Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Support for evolution

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was No consensus. Cbrown1023 22:34, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Support for evolution

Support for evolution (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

As my user page shows, I am certainly not a pseudoscientist, but this type of article isn't good for the health of Wikipedia and coverage of evolution. The article is a clear POV fork, something which shouldn't be created and in my experience can actually cause POV problems in the opposite way that was intended. By sequestering this information into its own article rather than adding it to the appropriate articles such as Creation-evolution_controversy, the page decreases the support for evolution in the articles that people will actually read. POV forks shouldn't be created just because it is difficult to make the proper articles have a neutral point of view. As a note, I should also mention that much of the material doesn't seem very informative. Evolution is an accepted scientific theory, and as such I would think that support for it by scientific organizations would be presumed. Listing scientific organizations that support evolution is like listing financial organizations that deal with money. --Philosophus T 07:09, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Update: I no longer propose deletion and now support the solution outlined below, with the page being moved to "Opinions on Evolution" but being redirected to "Evidence for Evolution". --Philosophus T 23:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm not sure that's clear. It couldn't be both moved to "opinions on evolution" and made into a redirect to "evidence for evolution". Well, I guess it could but I'm pretty sure that's not what you mean. — coelacan talk — 01:28, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I think the idea is to move the contents of the page to an article titled Opinions on evolution; while a user searching for "support for evolution" will be redirected to Evidence for evolution since he/she is more likely to be looking for the ideas that support evolution, rather than the people.
If this solution is adopted, it will involve manually resetting the links that currently point to Support for evolution. Philosophus, correct me if I am putting wrong words in your mouth, and I will strike out this post in order to avoid confusion. Abecedare 02:41, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
You are quite correct. That is the idea that I proposed somewhere in the depths below. --Philosophus T 04:17, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Response The entire area that concerns this controversy is immense, over dozens and dozens of articles. The Creation-evolution_controversy article is a tiny tip of the iceberg. I have begun documenting some of the voluminous number of articles at Talk:Evolution/controversyarticles. This area is too large to be contained in one article by far. One could of course dismiss the entire subject by saying "there is no controversy, so all of those articles have no reason to exist". But in fact, there is a thriving controversy, with immense sums of money being expended on both sides. Dozens of court battles have been waged. Many states have implemented laws or flirted with implementing laws associated with this. The list of arguments on both sides runs up into the hundreds or thousands. Of course, WP cannot address all of this. But what WP can do is to provide some sort of structure to some of this material so someone from the outside can access it and understand it. At the moment, the Creation-evolution_controversy is too long and is poorly written and hard to understand. What I would like to do is to provide a service for the average reader like the high school kid who wants to learn what it is about and the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, the parent who is trying to understand the situation, the creationist who wants to have a clear view of how to change his or her strategy, the politician who wants to get up to speed to understand the issue, and so on and so forth. It cannot be written for philosophers of science, as many of the articles in WP on this topic are; they are worthless for the average person. It cannot be written for scientists who already have their PhDs; that is what we have in a large fraction of the evolution articles which do not acknowledge that the controversy even exists (nor should they, in my opinion). Problem areas in the argument which arise over and over and are huge sources of confusion should be written clearly with copious references on both sides, as I have done. Every charge and counter charge, involved in some way with support, I have found sources for both sides. If I have to rewrite it to make it more balanced, then so be it, I will do it.--Filll 08:19, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment - Because you haven't provided a justification yet, I will leave a comment for now. There is no article like Support for creationism or Support for intelligent design, so an article like this is a bit cumbersome. Add the fact, there is also no chance for this article to ever succeed at not violating NPOV. :: Colin Keigher (Talk) 06:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Sorry for taking so long - I had the justification written and was editing it when I pressed Ctrl-W to delete a word in the way that works everywhere else in Unix - except for Firefox. And then I ran into an edit conflict... --Philosophus T 07:09, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • No worries. Delete per what I said and the nomination. :: Colin Keigher (Talk) 07:12, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Reluctant Delete. While I agree with the article and the motivation of its creator, it _is_ inherently POV - Wikipedia is not talk.origins. I appreciate User:Filll's motives in trying to ensure that we accurately characterize the debate and the nature of science, but I don't think this is the way to do it. Tevildo 07:27, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I agree that Filll was trying to help here. I've written a longer explanation as to why I think this article could be harmful to Wikipedia on Filll's talk page, and it probably should be copied here. --Philosophus T 07:44, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I strongly disagree. Perhaps the organization information is not presented in the best possible fashion. We are considering a map format instead to make it more presentable. This can easily be resolved so it is not such a laundry list. I also have multiple statements in the text stating the opposing position, with links to 4 creationist organizations and their lists of hundreds of supporters as well. To satisfy the NPOV concerns, I propose to create a seperate prominent section where I collect all the contrary evidence that disputes support for evolution, prominently, and call it dispute for support for evolution. I also propose to change the title of the article to something more neutral. I do not believe that this article is an inaccurate description of the current situation. It is a straightforward description of the level of support for evolution, both positive and negative, in various domains. It states claims of support or lack of support in each domain, and then bolsters it with evidence on both sides. I also propose to create separate articles on support for creationism. I am currently logging the articles that support creationism and describe the arguments that creationists use. There are many of these; many more than there are evolution articles. This is because evolution mainly concerns itself with science on WP, and does not state its case in any way except by describing the nature of the science. On the other hand, creationism is in an aggressive stance with numerous arguments and organizations and strategies that are laid out in a very impressive suite of articles, dwarfing the "creation-evolution controversy" article and the small section in evolution attempting and failing at answering a few critiques of evolution by creationists (and doing it quite poorly and incoherently, and basically of no value to the reader at all, frankly). Even the creation-evolution controversy article spends relatively little space describing the details and aspects of the controversy. Most of it describes the accusations/objections in vague terms, and then the opposite side as well in vague terms. A reader who is not schooled in this debate will gain little from this overly academic imprecise hand-waving description. I ask that I be given a stay of execution to at least bring the article up to snuff. --Filll 07:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • I've been here for quite a while, and have been fighting pseudoscientists like Aetherometrists, Anti-relativists, Pull-on-finger-to-diagnose-cancerists and New-age-quantumists since I created this account. I've experienced POV forks and their effects before, and know that creating POV forks like this isn't the right way to go about editing. The information itself in a POV fork can be NPOV, it is the content that is the issue - you are moving content which should be on one page into two pages, creating a battlefield of opposing articles. The consensus on Wikipedia is that this should not be done due to the many ill effects of doing so.
As for the Evolution article, it should not contain significant information about the controversy. The article is about science, not media and religious controversy. Since creationism doesn't satisfy the appropriate source requirements (from the Pseudoscience ArbCom case) to be presented as scientific, it shouldn't be afforded space in the article. The controversy information belongs in the controversy article, which is about controversy, not science. But even then, creationism doesn't have appropriate sources to allow for defence against criticism in proper sources. You are viewing this as a battle, when in reality, it isn't one. --Philosophus T 08:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Well I will make it more obvious in the article that it is balanced and NPOV. It would be great if we could fit all this entire topic into one article. But there is no way to do it. It can be divided up by subject, by subtopic or whatever, but it is too big. A very small investigation shows that to be eminently clear. In fact, I think it would be great if we could wave a magic wand and make it completely disappear and never have to worry about it again. I do not think that is going to happen, given that the support level for evolution operating without supernatural interference in the general public is around the 10 or 15 % level in the US, and a good half of those surveyed were unable to pick the correct definition of "evolution" from a list of several possible definitions. Given that in the last couple of presidential elections, politicians on both Democratic and Republican sides have pledged to allow creationism in the science classroom, this is a movement with momentum, like it or not. Given the fact that the Santorum amendment is now in the records and will be treated as law to allow creationism in the science classroom, and the courts so far have not yielded, this is not going away. Given the vast sums of money on both sides involved, this will not go away. So you can claim there is nothing to write about here. You can claim that the entire subject is stupid, which it is, and no controversy exists, which it doesn't, in one sense. But that will not stop this creationism leviathan.--Filll 08:51, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

As for the evolution article itself, I have pleaded to get the nonscientific nonsense out of it several dozen times. If a person tried to do it, I can promise that the editors who are protecting it would rise to the attack. I would not suggest it. You are welcome to try, however. It would be entertaining to watch, that is for sure.--Filll 08:51, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Changed Drastically

Because of the comments here, I have changed the article substantially:

  • the lists of organizations that support evolution are gone now
  • I have a list of 4 organizations that support creationism
  • I can introduce a much longer list of organizations that support creationism. I am partway through a survey now and I can lengthen it considerably from 4 to maybe 50 or more creationist organizations.
  • I have put the creationist organizations in their own section and made them far more prominent.
  • I have devoted more space to creationist arguments and I will add more references. I have removed pro-evolution material.
  • I propose to enlist the assistance of some creationist editors to help add more creationist material.
  • I can change the title to make it blander. Perhaps the world support is too strong.
  • I can include more material about how creationism will probably come into US classrooms in any case because of the political situation, in spite of the supreme court rulings and other rulings.
  • There have been frequent calls from the creationist movement to recall all US judges (several tens of thousands) so that a proper judiciary can be installed. I will see if I can find the references to this and play it up as a good idea to balance things and make it more fair for creationists. People are angry at judges and they have a right to be. We dont need communists legislating from the bench. We need someone that knows the law and will give the US what it wants, which is a banning of evolution.--Filll 09:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete this. A new article which explains your point of view much better than the several existing articles on the subject is called a POV fork and is almost always a bad idea. We already have extensive coverage of this topic. It doesn't matter that you're pushing the mainstream view here, it's still a fork. Incidentally, Filll, the immense sums of money are only being spent by the creationists, I think - evolution has no need of promotion these days, it's accepted as the default hypothesis even by many Christians. Guy (Help!) 10:08, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Sorry - but Delete. It's great, full of useful information, etc. But it really should all be included in Evolution, Creation-evolution controversy, Evidence for evolution, etc. To fork it off in this way gives a hostage to fortune by suggesting that it is possible for a scientist to NOT support evolution. If I nominate nonsense like Argument from beauty for deletion on the grounds of WP:OR and WP:NPOV, I must do the same in the case of this article. Snalwibma 11:14, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete, POV fork. Article is already covered elsewhere, as descirbed above. Unnecessary and looks like a POV fork/soapbox for griping at creationists. Titanium Dragon 11:16, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete pov fork. -Docg 13:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep. POV? Evolution is a fact, and there has to be a full listing of all the information that states it is a fact. For anyone that follows the various articles that deal with Evolution, including Creationism, Intelligent Design, etc, these points have to be made and remade numerous times. This article will save many keystrokes (and possible strokes) when in discussions in all of the articles. We all know that Evolution is fact-based; the flat earthers don't. Orangemarlin 13:50, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete I don't pretend to be neutral about a topic like this and don't intend to try, but it seems to me that support for evolution would belong in another article first at least with summary style, which doesn't seem to be the case here, in order for this not to be a pov fork. Homestarmy 13:57, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Merge POV-fork with evidence of evolution. The distinction between "support" and "evidence" is not well-argued in my mind. --ScienceApologist 15:30, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
I don't know if I can legally say what I am about to say, but can we go with Merge as a compromise? I think this is a great idea. Orangemarlin 22:19, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep, but expand scope and move to Opinions on Evolution. As is, the article is a POV fork. In line with what I told Filll at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#NPOV, I think the solution in general is more information, not less. There's good reason to talk about the nature of the debate and in particular where prominent individuals and groups stand, but only reporting on one side is a problem. –  Anþony  talk  16:50, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep, this article is phenomenally well-sourced and researched. I don't think it is a POV fork, as it documents the subject fairly well and has room within it for critical analysis. I could see an argument for merging it with Creation-evolution controversy, but not for evidence of evolution which deals purely with the scientific evidence. The previous commenter's suggestion of naming it Opinions on evolution is a good one, however, and might avoid some POV bias in the title (and probably prevent someone from creating "Lack of Support for Evolution"). I have noted that Opinions on evolution is currently a redirect to Creation-evolution controversy, but I think this deals with a fundamentally different topic. Tarinth 18:24, 4 January 2007 (UTC)


  • Merge with Creation-evolution controversy, of which this whole article is a facet. Zahir13 18:36, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Weak Keep following rewrite, and Move to Opinions on evolution per above comments. I still can't help feeling that this material would be better in Creation-evolution controversy, but that's a battleground I don't really want to traipse into. Tevildo 19:21, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep and move to Opinions on evolution as a sub-page for Creation-evolution controversy, where it would make a suitable main article for the #Common venues for debate section which at present states "Most Christian denominations have an official stance on the controversy.... Some groups that explicitly advocate for creationism and against evolution include..." then lists sample denominations, but has no information on those supporting theistic evolution, and little info on other venues of debate. ..dave souza, talk 22:05, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep and move as per above. Although who support evolution and who don't is briefly described in various places, I believe it would be good to devote more space to the phenomenon. Readers of Wikipedia that want more than a short paragraph on the support of evolution could then be directed to the (merged) text. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia should provide facts where facts are needed, and the contribution of Filll does just that. --EthicsGradient 23:41, 4 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Merge into evidence of evolution. There's nothing wrong with including this information in Wikipedia, but we don't need yet another separate article doing so. Make it easier on the reader by consolidating. — coelacan talk — 23:58, 4 January 2007 (UTC) Snalwibma and DGG have flattened out my opinion. I don't know exactly how I would vote now, and so I'm just retracting my earlier vote without replacing it. Pretend I never walked in the door. — coelacan talk — 04:45, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete It's really quite good, but it just doesn't work on its own as an encyclopaedia article. I'm sure this information can be housed in a related evolution article. GassyGuy 01:09, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Is that more of a "merge" then? — coelacan talk — 06:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
No. I don't particularly like this redirect, a lot of this info is already found elsewhere, there's no one article into which it should go, and I don't know that having the fork's edit history is a particularly good idea. GassyGuy 06:35, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Ahh. Understood. — coelacan talk — 06:59, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
This was my opinion as well - that the information was essentially good, but needed to be dispersed among various articles, and redirecting "support for evolution" to an NPOV page on the controversy would be somewhat difficult to justify. How about the following: the article could be moved to Opinions on Evolution as others have suggested, which seems to be a proper title for the content it is covering. Support for Evolution, instead of being redirected to Opinions, would be then be redirected to Evidence of Evolution, since after all, evolution's greatest support is from evidence. If this is agreeable to others then I will retract my nomination. --Philosophus T 08:40, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes - well put. I think that is an excellent suggestion, and on those grounds I will retract my "delete" response. Move to Opinions on evolution. Snalwibma 09:37, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Agree–to meet GassyGuy's concern about edit history, would it be better to cut and paste the info rather than using the move function? Regarding dispersal, it's my understanding that several articles make reference to the extent of opinions, but don't have space to cover the point in so much detail, so this would be a useful resource making summary style sections fully adequate for each article and avoiding unnecessary duplication. .. dave souza, talk 10:03, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
CommentThis was our original intent on writing this article. Note that this article was not just written by me; I had coeditors when it was in a sandbox form for the last couple of weeks. I did not invite enough people to help probably; I will not make that mistake again. I would expect that all of the relevant articles would have a sentence or two that describe this, and then hopefully a link to this central subarticle that summarizes as much of the information on this topic as possible. It is not possible to do justice to this in another article in any depth, and I do not think it is desirable. I am not in favor of making our main articles so long and bulky that they are unreadable. I also will note that I have encountered this argument over and over by creationists; there is no support for evolution by the public, by religions, by scientists etc. Also evolution supporters are often a bit foggy about the level of support in each of these domains for evolution. This article attempts to describe very accurately what the situation is. Where creationism is strongly supported and how firm that support is. Where evolution is strong and how strongly supported. It does not ignore the ambiguity that exists on either side, which I do not think is useful for either party in this controversy, and not helpful for someone who is looking in from the outside and trying to understand the nature of the dispute.--Filll 15:26, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I too think that Opinions on evolution would be a better title for this article; with Support for evolution being a redirect to Evidence for evolution. Abecedare 15:47, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
The new Opinions on evolution can also cite the relgious oppositions and the concerns in the public sphere. That should also eliminate the POV concerns. Abecedare 15:52, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
I've stricken the edit history concern. I meant more I just didn't want anything with that title to be directing anywhere, but I suppose a move would take care of that. Not sure I like having this name redirect anywhere, but certainly better the proposed way. GassyGuy 14:49, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep It is relevant, well-written, covers the different aspects and POVs, and is referenced. Abecedare 04:37, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Delete topic already covered in other articles as above (Evolution, Creation-evolution controversy, Evidence for evolution, etc.) Billlion 15:58, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Delete Unencyclopedic. --Wildnox(talk) 01:03, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep We obviously need to be careful about POV concerns here but given the size of the main articles on this subject a fork was clearly necessary. JoshuaZ 01:12, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Strong keep. This is not the first fork. Each of the individual creationist positions has its article, and its arguments are presented in a sympathetic way. So do various aspects of evolution. It was never possible to keep a single article on evolution with all of the material--there is simply too much that needs to be said. I do not see this article, or the many creationist articles, as a POV fork, but a content fork. The creationist movement is notable enough and diverse enough to need articles on the movement--those coming first to these topics might not realize the range of possible positions. The movement itself is notable, many of the people are, and some of the publications. We have separate articles on the (you name it) view of evolution, and rightly so.
  • Similarly, the movement to support evolution is deserving of an article in its own right, as are many of the people, and some of the publications. It is not reasonable to always present the positions as a Q and A exchange.
  • This particular article is neither. it is an eminently fair article on the state of the controversy, not on the merits of the positions. it is far better that this be centralized in an article exploring it in depth than presented in a superficial way dozens of times. This is an article on the state of the debate, not the merits of the theory.

*As a practical matter, anyone who has tried to edit any of the articles concerned will realize they are best edited separately, or else we have 10 subpages or 10 linked articles each saying the same thing. What is needed on all of these is depth. This article is a start. The POV question is whether the articles as a whole are fair, and they are. False statments in any of them should be challenged, but it is impossible to deny thaty the different views exist, and that there are intellectually honest people who support each of them.DGG 04:08, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Keep. I was extremely skeptical about whether an article like this could be POV or valuable, after seeing the title. However, upon actually reading the article, I was amazed by how interesting, well-referenced, neutral, and most of the article is. This is an impressive accomplishment, and although I am a strong mergist in general, the sheer amount of information here makes it clear that full merging is not currently an option; if editors find that a large portion of the information is unencyclopedic, redundant, unreferenced, or non-noteworthy, then they can trim it, and after the trimming we can rediscuss a merger. Currently, though, the article's contents and topic seem to merit a distinct article. Could someone explain to me why it does not? I am not closed to the idea of deleting it, because I am wary of POV forks, but right now it seems like we'd just be losing a very interesting and useful article (albeit one that could still use a lot of improvement, sure). -Silence 09:15, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Also, oppose move to Opinions on evolution or anything of the sort. The current Support for evolution article is tight, concise, and focused; I worry that if we made it as vague as "Opinions", it would rapidly accumulate trivia, cruft, and a wide variety of unrelated issues. Plus it just seems like a less encyclopedic topic; gauging how much broad support there is for evolution among various people is clearly an academic topic, but simply listing a random group of "opinions on evolution" seems too arbitrary and unfocused. If the reason this move is being proposed is because of concerns that people will interpret this article title as a POVed Wikipedia article in support of evolution, then my proposal is to move this article to a title that clarifies the current topic, not to a title that would dramatically change the topic. So, I'd recommend a move to something like Level of support for evolution, not to Opinions on evolution. -Silence 08:40, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
Which is why I had suggested something with the word measures or measuring in the title. How about Measuring support for evolution ? Evolution support metrics ? (possibly too complicated) Gauging evolution support ? (probably too complicated) Measures of support for evolution? or if opinions have to be used, Measuring opinions of evolution? Measuring evolution beliefs? Evolution belief statistics? or something similar. I gather that a while back there was an article called Evolution poll or something similar but it was deleted through AfD. The words "poll" and "survey" are ok, but this article also includes petitions, and statements etc to try to express support for one side or the other, so "poll" and "survey" are too narrow. The reason I chose "support" over "opinions" or "beliefs" originally was that "opinions" sounds more just a whim, based on no information, and "beliefs" sounds too religious. Both "opinions" and "beliefs" sort of make scientists queasy, and "support" sounds more neutral in that sense. I did ponder the conflict with evidence for evolution before I named it, and wondered if there would be confusion about the name. But these names are not easy to come up with. I should mention that I think the word "level" is fine as well. --Filll 14:04, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I prefer "Level of support" simply because it avoids a self-reference. This isn't an article about measuring the level of support for evolution (i.e., explaining the statistical and polling methods in great detail), it's an article about the level of support itself; statistics and metrics are just a means to that end. -Silence 14:14, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
You are correct. "Measures" and "metrics" suggest that the article describes the polls, surveys, petitions, fatwahs, etc. It does, but only tangentially. It is more what the measurements are, but "measurements" is a very long word.--Filll 14:21, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep reasonable subarticle of Creation-evolution contraversy, also linked from several other articles. Well sourced, verifiable, encyclopaedic. Is this a content dispute or something? WilyD 18:45, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  • This was a dispute over POV forks which died after a reasonable solution was devised. --Philosophus T 23:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep, well sourced and decent subarticle, and per Philosophus' comment above. --HassourZain 20:25, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Comment I have continued to add material on both sides and add citations for the unsourced statements. I am now going to add more cites of political material, as per the plan on the article talk page. If one looks, one will see that evolution has more support in some ways, and creationism has more support in other ways. There is plenty of ambiguity in the situation as well, which I try to capture. --Filll 20:44, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Keep, well-written and references a-plenty. ~ Flameviper 21:57, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Strong keep. The article is nicely focused on the support for evolution within different communities. It isnt attempting to describe Evolution or provide Evidence of evolution. I would be just as happy for a well written Support for creationism to exist. John Vandenberg 07:20, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.