Is evolution widely misunderstood? Who/What is responsible for this?

Evolution is widely misunderstood, and there are multiple causes, including (1) a bad education system (in most countries), (2) scientists (and Science writers) who use confusing metaphors, (3) the fact that it's an innately non-intuitive subject, and (4) opposition from groups promoting Creationism. I'll expand on all of these except the last one, because it's all most people talk about. There's nothing I can add to previous comments except that I believe people focus way too much on it—as if once we get rid of Creationists, everyone will instantly understand Evolution. They won't. Maybe without opposing forces, Evolution would become dogma for most people, but dogma isn't the same as understanding. Also, opposing forces aren't going away any time soon. Spending all our energy yelling at them doesn't help. Instead, we could be working to improve Science Education. Alas, most secularists care more about us-vs-them than really improving public understanding. If pro-Science folks could get Creationists to shut up, many would say, "Job well done," pat themselves on the back, then and leave the public schools to go on doing the crappy jobs they're already doing. Note that there's no Fundamentalist movement against Math. You could argue that Fundamentalism adds to a general anti-intellectual ethos, but few would go as far as to say extreme religious forces are the main reason most kids leave school without any rigorous understanding of the subject. Also, note that in mostly-secular countries, many people still don't understand Evolution very well. Evolution is Counter Intuitive Intuitive concepts are those which are tied to everyday things we can experience with our senses. Gravity is intuitive, even if people don't understand its mechanics, because everyone drops coffee cups. And that's at least a basis for understanding. It's a starting point. We can't see, hear, smell, touch, or taste Evolution, and that immediately creates a teaching challenge. The closest we can get is noting how different species have similar features. However, that isn't good enough. We know it's not, because the fact that humans and chimps look remarkably alike is far from enough to convince many people. And even many who are convinced have an extremely low-level of understanding. Another challenge is the timescales involved. People have a hard time comprehending timescales in recorded human history, like the fact that the USA has existed for about 200 years while Ancient Egyptian society lasted for 3,000. It's not just that people don't know that (though most don't); it's that in everyday life, almost no one thinks in vast timescales. I tried to tackle that problem, here: It's vital that we help people understand the timescales involved in Evolution, because without that understanding, Evolution seems absurd. "Really? Something as complex as a human brain or an eye just appeared without anyone designing it? What are the chances of that?" I guarantee you that when people say that, they are not visualizing the amount of time involved. How are we helping them? By simply saying, "Your failing to understand how long it took"? Our Education Systems Sucks How do schools try to help kids comprehend vast timescales? Answer: they don't. How do they teach other aspects of Evolution. At best by taking kids on field trips to museums where they stare at dinosaur bones; at worst by lecturing them about Darwin, Mendel, Watson and Crick. None of those strategies are likely to lead to deep understanding. First of all, schools need to get kids used to playing with large numbers. This will help them understand biological time scales, geological time scales, historical timescales, and vast distances, such as the massive amounts of space between the Earth and the Moon: * = width of the USA Distance between the Earth and the Moon: 0 ******************************************************************************** o (If I illustrated the distance between Earth and Mars this way, I'd need 11,598 asterisks when the planets are closest together.) How about taking kids on a field trip where they walk a mile, helping them get a visceral understanding of how long a mile is? Then, after getting them to think of one step as a mile, having them walk to the moon. And then to Mars. Here's another good question kids should be grappling with: what are the chances that if you throw ten coins on the floor, they'll all show heads? And I'm not suggesting they work on the math behind this. (Well, they should do that, but here I'm focusing on something else.) If they accept it's theoretically possible to get ten heads, how long (how many tosses) would they expect it to take? Would they expect to see it in an hour of tossing? a day? a year? a hundred years? They should be running tests and building computer simulations. Most people simply don't make a distinction between "impossible" and "takes an absurdly long time," and it makes sense that they don't, because, on a human scale, emptying the Pacific Ocean with a thimble might as well be impossible. So we need to help kids understand what happens when you throw vast amounts of time at a system. I believe people of average intelligence can understand this, but it will take them time and practice, and lecturing at them won't do the trick. More here: And here: When I was a kid, I "believed" in Evolution because "smart people said it was true," and I even had a kind of understanding of it. But I didn't have an intuitive grasp of it until I built some simple computer simulations and let them run for hours. In addition to teaching timescales, it would be great to bring selective breeding into schools, and I'm not talking about teenage makeout parties. I'm talking about students doing longterm experiments with short-lifespan, fast-reproducing animals and plants. Someone should design an experiment in which kids work with (for instance) fruit flies and only change the environment they live in. What happens to their wingspans over generations if you put their food far away from them? Metaphors that Hurt Even amongst people with some understanding of Evolution, many have huge misconceptions, and they often center around seeing Evolution as some kind of purpose-driven system. Partly, they think this way because agent-based thinking is natural to people. We see car headlights as eyes and we yell at our computers. Scientists often make things worse by continually using anthropomorphized language: "Evolution didn't build us to be monogamous." "The purpose of a duck's feet is to propel it through water." "The Selfish Gene" This sort of language can be immensely helpful (as shorthand) to people who understand that it's metaphorical. To everyone else, it's misleading. It's even misleading to talk about Evolution as a system. If people talked about History that way, they'd constantly say things like ... "History uses wars to redraw political boundaries." ... and ...   "The purpose of Ancient Greece was to generate the idea of democracy." But most of us understand that there's no system called History. Rather, there's stuff that happens and, after the fact, we think of that stuff as History. Evolution is similar, though almost no one talks about it that way. It isn't trying to do anything, and—in a very real sense—it's not even doing anything without trying. History doesn't do things. Grammar doesn't do things. Philosophy doesn't do things. Math doesn't do things. In other words, it doesn't really make sense to say "Evolution doesn't have a goal" or "Evolution isn't sentient." We say that about rocks and tree stumps, but Evolution isn't like those. It's neither a purposeful thing nor a purposeless thing. It's not a thing at all.  Here's what actually happens: a bunch of organisms have various traits. Some of those traits help their hosts to survive and have lots of kids. Other traits are hindrances. If traits fail to help their hosts have kids, they can't pass those traits to the next generation. If traits are helpful, a mechanism called DNA passes them on... We call the fact that this happens Evolution. One more example. If we talked about horse races the way we talked about Evolution, we'd say, "The race didn't intent Big Boy to win..." Instead, we understand that some events happened and, as a group, we call those events "a horse race." Perhaps there's a philosophical level where this is true of any system, e.g. "There's no such thing as Democracy. It's just the label we give to a series of events that occur when there's a representative government, elections, etc." And it's probably useful to think the opposite way: to posit Democracy or Evolution as "things" that have properties and work according to rules to achieve certain goals. I am not denying the utility of that. But it's equally important to understand what actually exists. Evolution doesn't exist. What exists are the environment, organisms with various traits behaving in various ways, and genes getting copied (sometimes with errors). As soon as you slip away from this nut-and-bolts description, it's a skip and a jump to (often useful) metaphors and a small stroll from there to agent-based thinking, in which, as this question suggests, Evolution becomes a proxy for God.

Yes it is misunderstood. I think one of the biggest reasons is how it is being explained and taught to people in comparison to things like creationism. Debates, panels and books are not representative of actual scientific support. Those that believe in some kind of religious explanation are the only ones trying to say evolution is flawed. You (generally) won't see an atheist trying to question evolution. The theists insist on getting a chance to explain their theory claiming it is equal. Thus a debate featuring 1 person for evolution and 1 person against evolution. Both people may have "Dr." in front of their name. Even if one is a doctor in a field related to evolution such as medicine, biology, genetics or paleontology and the other is a doctor in theology or even just linguistics. (Nothing against linguists or theologists but they are not qualified to speak about evolution.) This gives the erroneous impression that there are two sides to the issue and both are "equally valid" in the eyes of the common layperson or a child. If we held a real debate that matched the distribution of scientists that believe in evolution vs those that don't you would have 95-99 people on the evolution debate and 1-5 on the creationist side. Thus people are not very well educated about the subject due to all the directly conflicting information. Reference: http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/ 2009 . http://www.people-press.org/2006/08/24/section-iii-religion-and-science/ 2005-6 . What is really shocking here is that most religious people do not know or refuse to believe that 97% of scientists think we evolved over time. Of those scientists only 8% think that a divine force had ANY HAND at all in that process. More than half of them seem to think that the scientific community is just as divided as the general public is. What is not as shocking is the more often someone goes to church the more likely they are to refute evolution.

As I am currently working on a paper on the predictability of evolution, this is a particularly interesting question for me. We can, actually, predict the future direction of evolution in extremely limited cases. However, this is prediction of the form "there is a 10% chance this population will adapt to this condition via mutation x, a 20% chance it will adapt using mutation y ...". Currently, this is done through empirical replication. E.g. if you observe an organism adapting to a particular environment 1000 times, you can then have a pretty good guess about the probability distribution of how the 1001th replicate will evolve. This has been done in HIV: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002527 Bacteria: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6067/457 and to a limited extent, yeast: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3084205/ I am currently working on projects to do this in a large scale in yeast. In systems where we can genetically engineer the organism, it is possible to ask the "Why" questions. For example in the yeast paper cited above, the authors find that there are two different adaptive mutations that crop up in the populations, but they are mutually exclusive to each other. Having one mutation makes the other impossible. Judging from what the mutations do, having both mutations seems to create an overdose of a gene that is harmful to the organism when it is trying to adapt to the experimental environment. In studying the evolution of naturally evolving organisms, I am of the opinion that even the "How" questions are nearly impossible to answer. As has very well said, tree-thinking is very important. We can use trees to infer approximately when the trait in question evolved and what kind of organism it evolved in, but knowing what evolutionary pressure it evolved in response to is almost impossible with any sort of confidence (short of inventing a time machine and going back in time to observe the organism in question). In large populations (like microbes), where every mutation can occur every generation, it is almost a given that the population can adapt to the environment, so it may seem reasonable to ask questions of why this adaptation occurred using one method instead of another. E.g. in HIV, under single drug therapy, the population size is so large that resistance occurs very predictably within a few months. These populations are so large that essentially every change that occurs at a molecular level is driven by adaptation to something, either through direct selection or genetic draft. In these sorts of conditions, even scientists use adaptationist thinking, assuming that the population is destined to adapt to its environment, since it is a reasonable approximation of what occurs. I think people tend to think that adaptation and evolution are the same thing. The general public reveres darwin's ideas of natural selection as the only method of evolution, which is simply not true (ignoring the forces of mutation, drift and demography). This gets them to think that everything that evolved was an adaptation to something, and the only question is why it evolved this way instead of some other way. It doesn't help that the only scientific evolution stories that are published for the public in newspapers tend to be adaptation based. Even for scientists, it is way more exciting to find that something is an adaptation than a product of random chance, and adaptation articles get published in much higher impact journals, leading to more exposure. Professional scientists understand that there are both random and adaptive forces at work in evolution, but this lack of understanding leads to some pretty terrible conclusions in the general public. If nothing else, from a public funding point of view (which is where most evolutionary biologists, including myself, get their money from), this mis-characterization needs to be corrected soon. Finally, see my response to this question in an old post:

The root of the problem is that we first learn about evolution as survival of the fittest.  Unfortunately, this makes evolution sound a lot like a competition, where if you are bigger, stronger, faster or more clever, you win.  Combine that with the natural and pervasive human desire to understand our world in terms of stories rather than mathematical models, and you have a popular misunderstanding about the nature of evolution. Evolution is more aptly described as survival of the things that survived or as the Great Tinkerer.  Both of these ideas convey that the development of traits is not sentient, thereby nullifying the questions you described above.

In addition to the excellent answers posted here I'd suggest evolution is misunderstood because of our basic human desire to turn life into an interesting narrative. Life doesn't skew towards the interesting but as humans we assume it does and wish it did. Things happen in the universe and we want to believe the most interesting and fascinating answer above the more banal but truthful one. This is why we have such widespread belief in the supernatural and psuedoscience because they all provide answers to events and phenomenon that are much more interesting than the actual truth which is often fairly dull. Evolution is focused on the passing on of genetic material and the survival of the fittest. Things that are good at passing on their genetic material propagate their species better than those who can't.  Species evolve to better pass on their genetic material and for no other reason. It's simple stuff but it's only one twist away from something that's a lot more interesting. The idea of evolution being an active force which is trying to gradually turn creatures into super-creatures is much more fun than the truth. It's much more interesting to believe the human race is not far off evolving wings or ESP or something equally fascinating. Fiction has been quick to latch on to evolution as a plot device and played up the idea that it's a fantastic force transforming the planet with immediately visible results. Evolution is misunderstood because it's rarely studied but often viewed in fiction and discussed for its entertainment value. This (and the fact that we think waiting on hold with customer service for ten minutes is a long time and have no concept of what the planet earth considers a long time) has made evolution a much more difficult concept than it actually is.

Actually, the way evolution is taught spreads the errors. http://www.evolution-outreach.com/content/7/1/7 "Analyses revealed that students typically exit the Biology I classroom more confident in their biological evolution knowledge but holding greater numbers of misconceptions than they initially possessed upon entering the course."

I think this misunderstanding of evolution comes from a misunderstanding of the role of scientific theories & how science works. The "why" question is the wrong way to approach virtually any scientific subjects, as opposed to the "how" question. To make an extremely simplified but description, science is about empirically describe some phenomenon in the world and then come up with theories to explain the phenomenon that can be empirically tested. The "why" question is a demand on scientific theories for explanatory power, which science does not promise to deliver. For even the most successful scientific theory, a few "why" question can easily go out of scope. An example of that would be: Why does the sun rise? Gravity between sun & earth. Why is there gravity? Temporal-space curvature caused by the mass. Why mass can cause Temporal-space curvature? No answer. For me, there are always teleological/existential underpinnings to the "why" questions. It is religion, not science, that most likely to deliver satisfactory answers. When it comes to evolution, evolutionary biology as a field is about first describing both evolutionary history and observing present ongoing evolution, and then come up with theories to explain them. Our theories about evolution are not every powerful yet, especially when it comes to macroevolution. This should be made explicit to the general public, and put in the proper context of how science works. Instead of painting cartoons of the imperfect evolutionary theories we currently have and pretending they can explain everything, the better thing to do is to admit the limits of the theories and focus on the mountains of stuff that only evolution can explain.

The fact that people - even very intelligent people - don't understand evolution is evinced but the amount of effort that is spent in the conservation of species which, for whatever reason, have reached an evolutionary dead end. There is little to add to Marcus Geduld's answer which addresses almost every issue, but I would add that the failure to understand evolutionary processes (I don't like using the term "evolution" for reasons Marcus covers very well) stems from the lack of education not in the biological sciences, but in mathematics, logic and critical thinking.  One of the biggest misconceptions about biological evolutionary processes is the role chance plays. Many people argue that evolution is difficult to accept because it depends on multiple chains of co-incidence and it's hard to get them to understand the difference between random chance and co-incidence. The other big misconception is that "evolution" is progress; that it has an end agenda.  J'accuse the many pulp sci-fi writers that, over the years, humans will continue to "improve", and "progress", and become more "intelligent". There is no certainty of this. There is no certainty that we will even be here next year if conditions change.

I have an off the cuff answer for you. Please consider that even the very best summaries of evolution are portrayed using verbiage which imbues the organisms in question with the will to change and effect the outcome of their fitness, e.g. "Then they grew wings to take to the skies.", "They stopped using their legs and grew fins." etc. This is often done in a well meaning but misguided attempt to hold the interest of a lay public by personifying organisms and telling a story of evolution. It just would be as engaging for the public or children to say some thing like this: Among ~500 trillion individuals of a given generation of perennial beetle ~50k of these began stinky abdominal secretions 48 hours earlier than their peers. Analysis has indicated this was the result of a dietary shift in a small niche after a neighboring species invaded their territory and competed for similar foliage. These stinky beetles were significantly more likely to ward off predators earlier which significantly increased their survival to maturity rate. Over the next 2-3k years we see a logarithmic increase in the number of beetles. We also see the development of a large odor secreting sac on the abdomen of these beetles. Today we often confuse them with the Stink Bug and they will likely outlive humans on the earth. I just made this up but I find biology infinitely interesting. I'm probably the exception.