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I am writing this in conservative Utah, where Darwin Day passed rather quietly. But Utah .

To many of America's friends abroad, this odd refusal to come to terms with the theory of evolution is one of those cultural dividing lines that causes suspicion: what can the Americans be thinking? Why are they so strange? It's in the same box as America's enthusiasm for executions and its penchant for guns.

But I have always thought the creationist America line rather over-done by foreign news organisations looking for stories. The truth is that most educated Americans or do not have a view.

In a nation where people are free to organise and raise their voices there is, though, a lot of sound and fury on the creationist front - and probably around a quarter of Americans, mostly southerners, are creationists.

They are not in the driving seat in Obama's America (actually they were not in Bush's either) and nor - as makes clear - do they feel themselves to be in the driving seat.

The Creation Museum in Kentucky (I visited it when it opened) does not exactly threaten the scientific world with the cogency of its thought. Creationism is a strand of American thinking, but it does not define the nation.

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