Interesting that on the evolution vs GDP graph, Turkey is another outlier, with even lower belief in evolution than their GDP would suggest. Turkey, and it's teaching of evolution is brought up in the original article as a failure of science to destroy religion. I wonder if that survey records that the teaching of evolution never worked, or reflects the backlash against that belief.

Evolution is a scientific fact for local adaptation, i.e. developing mechanisms to cope with environmental changes between generations. In a geological timescale it's just a theory, basically extrapolating local changes to creating whole new species (which we obviously can't observe yet). There are various issues with this extrapolation, i.e. from computational complexity point of view the time from the start of the Universe might not be sufficient to come up with precision needed for a new specie. This obviously then puts evolution among other hypotheses like the religious one (there is a God, or there are multiple gods, creating the world), simulation hypothesis (we are a hypercomputer game/reality show/testing ground/miniatures/VM etc.), chaos theory, total determinism a'la Bell equation etc. From these religion is the only one that gives most people some meaning/goal to their lives, especially during hard times when it's easier to off oneself, so no wonder it's going to stay. Evolution also plays against non-religious people as these often produce less children than religious ones, increasing odds of their genotype to survive and keep the same culture. So in fact being religious might be a better evolutionary strategy, which is quite funny.

Turkey isn't an outlier they are literally on the line.

The line is drawn including Turkey, but not including America. Visually, they both look like outliers.

1. Looking at this at a national level, you do not know whether the people earning all the wealth are also the people who have the same belief (although the _probability_ is higher). 2. There are large numbers of important countries excluded from both plots.