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I Hate To...

Entry 966, on 2009-03-16 at 20:46:14 (Rating 3, News)

I hate to harp on about the ignorance of... Actually I need to correct that. I don't actually hate harping on at all - I actually quite enjoy it - because no matter how many times I see certain demonstrations of ignorance and stupidity it still astounds me, and things which astound me make good subjects for blogging.

Yes, so what is it this time? Its an old perennial favourite: scientific ignorance. A poll conducted late last year by telephone within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of the California Academy of Science showed a surprising level of ignorance amongst the public. Yes, even after the poor results in previous polls it was still surprising!

Here's the highlights, which were reported in Science Daily. Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun. Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water. And only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.

So only about half the people polled knew what a year was. This is something taught fairly early on in the science curriculum. Did they all forget it or did they never know? Did they not ever wonder what the physical relevance of a year was? Could they not have guessed the answer, at least? I must look up the details of this survey because I'm sure some of the answers would be amusing!

Anyone with any reasonable basic scientific knowledge should get all the questions right so I guess that means that around 20% of Americans have reasonable scientific knowledge. I'm not sure if this would be much different in other western countries by I would guess most would get a better result than this.

But why should I care? None of these questions have any direct, practical effect on everyday life. Is it surprising people don't know the answer to questions which they might see as irrelevant? There's the old argument that these people vote for politicians who control the most powerful country in the world. Being allowed to vote after demonstrating such abysmal general knowledge worries me.

And there's the fact that science is important. About 80% of the people involved in the poll thought science was "absolutely essential" or "very important" to healthcare, the economy, etc. Important, but not important enough to worry about their own knowledge level apparently.

Then there's the more philosophical idea of why don't people care. Shouldn't they have enough curiosity that they want to know the answer to simple (but admittedly abstract) questions like this? Apparently not. Maybe they are more interested in pop culture phenomena like the lives of movie stars, etc and have no time for understanding nature.

It would be interesting to see if knowledge of pop culture was proportional or inversely proportional to knowledge of science and nature. Maybe curiosity is an attribute which a person might apply to both areas or maybe wanting to know more about pop culture leads to less understanding of nature.

So yes, I do hate to be critical, but there's something wrong when these simple facts aren't widely known by half of the population.

Comment 1 (1899) by Anonymous on 2009-03-19 at 03:52:34:

This result seems to be consistent after many polls are taken so you shouldn't be surprised should you. When you look at who the Americans voted as their previous president is it surprising to find that they don't rate science and technology very highly?

Comment 2 (1901) by OJB on 2009-03-25 at 08:54:13:

Many polls indicate Americans do rate science highly. They just aren't prepared to back up that high rating with any real commitment. For example, they don't want to do difficult university level science training, they don't want to bother learning about technology, and they don't want to accept the factual findings of science and prefer to believe old myths instead. Of course this doesn't apply to them all but to a higher proportion than I would expect in such an advanced country.

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