sample, individuals who accept naturalistic evolution also have a significantly higher mean score on the knowledge scale (15.45, SD = 2.89) than individuals who do not (12.14, SD = 4.84), t(961) = −10.52, p < .001.

We conducted the same analyses on participants who accept any of the three evolutionist options.³ In the US sample, individuals who accept any form of evolution scored an average of 15.91 on the knowledge scale (SD = 4.56), while individuals who accept creationism scored an average of 13.04 (SD = 3.70). This is a statistically significant difference, t(657) = −6.89, p < .001. In the Chinese sample, individuals who accept any form of evolution scored an average of 15.16 (SD = 3.25), while individuals who accept creationism scored an average of 11.29 (SD = 4.96), again a statistically significant difference, t(961) = −6.11, p < .001.

That is, our data show meaningful, statistically significant differences in understanding of evolution based on the degree of acceptance.

What are the differences in the other measures between Chinese and the US respondents?

According to the analyses above, the Chinese sample shows a significantly higher level of acceptance but a similar level of understanding on average when compared with the US sample. Besides these two measures, we also tested the differences between the Chinese and the US samples with respect to their general science knowledge and reasoning skills, understanding of the nature of scientific theories, and criteria for belief.

For general science knowledge and reasoning skills, the mean score of the Chinese sample (mean = 14.65, SD = 2.34) is significantly higher than that of the US sample (mean = 10.77, SD = 3.82), t(1620) = −25.35, p < .001.

For understanding of the nature of scientific theories, the mean score of the Chinese sample (mean = 4.05, SD = .68) is significantly higher than that of the US sample (mean = 3.64, SD = 0.87), t(1620) = −10.53, p < .001.

For the scientific evidence criterion, the mean agreement of the Chinese sample (mean = 4.06, SD = .76) is significantly higher than that of the US sample (mean = 3.68, SD = .86), t(1620) = −9.31, p < .001.

For the gut criterion, the mean agreement with the “true in my gut” criterion of the Chinese sample (mean = 2.57, SD = .79) is significantly lower than that of the US sample (mean = 2.97, SD = 1.04), t(1620) = 8.78, p < .001.

What is the impact of the other measures on acceptance of naturalistic evolution?

Using binary logistic regression analyses, we predicted acceptance of naturalistic evolution from each of these measured variables: evolution knowledge, general science knowledge and reasoning skills, understanding of the nature of scientific theories, and criteria for belief.

For the Chinese sample, we found that naturalistic evolution acceptance was positively predicted by understanding of evolution (beta = .24, p < .001), general science knowledge and reasoning skills (as measured by the OSI_2.0; beta = .36, p < .001), understanding the nature of scientific theories (beta = .88, p < .001), and accepting “there is good scientific evidence for it” as a criterion for belief (beta = .99, p < .001). Accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief was not related to acceptance (beta = −.12, p = .35).

For the US sample, naturalistic evolution acceptance was positively predicted by understanding of evolution (beta = .12, p < .001), general science knowledge and reasoning skills (as measured by the OSI_2.0; beta = .13, p < .001), understanding the nature of scientific theories (beta = .85, p < .001), and accepting “there is good scientific evidence for it” as a criterion for belief (beta = .86, p < .001). Accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief was negatively related to acceptance (beta = −.38, p < .001).

We also examined the combined impact of these five factors on acceptance of naturalistic evolution, again using binary logistic regressions. For the Chinese sample, when all of these factors were included in a single model, all four factors that were significant predictors of evolution acceptance before remained significant predictors: understanding of evolution (beta = .10, p = .003), general science knowledge and reasoning skills (beta = .23, p < .001), understanding the nature of scientific theories (beta = .42, p = .011), and accepting the “scientific evidence” criterion for belief (beta = .54, p < .001). Accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief remained non-significant (beta = −.09, p = .51).

For the US sample, understanding of evolution as well as general science knowledge and reasoning skills no longer statistically significantly predicted naturalistic evolution acceptance in this model (both betas = .02, both p-values > .41). However, there remained statistically significant contributions of nature of science understanding (beta = .45, p = .006), accepting the “scientific evidence” criterion (beta = .60, p < .001), and accepting the “it feels true in my gut” criterion (beta = −.25, p = .006). These results in our US sample are consistent with Dunk et al.’s (2017) finding in a US study that understanding of the nature of science was a more important factor associated with acceptance of evolution than measures of evolutionary knowledge.

The above results suggest that the contributions of understanding of evolution as well as general science knowledge and reasoning skills to acceptance of naturalistic evolution are somewhat more important in the Chinese sample than in the highly educated US sample. Conversely, nature of science understanding and different criteria for evidence are somewhat more important in the US sample than in the Chinese sample.

What is the impact of the other measures on acceptance of any form of evolution?

We re-ran the analyses reported in the last section, this time using acceptance of any of the three evolutionist options (vs creationism) as the main outcome measure.

For the Chinese sample, we found that acceptance of any kind of evolution was positively predicted by understanding of evolution (beta = .24, p < .001), general science knowledge and reasoning skills (as measured by the OSI_2.0; beta = .32, p < .001), understanding the nature of scientific theories (beta = 1.18, p < .001), and accepting “there is good scientific evidence for it” as a criterion for belief (beta = 1.27, p < .001). Again, accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief was not related to acceptance (beta = .05, p = .83).

For the US sample, acceptance of any of kind of evolution was positively predicted by understanding of evolution (beta = .15, p < .001), general science knowledge and reasoning skills (as measured by the OSI_2.0; beta = .15, p < .001), understanding the nature of scientific theories (beta = .72, p < .001), and accepting “there is good scientific evidence for it” as a criterion for belief (beta = .70, p < .001). Finally, accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief was negatively related to acceptance (beta = −.23, p = .013).

As before, we examined the combined impact of these five factors on acceptance of any of the three evolutionary options, again using binary logistic regressions. For the Chinese sample, when all of these factors were included in a single model, only two factors remained statistically significant predictors: general science knowledge and reasoning skills (beta = .17, p = .021) and accepting the “scientific evidence” criterion for belief (beta = .854, p < .001). Understanding the nature of scientific theories was marginally related to evolution acceptance (beta = .53, p = .064). Understanding of evolution (beta = .013, p = .84) and accepting “it feels true in my gut” as a criterion for belief were not significantly related to evolution acceptance (beta = −.14, p = .57). However, we would urge caution in interpreting these results, as 97% of this sample reported accepting one of the three evolutionary options.

For the US sample, understanding of evolution (beta = .07, p = .037), nature of science understanding (beta = .30, p = .031), and accepting the “scientific evidence” criterion (beta = .49, p < .001) were all significant predictors of accepting any form of evolution. The other factors were not significant: general science knowledge and reasoning skills (beta = .04, p = .31); the “it feels true in my gut” criterion (beta = −.12, p = .24).

In general, then, accepting the criterion “there is good scientific evidence” as a reason for belief is most consistently associated with acceptance of evolution tout court; the other factors varied depending on the sample.

4. Discussion

The current study contributes to global research on evolution education by providing a more accurate view of how highly educated Chinese think about evolutionary theory, and of the differences with respect to acceptance and understanding of evolution between Chinese and American participants. One major goal of this study was to investigate whether individuals’ understanding of evolutionary theory plays a significant role in their acceptance of evolution in a Chinese sample. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to comprehensively measure understanding of evolutionary theory within a Chinese sample and to compare these results with a US sample. It is also the first attempt to test the relationship between understanding and acceptance of evolution in China.

Currently, there is no universally used tool for measuring understanding of evolution. In contrast to studies that only measure the familiarity with evolutionary terms (e.g. Barone et al., 2014; Dunk et al., 2017) or use a limited number of questions (Rissler et al., 2014), our study used a new evolutionary knowledge battery (Weisberg et al., 2018) that was designed to provide a detailed measurement of the general public’s comprehensive understanding of evolutionary theory. Although the current study focused on highly educated individuals in China and the United States, our evolution knowledge battery can also be used in future studies of other countries to capture the variation of evolution understanding present in broader populations.

For both naturalistic evolution and evolution tout court, we found a significantly higher acceptance level among students in China than in a highly educated subset of our US sample. But we found no significant differences in the average level of understanding of evolution between the Chinese and the US samples. In fact, when only focusing on the respondents who accept evolution (considering naturalistic evolution and evolution tout court respectively), the Chinese sample shows a significantly lower average level of understanding of evolution than the US sample in both cases. This result provides further evidence for the idea that higher levels of acceptance of evolution do not necessarily reflect higher levels of understanding of evolution. Similar phenomena have been reported in a study on biology undergraduate students from a Brazilian university, in which researchers found a very high level of acceptance and a very low level of understanding of evolution in their sample (Tavares and Bobrowski, 2018). Given these findings, we suggest that the purpose of evolution education should go beyond merely improving acceptance. Increasing students’ understanding of evolution should be regarded not only as a means of improving evolution acceptance, but also as a goal in itself (Dunk et al., 2019), especially in countries like China that already have a high level of evolution acceptance.

We also found that the shape of the distribution of knowledge scores is quite different between the two samples, with individuals in the US sample being more likely to score at the extreme high and low ends of the scale. This may be the result of the uniform evolution education in China, which guarantees that students from different provinces receive basically the same information about evolutionary theory (Zhu et al., 2020). By contrast, because of the decentralization of the American educational system, the policy and practice of evolution education in the United States vary across different states (Branch et al., 2010). This may lead to greater variance in the distribution of evolution knowledge score in the US sample.

More interestingly, our analyses show that accepting evolution, no matter whether it is defined as accepting only naturalistic evolution or accepting evolution tout court, is related to understanding of evolution in both the Chinese and the US samples. In addition, general science knowledge and reasoning skills, understanding of the nature of scientific theories, and the “scientific evidence” criterion for belief independently predict acceptance of naturalistic evolution in both samples. These outcomes support the findings in Weisberg et al. (2018), on which the current study was based.

Even though the high rate of evolution acceptance in China is greatly influenced by its links to Marxism and other ideologically motivated presentations of evolutionary theory (Zhu et al., 2020), understanding of evolution still predicts acceptance in our Chinese sample. This result indicates that the relationship between understanding and acceptance of evolution is indeed cross-culturally robust. However, as noted above, Chinese respondents had a significantly higher evolution acceptance level than the US respondents, though the two groups did not significantly differ in their average understanding levels. Hence, the high acceptance rate in the Chinese sample is also likely to be influenced by other factors. For example, Zhu et al. (2020) find that multiple methods of continuous and intensive evolution dissemination in China, including formal and informal science education, have exposed the entire country to the idea of evolution. This long history of evolution popularization may have contributed to the high acceptance rate in China.

Prior work has also suggested that general science knowledge and reasoning skills, understanding of the nature of scientific theories, and accepting good scientific evidence as a criterion for belief all relate positively to acceptance of evolution (Weisberg et al., 2018, 2021). The fact that the Chinese sample has a higher mean score on general science knowledge and reasoning skills, a better understanding of the nature of scientific theories, a higher mean agreement with accepting good scientific evidence as a criterion for belief, and a lower mean agreement with accepting gut feeling as a criterion for belief may also partly explain the higher acceptance level among the Chinese respondents compared with the US sample.

It should be noted that the proportion of citizens who are qualified as having basic scientific literacy in China is 8.47% in 2018 (Ren, 2019), which is still lower than the scientific literacy rate of the United States (approximately 17%) by the end of the twentieth century (Miller, 2004). Given this, the fact that our Chinese sample had a higher mean score on general science knowledge and reasoning skills as well as a better understanding of the nature of scientific theories may look problematic at first sight. However, since the current study focuses on the highly educated population, our results are consistent with the fact that the Chinese population as a whole has a relatively lower scientific literacy rate compared with the United States.

Although the current study is focused on the comparison between China and the United States, its results may have implications for evolution education and related research in other countries as well. Many previous studies, both in and outside the United States, have shown that people’s religious or political values have great impact on their attitudes toward evolution (e. g. Kahan, 2017; Silva and Mortimer, 2020). These findings have led some to underestimate the role of evolution knowledge in promoting evolution acceptance. We do not deny the influence of sociocultural factors on people’s attitudes toward evolution, but our study shows that what exactly people know about evolution really matters and its possible effect on the acceptance of evolution should not be underestimated. Previous studies in Brazil (Pazza et al., 2010; Penteado et al., 2012) also found that knowledge of evolution per se can also be influenced by various sociocultural factors. These findings may help draw more attention to the role of knowledge in evolution education and the various factors that may affect people’s understanding of evolution, inspiring efforts on promoting evolution acceptance through formal and informal education or science communication beyond China and the United States.

Finally, because this study is correlational, it does not provide definitive evidence about potential causal links between understanding and acceptance of evolution. Also, the results presented in this article are limited to the survey sample which only targeted highly educated people. Nevertheless, our study demonstrates that some aspects of the connections between acceptance and understanding of evolution are robust in different cultural and social contexts, an observation which can be used as the basis for more in-depth studies of these issues, both in China and in other countries worldwide. We also hope that our new evolutionary knowledge battery can be used as a tool for estimating people’s understanding of evolution in other countries worldwide. We believe that a constructivist education approach that relates evolution to what students already know can be a more effective path to follow.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant number STS 1455425 to Michael Weisberg and Deena Skolnick Weisberg) and the Research Funds of Happiness Flower ECNU (grant number 2019ECNU-XFZH006 to Jing Zhu).

Research data

Data are available at

We used R to analyze the data. All code is available at

Ethical standards and issues

This study was approved by University of Pennsylvania Institutional Review Board (#821385), East China Normal University Institutional Review Board (#HR 089-2018), and Villanova University Institutional Review Board (#IRB-FY2020-157). The survey described in this paper was conducted among students at a university in China and participants in the United States. We asked the participants both in China and in the United States for their consent to participate in this study. We promised the participants to use the information for only research purposes.

ORCID iDs

Mingjun Zhang

Deena Skolnick Weisberg

Jing Zhu

Michael Weisberg

Notes

Author biographies

Mingjun Zhang is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on philosophy of biology, philosophy of ecology, and philosophy of science. He is also interested in philosophy of science communication, with a special interest in epistemological issues involved in citizen science and community science.

Deena Skolnick Weisberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Villanova University, where she directs the Scientific Thinking and Representation (STAR) Laboratory and co-directs the Pennsylvania Laboratory for Understanding Science (PLUS). Her research focuses on scientific thinking and imaginative cognition in children and adults. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and her work has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation.

Jing Zhu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at East China Normal University. Her research focuses on philosophy of science in practice, division of cognitive labor in scientific collaboration, and philosophy of science communication.

Michael Weisberg is a Professor and Chair of Philosophy, as well as Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of Post-Graduate Programs at Perry World House, at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on how highly idealized models and simulations can be used to understand complex systems. He leads efforts to better understand the interface between humans and wildlife and between humans and the climate system, and he studies how scientific issues are understood by communities in the Americas and in East Asia.

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