So in what category would you suppose the USA is worse than former Soviet client states or extremely conservative religious cultures? Visit this graph on the National Geographic website.

When it comes to evolution, folks in the USA are less likely to accept it as correct than folks from most other Western nations. Only Turkey is worse, and the others that are near the bottom of the list are former Soviet client states or countries distinguished by very conservative religious cultures.

However, liberalism vs conservatism isn't a universal predictor. The Netherlands, a country which is notorious in the USA for its liberal drugs policy, has about 1/3 indicating they either don't accept evolution or don't know about it. On the other hand the UK, a country that in many respects echos USAn conservative values, ranks 6th highest as accepting evolution.

Curiously, Japan was included in the list. Since when is that a Western country? Not surprisingly, evolution is accepted by more people in Japan than in all but four Western countries in the list. Which kinda makes me think that the predictor for this result might be effective public education. I bet if you lined up test scores for science and engineering with this chart, they'd be a pretty close match.

LiveScience.com has another article about this situation.