Poor form BBC! Don't spread creationism from America!

An otherwise good article on the BBC was spoilt by this table:

The data comes from the Population Reference Bureau based in the USA. As you see, they have the human population starting with two individuals. This is not the case. Human population size has never been smaller than 1,200 individuals.

Alas, in America, acceptance of evolution is painfully low. A recent poll had it as low as 16%. Rejection of evolution is in America, and elsewhere, is usually because of religion (that same poll has 38% beleiving in God guided evolution, 40% believing humans were created by God in their present form).

Religion has spoilt things again - a discussion on the population bottleneck would be interesting but possibly longer than that article allows. But at least getting the table right might lead people to find out more about our origins.


UPDATE: Over at Reddit a good point was made:

LordBritish wrote:

"Alas, in America, acceptance of evolution is painfully low. A recent poll had it as low as 16%. Rejection of evolution is in America, and elsewhere, is usually because of religion (that same poll has 38% beleiving in God guided evolution, 40% believing humans were created by God in their present form)."So really acceptance of evolution in America is at 54%.

This isn't the case. Believing that God has directed evolution means that you've not quite understood evolution. Evolution is entirely unguided - it's a process that carries on, but their is no destination in sight.