For many years, the NSF has been producing a biennial report on American attitudes (and many other statistics) about science called Science and Engineering Indicators. This year, as they have every year, they got the uncomfortable news that a majority of our compatriots reject human evolution and the Big Bang (that last one might have been partly because of the dumb way the question is phrased). What’s different, though, is that for the first time the NSF has decided to omit the fact.
This is very strange. It is a serious problem in our educational system that so much of the public is vocal in their opposition to a well-established set of ideas — these ought to be relevant data in a survey of national attitudes towards science. Why were they dropped? It isn’t because of an overt whitewash to hide our shame away, it seems — instead, it sounds like it’s an accommodationist’s discomfort with highlighting a conflict between religion and science. At least, that’s how I read the excuses given. John Bruer, a philosopher who led the review team on this section of the report, is open about his reasoning.
Bruer proposed the changes last summer, shortly after NSF sent a draft version of Indicators containing this text to OSTP and other government agencies. In addition to removing a section titled “Evolution and the Big Bang,” Bruer recommended that the board drop a sentence noting that “the only circumstance in which the U.S. scores below other countries on science knowledge comparisons is when many Americans experience a conflict between accepted scientific knowledge and their religious beliefs (e.g., beliefs about evolution).” At a May 2009 meeting of the board’s Indicators committee, Bruer said that he “hoped indicators could be developed that were not as value-charged as evolution.”
Bruer, who was appointed to the 24-member NSB in 2006 and chairs the board’s Education and Human Resources Committee, says he first became concerned about the two survey questions as the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. At the time, the board settled for what Bruer calls “a halfway solution”: adding a disclaimer that many Americans didn’t do well on those questions because the underlying issues brought their value systems in conflict with knowledge. As evidence of that conflict, Bruer notes a 2004 study described in the 2008 Indicators that found 72% of Americans answered correctly when the statement about humans evolving from earlier species was prefaced with the phrase “according to the theory of evolution.” The 2008 volume explains that the different percentages of correct answers “reflect factors beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.”
George Bishop, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio who has studied attitudes toward evolution, believes the board’s argument is defensible. “Because of biblical traditions in American culture, that question is really a measure of belief, not knowledge,” he says. In European and other societies, he adds, “it may be more of a measure of knowledge.”
I’ve emphasized the key phrases in that summary, and actually, I rather agree with them. These are issues in which ignorance isn’t the fundamental problem (although, of course, ignorance contributes), but in which American culture has a serious and active obstacle to advancing scientific awareness, the evangelical stupidity of religion. That is something different from what we find in Europe, and it’s also something more malevolent and pernicious than an inadequate educational system.
It seems to me, though, that that isn’t a reason to drop it from the survey and pretend it doesn’t exist and isn’t a problem. Instead, maybe they should promote it to a whole new section of the summary and emphasize it even more, since they admit that it is an unusual feature of our culture, and one that compels people to give wrong answers on a science survey.
Maybe they could title the section, “The Malign Influence of Religion on American Science Education”.
I also rather like the answer given by Jon Miller, the fellow who has actually conducted the work of doing the survey in the past.
Miller believes that removing the entire section was a clumsy attempt to hide a national embarrassment. “Nobody likes our infant death rate,” he says by way of comparison, “but it doesn’t go away if you quit talking about it.”
Exactly right. But if we do talk about it, we end up asking why it’s so bad, and then we make rich people squirm as we point fingers at our deplorable health care system. And in the case of the question about evolution, we make religious people, and especially the apologists for religion, extremely uncomfortable, because they have been defending this institution of nonsense that has direct effects on measurable aspects of science literacy.
Unfortunately, Bruer has also been caught saying something very stupid.
When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: “There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution,” adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer “false” to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: “On that particular point, no.”
What was he thinking? The question on the NSF survey is not asking about details of the mechanisms of evolution, so his objection is weirdly irrelevant. I don’t know if he’s hiding away any creationist sympathies (that phrasing is exactly what I’ve heard from many creationists, after all), but it does reveal that he’s not thinking at all deeply about the issue. And for a philosopher, shouldn’t that be a high crime?
Bhattacharjee Y (2010) NSF Board Draws Flak for Dropping Evolution From Indicators. Science 328(5975):150-151.
I have a hypothesis: I believe that every single religious believer truly knows, deep down, that their beliefs are ridiculous. They’re not blind but, rather, merely blindoflded and refuse to remove the occlusion because they fear that, if they do, they’d have to confront the fact that they’d been lied to by parents, etc – you know: the same people who told them about Santa et al. They continue to _pretend_ to believe because they they fear being shunned by their families and by socieity. It’s like a drug.
Taking these stats out of the report merely ties the blindfold tighter.
Great post.
No. It’s the same everywhere. Knowledge is based in evidence. Faith is unevidenced belief. People are being kept from the evidence by their religion or are failing to examine it because of their religion, or they are, with the evidence in front of them, choosing to deny it – choosing faith over knowledge.
That superstition is interfering with the acquisition of scientific knowledge in this country does not transform scientific questions into matters of belief.
In other related news… Since a majority of Americans think that the Capital of Kansas is Kansas City, the state Capitol building will be moved to that city. Due to the lack of infrastructure on the Kansas side of the border, the Capital of Kansas will be in Missouri.
I will say, I think Chad Orzel raised an interesting point in his blog — that the science knowledge stats were universally bad, even in places where religion didn’t give a damn. It could be that increased education in evolution could just move it into the realm of ‘the Earth orbits the Sun’ — religions have to accept it, because to do otherwise would be to look like they were still acting like it was 1500 (moreso than normal). (It’s interesting to study — how much is just piss-poor science ed and how much is religious meddling.)
On the other hand, leaving it out, while keeping all the statistics that say ‘we still aren’t as knowledgeable about science as other first world countries’ makes the editors look pretty damn bad.
Now evangelists (and Fox News) will jump on this and accuse “secular scientists” of another “cover up.”
Bad move.
Well, it is all part of the NSF’s effort to move the bell curve of American intelligence from “Abject Idiot” all the way over to the “Illiterate Redneck” instead. It’s a start towards getting the average US intelligence near “Forrest Gump”.
This just proves that the agenda for continuing ignorance being lauded is successful. The war for reason is being lost. And the few gains made lately will take a long time to reverse this trend, especially with “news” outlets like Fox News and every other neocon rag free to spout what they wish without fact-checking or any other kind of oversight.
Too bad reality can’t sue for libel or slander.
The NSF should have a statistician on the editorial board and someone who understands what “reporting the findings” means. Bruer is a philosopher and that quote makes him sound like a closet creationist.
Because we all know that real scientists go into their labs every day and rerun centuries old experiments ’cause there are no unanswered questions left in all branches of science (except, evolutionary biology, of course) and they have to do something to earn their paychecks.
The NSF found a solution
To a culture that shuns evolution:
We think it is best
That the national test
Make a critical, small substitution—
Since creationists find it offensive
We are more than a bit apprehensive—
So we think, if you please,
It is best to appease
(Besides, lawsuits get rather expensive!)
Sure, it may be the coward’s way out
But religion, it carries some clout—
Just one thing we will hide,
Because national pride
Is what testing is really about!
So our scores will be where they belong
And it looks like our science is strong.
And besides, we’re not fools—
The creationist schools
Are aware that their teaching is wrong!
Though uncomfortable truths make us squirm,
We do not need a test to confirm
Half the country will choose
To most willingly lose
On exams at the end of the term!
It’s their faith that we put to the test
When we ask them which answer is best
If they really do well
Then they’re going to Hell—
If they flunk, then they’re heavenly blessed!
We could gather their scores, with a blush,
And confirm that their thinking is mush,
Or do this: with a shrug,
Sweep it under the rug:
Don’t address it, but keep it hush-hush.
http://digitalcuttlefish.blogspot.com/2010/04/creationists-what-creationists.html
WTF? What is “value-charged” about evolution, or any other scientific descriptor? And what incicators, pray, could we develop?
Faith is value-charged, as we know; science isn’t – to expect us to somehow hush up the discussion of the most important part of biology is merely to give up in the face of ignorance.
If they aren’t careful, such no doubt well-meaning pandering to propoganda will end up doing the creationists’ job for them.
We have similar problems in South Africa:
A poll worth pharyngulating:
“Do you believe in evolution?”
http://www.iol.co.za/
The questions didn’t “force” the public to conflate knowledge and beliefs. The epistemic system of religion forced some members of the public to conflate knowledge and beliefs. The questions only revealed this confusion — a confusion which is caused by the assumption that there are “other ways of knowing” which put the faithful above empirical evidence.
So, what are some of the strategies for dealing with this epistemic problem?
1.) Tell people that the “other way of knowing” is real and special, but it reveals facts which have to be kept personal and private, and these facts need to be ignored when dealing with, or even thinking about, the outside world.
2.) Tell people that the “other way of knowing” is real and special, but it only has to do with knowing about personal feelings, not facts — though in some mysterious way, they can be the same thing, but only in private.
3.) Tell people the truth — there are no “special ways of knowing” facts based on having a personal relationship to the universe. If your religious beliefs contradict science, then the religious belief is just plain wrong. Grow the f*k up.
ya not gona lie, i think id have to answer no to the second question…horribly phrased. and thats from the NSF?
The purpose of the survey is to probe scientific literacy. There is only one reason that a person would get a question about the earth revolving around the sun wrong; they don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun. There are two reasons that someone might get the question wrong about human evolution: 1) they don’t know that humans evolved from other animals, or 2) they realize that the scientific evidence indicates as much, but they reject scientific findings when they are relevant to human origins. In this instance, the person is not ignorant of the position that science supports–they simply reject it, which is a different but bigger problem.
However, the survey is a tool that has been designed to discover the first reason. Remove the human evolution question because it functions poorly…fine. But the NSF now has a decidedly stickier problem on its hands. By removing the question about human evolution the NSF recognizes that some significant fraction of the American public rejects science. They could expand the survey to find out why, but I think we all know why (religious conviction…but I suppose if anyone has any other explanation, we could entertain it). The question is, what does a government agency do about that?
Anyway, I don’t think the NSF is tryng to “hide” America’s ignorance. I think that they have designed a poor tool to characterize a tricky problem…the reason for ignorance. And rather than dealing with the second sticky problem, they just want to focus on the first: the depth of ignorance.
I hope the believers can hide this:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/world/news/e3ia32c20e0500d8fa5ea4872e8a7bddf00
Highlight? It should be screamed from every mountain top! This is a travesty, and should be widely promulgated. You don’t improve our educational system and attitudes by hiding the biggest conflicts, no matter how traditional they are.
What buttmunches.
I did that for several years for that very reason. Even after I became aware of it.
I don’t believe the universe began with some mere ”huge explosion”. I believe it started with a rapid expansion of matter from a singularity. It’s embarassing that it’s not 100% of Americans who answered false to that one. The correct answer is of course false. Big Bang is a bad name for it, because it gives a wrong impression of what occurred.
Actually, it does – MRSA is a good example.
More and more, humanity’s science is becoming so presice and powerful that the gaps for ‘goddidit’ are narrowing uncomfortably to shoehorn an entire mythology into. The basic facts of the world have always been in direct opposition to blind faith, and of late this is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
We’re just seeing the desperate pushing against the ‘advancing wall’ of reality.
That’s not a good excuse to aid and abet this hysterical denial, however – just the opposite. Shame on the NSF.
I haven’t seen any studies definitively linking infant mortality rates in the US to the quality of healthcare. Statistics such as this (and the slightly lower longevity rate) are trotted out every time health care in America is discussed on this blog.
Correlation does not equal causation; there are many factors besides lack of health care that one can assume have as much or more impact on infant mortality and longevity.
There is much evidence linking low birth weight (LBW), prenatal care and the mother’s age durning pregnancy. The CDC says approximately two-thirds of infant deaths during the first month of life were LBW babies. It also says children born of teen mothers are more likely to be of LBW and more likely to die in the first year.
According to the CDC, of all groups, teens are the least likely to get early prenatal care, thus placing themselves, as well as their babies, at the highest risk of health complications. The U. S. Department of Health and Human Servces has long contended that three-fourths of associated health risks may be detected during the first prenatal care visit.
This study places at least as much emphasis on education as economics.
Given that prenatal care is available free through Medicaid it seems to me a lack of education and an unwillingness to conform to the recommended lifestyle changes (smoking, substance abuse, poor nutrition, etc.) has as much or more to do with infant mortality in the US as the quality of health care.
A doctor can’t help someone who doesn’t visit or refuses to accept his/her advice.
Seconding #20
If their goal was to find whether people thought the universe began with the Big Bang, they failed miserably.
Anyone who attended a college course in physics ought to answer no to that one.
I’ve posted about this on my blog:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2010/04/you-people-wouldnt-know-scientific.html
#22 – I suppose contraception for teens is available free through Medicaid, and that they know where to go to get their free prenatal exams and contraception because some Medicaid paid provider has been following them throughout their childhoods to help prevent them from developing unhealthy lifestyles in the first place????
*SMOKING GUN*
On October 1986, John T. Bruer was appointed president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation, St. Louis, Missouri. The Foundation awards $18 Million annually in support of biomedical science, education, and international projects. Dr. Bruer is the first full-time professional to head the McDonnell Foundation and has developed and initiated major new programs for the Foundation. In collaboration with the Pew Charitable Trusts, he established the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, a new-mind brain science that links systems neuroscience and psychology in the study of human cognition.
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Re-read that until you catch what is important there. Then research ‘that group’. John Bruer was suggested to be ‘the leader’ in removing this information.
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The place he works at, after 5 minutes of detailed research to me does not appear to exist or is in a Macy’s parking lot. LOL JK – sort of but not reall. It is odd They do not list a phone number on their web page.
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Anyhow, I am going to give John a call at JM Foundation on Monday. I am planning my interview questions now. It is my hunch this another of science grants and funding(money) trumping science. There is nothing new under the sun. Just like the recent Texas Text Book Massacre and The Templetons if you throw big bucks around even god can exist.
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BTW if you did not find it. Johns employer is it seems heavily connected with “Pew Charitable Trusts”. I have only had 5 min of research here so I will have to wait to speak with him about this on Monday.
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If you want to Join in on the conference call have some good questions I got the number if you got the time.
Tony Schwartz
[email protected]
Fuck your god and if you have to try to use money to mask the fact a belief in god is not delusional fuck you too.
Healthcare is about more than just people visiting doctors. And people not visiting doctors, or not taking advice, is a healthcare issue.
off-topic but related: the ranking of the ‘greatest country on earth’ on the global peace index:
http://www.visionofhumanity.org/gpi/results/rankings.php
tadaah… number 83! right behind bolivia and ukraine, but beating kazakhstan by a whopping 3 points (2018 vs 2015 points).
something’s rotten in the states.
PS:
I am not sure how I do it. But I will fork out the $5-50 dollars whatever it is for a conference/bridge line so he can address all of our questions in a fair manner. Rude ignorant turkies will be muted :)
It’s rare that I arrive in such an early stage of pharyngulation.
Not just matter. It’s spacetime as a whole, with energy (including matter) in it.
Besides, there’s a single key for the quotation mark, you don’t need to use two apostrophes. I forgot if it’s Shift+2 on an American keyboard, but probably it is.
There’s no way to answer “the universe began with a giant explosion”. It’s a straw man of the big bang, I don’t for a second believe it but answering no would be just as bad answering yes. How on earth did such pathetically stupid phrasing of the question get through?
Not that it is really relevant, but the Accommodationist Supreme, Matt Nisbet, has published his usual blather in support of NSF’s decision in his blog. He says:
Distracting? Harmful to public engagement? False deficit? Is this outlook false, not based on facts? How blind can he be?
PZ said:
Not in my experience. Evangelicals are quite sure of themselves that the bible is 99.9% accurate and has never been shown wrong in any but the most trivial facets, and they don’t squirm at all.
Pedestrian laity take anything they don’t believe literally and categorize it as metaphor.
One good friend who is the rare combination of smart, educated, thoughtful, and also deeply Catholic, resolves it this way: it doesn’t make any sense at all if he stops and thinks about it, but empirically it helps him to believe it, so he continues to believe it.
I grew up well-educated but in a reclusive bubble. From their apparent secular behavior, I figured everyone knew gods were mythology, and churches were arbitrarily-themed clubhouses. And when “god” was mentioned, it was for poetic effect. The bible was just like Aesop’s fables (cited at will to make points).
And the people who really believed were off in deserts and savannahs lopping stuff and chasing witches, or stereotype movie roles to make Stephen King spooky. The Jewish yarmulke was just an ethnic heritage trapping like the African kufi.
If given a survey, I would’ve answered christian (generic protestant?), assuming religious questions were about ancestry, like “Irish”. Cause with a Roddenberry worldview like that, what else could it mean?
Atheists and theological arguments didn’t make sense at the time:
Debating Zeus, really? Is batman vs spiderman next?
Then in conversation with a relative, it came up that he thought the grand canyon was carved by the great flood… didn’t come from monkeys… *froth* pascal’s wager… hell hell hell… pascal’s wager… *froth* read it, read it, read it.
I found his club’s bylaws (Leviticus/Deuteronomy) disturbing. :/
That was when it sunk in that people in this country were serious; that there were forms of “stupid” besides the idiopathic variety; some were infectious. And the calendar rolled back a couple hundred years.
Anti_Theist-317 @ 26:
I’m afraid I fail utterly to see either smoke or gun amid your innuendo. If you have a point, please state it clearly — and after more than five minutes of research.
Apparently you found the address and looked it up on Google Maps. That particular piece of Google Maps is seriously borked. It features a major shopping mall, the St Louis Galleria. The map locates several of the mall’s stores outside of the Galleria’s walls, in the parking lot or on the access road for the parking garage. Likewise it locates the McDonnell Foundation’s address (1034 S. Brentwood, St Louis MO 63117) in the middle of a small intersection.
MapQuest gives a more plausible location. See the map for Edward Jones, a stockbroker at the same address:
Mapquest’s version
Mapquest locates the address on the other side of Brentwood, opposite the Galleria instead of south of it. If you Google for the address you can find a number of other tenants of the same building. There is no reason whatever to suppose that the address is phony, and every reason to conclude that Google has it wrong.
James F. McDonnell made his millions from McDonnell Aircraft (or whatever it was called at the time), a major defense contractor that made fighter jets. It later became half of McDonnell-Douglas, and is now part of Boeing. So arguably the Foundation is an arm of the military-industrial complex. For some, that may be enough of a reason to dismiss it out of hand.
Or perhaps you have noted that the Foundation has teamed up with the Pew Charitable Trust, and pews are found in churches, so there must be some plot to inject religious woo into scientific research. If you have any evidence of it, please present it. And not until.
(Full disclosure: in graduate school I spent a lot of my time in the McDonnell Science Building at the Washington University Medical School, funded by James F. McDonnell and filled with research labs and offices. So I am a beneficiary of the dread merchant of death.)
There’s nothing like religion to make people feel proud of(and saved for) their ignorance.
(Also, applause to Cuttlefish for turning this travesty into cheerful verse– if life gives you lemons…)
“I mean, yeah, we get these appalling results because of a certain breed of American religiosity.”
Do tell, Mooney!
You know what’s embarrassing? Having to share a country with fundies.
And the fact that biology education is woefully inadequate.
I mean, I was talking with my mother today about cetacean evolution and she looked at me as if her mind was totally blown by the fact that cetaceans used to walk on land and have vestigial hips and multiple bones in their fins that correspond to limbs of other animals. I had to take about 5 minutes to explain to her why Pakicetus evolved into, say, a blue whale.
My mother knows evolution happens and she also has a master’s degree, albeit her field is sociology, and since I’m a biology student I have to kind of give her information in little chunks because she loves learning about this and in fact it helps her in her job at a major biomedical sciences grant institution, and at the same time she’s never taken a college biology course.
The gulf between those who are trained in this and those who are not is huge.
At least the comments on his post tear apart his BS. If they answer no on a question about evolution they don’t believe in evolution. The only reason not to believe in Evolution is because your religion opposes science and encourages ignorance.
These are facts and the numbers prove them.
I don’t see what’s so bad about Nisbet’s post. He seems to me to be making the same point that Epiphanes did above. Wrong answers to these questions can be the result of ignorance of what science says, or they can be the result of disagreeing with what science says.
Sure, there may be a sense in which someone who is aware of what science says about the origin of humans but who disagrees with it is scientifically illiterate, but at the least this person is scientifically illiterate in a different way than is the person who just has no idea what science has to say on the subject, and it’s not unreasonable to claim that the first person isn’t actually scientifically illiterate at all (without forgetting that there’s still something seriously wrong).
Personally, I wish Nisbet was a bit more upset about the fact that people’s religious views lead them to false beliefs, but I don’t see him excusing religion there – he just doesn’t really address it one way or the other – and the point he’s making is a good one. His solution seems to be in line with PZ’s – he wanted to see the report specifically comment on the fact that wrong answers were the result of religious beliefs in some cases.
dude, in civilized countries these ARE healthcare issues. In addition, they’re also poverty-related issues, so your country is fucking up twice over.
Looks to me like someone was uncomfortable pointing out that religion gets in the way of science education, knowledge and common sense in the USA.
The fact that you get an argument like that “evolution is value-charged” tells you all you need to know, it makes the evangelicals uncomfortable.
This is in fact a unique feature of american (un-)culture, and as PZ said, should be pointed out more rather than less.
That World Peace Index @28 is very interesting. One of the factors that contributes to a country’s WPI is “importance of religion in national life”. It’s not clear to me whether this is seen as positive or negative. I suspect it’s taken as a positive – and the USA still only comes in 83rd.
@30
I have a French keyboard right now. It makes my life complicated. Anyways, yeah, you’re right. It’s the singular instantaneous expansion of space-time.
Just sent the NSF an email suggesting, in far less kind words, that they have to be complete fools to redefine a culture that does the equivalent of eating lead paint “handi-capable”, just because those same people might be offended by being called retards, then failing to grasp what those same lead paint eaters will do with someone *removing* statistics about the paint, when their main argument amounts to, “There is nothing wrong with our paint, or eating it.”
Nisbet, Gotchaye and Epiphanes are correct in their explanation for why the questions were removed. There was no attempt to “hide” the data (due to embarrassment) or creationist leanings of the NSB/NSF. These discussions about the evolution question happened in public and minutes from these discussions are easily obtainable on the NSB’s website. There was full transparency. There has been an ongoing debate regarding whether these 2 questions measure what they proport to measure–scientific literacy. I believe this debate started as early as 1999. Whether removing the questions/data was the best solution is obviously debatable, but I believe the questions were removed until they could be better formulated. They weren’t simply dropped and that was supposed to be the end of story.
@ 46,
There has been an ongoing debate regarding whether these 2 questions measure what they proport to measure–scientific literacy
Reality is not statistical (though it does have a liberal bias).
Understanding that in describing reality, science actively opposes the bias of cultural values and prejudices is a significant aspect of science literacy. Siding with such bias on an answer is a failing.
A wrong answer is a wrong answer. Ignorance and knowing something while actively disregarding it are similar to an observer.
If denying traffic signs was a value, would such questions get striken from a driving test?
A wrong answer isn’t a wrong answer: Ignorance that results from a poor education and ignorance that results from having been brain-washed do not require the same solution.
I’m sorry to be in and out of this (running around today, doing family type stuff), but I use this survey in three different contexts in my teaching
1) At the beginning of a freshman botany course (majors)
2) In an honors seminar for non-majors, in which I discuss science and public policy.
3) In a senior seminar for biology majors.
Of these three groups, the only group that actually misses a substantial number of questions because of true ignorance is the freshman majors course: the results largely mriror those of the American public. By the time these students become senior majors, the ace the exam, including questions regarding the origins of humans and of the universe (and they agree that the latter question is stupidly worded). The honors students get all of the questions right (in general; some have a terrible time with probability) except the two origins questions. However, after 6 hours of lecture and discussion over evolutionary theory and it misrepresentation, the exact number of students who got those questions wrong will purposely choose the wrong answer when surveyed again. This contrasts strongly with the exam answers that indicate that the students understand evolutionary theory.
The point is many of the freshman don’t know that humans descend from other animals because no one has ever presented that idea to them seriously before. Once the idea is presented, to a large degree, the ignorance is corrected. However, the honors students understand fundamentally why scientists think humans descended from other animals, and choose to reject science. That is a kind of ignorance that I don’t know how to correct in a classroom, and further that this ham-fisted NSF survey cannot distinguish from the first kind of ignorance.
Oh Poo. Now we don’t get to evolve anymore.
Damn you Cincinnati!!11!!
mck9 @ 35
James F. McDonnell was “spiritual” (a woo). This is reflected on the names of the MD fighters (Voodoo, Phantom). I have heard that someone thought Satan would be a good name for the F4, but McDonnell objected because “Mr Satan is evil” and the aircraft was named the Phantom II.
The McDonnell foundation affiliation is significant.
Were these clowns Bush appointments by any chance?
I’m not certain that in an overview of the level of scientific literacy in a society, that such a discinction is an important one. The people giving the wrong answers are either ignorant of the finding of science (the one who have not been exposed to the concept), or they are ignorant of science, that is, what science is and the way it works.
They truly believe that their own opinion, based on writings related to an outdated middle eastern sky-god, makes some difference in the way the world is. This shows a deep and profound ignorance of the ways and means of science, and the functioning of the world around them (which, now that I think about it, is a redundant statement).
The point being, both are a demonstration of scientific (il)literacy, which (as I understand it) is what the survey was designed to measure.
As other contributors have noted, terms like “value charged” in this context should ring instant alarm bells. What we seem to have here is a perverse desire, not so much to glorify ignorance, as to look at the available evidence and simply disregard it. To quite literally deny reality in order to hold onto a fairytale that, if viewed dispassionately and objectively, is manifestly utterly at odds with all that we know about the universe.
I like fantasy and sci-fi as genres as much as the next guy (OK, if I am honest probably somewhat more than the next guy, but that’s a whole other issue), but one has to wonder about the kind of culture that priviliges poorly written and deeply harmful fantasy over reality itself. We really are through the looking glass here. The Matrix as metaphor for religion.
There are no ‘different ways of knowing’. On the one hand there is an understanding of reality that, while admittedly inperfect, is established through careful scientific analysis of the universe, backed up by copious hard evidence painstakingly accrued over years and centuries of research, and on the other hand evidence-free fanatasy that is malleable enough to conform to whatever suits the more empowered members of the various cults it sustains from one moment to the next. If a person freely chooses the latter over the former while possessing free access to the available evidence, then I fear there is simply no hope for them.
The equally important part of the story is Bruer’s comment towards the end. That kind of misunderstanding of the nature of what we are up against is one of the reasons the real world is losing its battle with the imaginary world (in climate change as well as evolution). Scientists seem to bend over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to idiots where there is no doubt. They seem unable to comprehend the depth of stupidity and ignorance that infests a significant part of the population, and think that these are debates (eg about the minutiae of evolutionary theory, or the exact nature of cloud feedback) that they would have in a university seminar room with colleagues. Instead they are arguing with people whose understanding of the world would seem primitive in medieval times. A similar misunderstanding is examined here today http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/the-worm-turns_b_532993.html.
Reality is not statistical
Suppose you polled folks and asked “Is reality real” and you got a 92% “yes” result. Then you asked, “If reality being real required you to give up your religion, would you still believe reality was real” and you then got a 55% “no” result.
I know a religious apologist campaign to convince folks that reality and religion are compatable isn’t the correct response, but I can sympathize with how such would be tempting when the alternative is 55% of the public outright rejecting reality… or at least I can empathize with an apologist wondering why the hell are we continually phrasing the questions is such a stupid way.
Oh well… it’s sad and scary no-matter how you look at it.
It’s the same basic approach as that used by the RCC to deal with the child abuse scandal; hide it, don’t talk about it, and maybe people will forget about it.
Standard operating procedure for organisations of all sorts across all times, sadly. It seems to take very little effort to move from “ok, we’ve sorted out that problem, let’s not dwell on it anymore” to “Nobody talks about that, go away”, to “Have him taken away and dealt with”, to “Nuke that entire place so they can’t offend us”.
That kind of misunderstanding of the nature of what we are up against is one of the reasons the real world is losing its battle with the imaginary world (in climate change as well as evolution). Scientists seem to bend over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to idiots where there is no doubt. They seem unable to comprehend the depth of stupidity and ignorance that infests a significant part of the population,
So… given that 2/3 of the American public are not very intelligent and not particularly knowledgeable and never will be very intelligent or knowledgeable…
1) What, if any, concern should we have over their “general understanding of science”? Would it matter if the majority believe the earth is flat? (They don’t.) That evolution is false? (They do.)
2) Given that *only* reason these not very intelligent and not very caring people deny a fundamental fact is because they think it contradicts their religion, how should we educate people to the fundamental facts (such as the earth is round, and evolution is true)?
Woozy #59 – A good start would be to free the education system from the “teach both sides” nonsense. While that would help though it would be insufficient without the mainstream media also dumping the “balanced” “he said she said” style of reporting, and in fact got behind science. That won’t happen as long as the media proprietors have an ideological objection to science.
David Horton
Hm. Does contrary belief also obstruct the development of knowledge, as well as the expression of it? I would expect so, but I’m not sure.
This is an experiment that PZ or some other biology instructor might run. Have students be given a survey of their beliefs at the beginning of the semester, and then at the end, have a test (not part of the class grade) which measures the development of their understanding, emphasizing they are supposed to answer questions based on their understanding of the current consensus among biologists, regardless of whether or not they believe this consensus is correct. You’d probably want four groups of questions: material students should know at the beginning of the course, know from coverage in the course, be able to figure out from the material in the course even though not directly covered, and material requiring more advanced understanding than the course is expected to provide.
You’d also probably need help from another professor, to assure students that their answers to the initial survey would not be given to their professor, and thus not (directly) influence their grade. And, of course, IRB approval for human subjects research….
That sounds like an article from The Onion.
‘Reality sues Fox News for libel, in England.’
To full accurate, the correct answer to “The universe started with a huge explosion” is false.
One of the misconceptions of the Big Bang is that is was an explosion. If explosion is defined in any way that an average person would recognize then the Big Bang was not explosion. The word explosion implies that somewhere in space something suddenly blew up which is most emphatically not what the Big Bang proposes.
They also usually ask if men coexisted with dinosaurs. I think most scientifically literate people can figure out that the question is really about non-avian dinosaurs, but that is not what the question explicitly asks. And of course the same point could be made about the Big Bang question.
Cosmology is pretty strange at the best of times; I suspect the Big Bang is even more poorly explained in classrooms than evolution.
So the NSF plays ostrich when the survey is not favorable to someone’s pay package? Well, that goes well with the NCSE recently turning to faith to explain why “ID” is bad (it’s blasphemous I tell you, BLASPHEMOUS!). I wonder if the NCSE is trying for a de facto ban of ID in Ireland? Ah, what a wonderful age we live in where science institutions use the tools of religions (denial and affirmation of stupidity) to promote science! Told you science was just another religion …
How many of them know better but say they disbelieve evolution in order to fulfill the mandate of their witch-doctors ?
“These are issues in which ignorance isn’t the fundamental problem …”
I disagree; ignorance *is* the fundamental problem. The ignorance is perpetuated by various religious systems and claims to be “knowledge”, and knowledge born of ignorance trumps knowledge born of hard work and observations.
@61 actually proposed this for my biology class but the instructor was afraid that merely asking the question would inflame the passions and wreck that class.
And just for my own — how is a rapid expansion of matter and space time not LIKE an explosion?
And at what point would the question be specific enough for a pedant? “As you can see on page 42 of question 3: the possibility of differential expansion is incorrectly expressed…” Therefore I would answer false.
I suppose you could preface each question with: at this time does the following theory best explain the known and relevant facts. –but that would mean nothing to the non-scientists and free the scientists types to reject the answer if it did not line up with their own current hypothesis. no?
Big Bang is just shorthand for the entire theory. Just like Darwinism is shorthand for a much larger body of knowledge and study. But unfortunately, both words have all kinds of political and cultural baggage too. So, looks like big explosion was an effort to ask about the big bang without invoking the cultural bits. To what success – I dunno.
But I don’t get me wrong, I don’t think running away from the questions is the right answer. Maybe just come right out and ask: do you think that science provides the best (whatever – I’m not sure what word to put here) for understanding reality? yes / no but then you would have to define reality. Maybe you just can’t ask these questions in woofilled America.
There is a very good reason to drop the survey question “the universe began with a giant explosion”, but not for the one mentioned. I can’t believe the NSF would word it that badly.
I was at a talk being given by a cosmologist [/kwok] and someone asked a question with the assumption of the big bang being an ‘explosion’ in flat, 3 dimensional, infinite space. The cosmologist cleared it up and said it’s probably the most frequent misconception he gets from laypeople.
I would have been tempted to say NO to the second question on the Big Bang or to throw the questionnaire away, but not because I am a creationist who thinks the world started 6000 years ago. Rather I teach physics and I know that the Big Bang was the simultaneous creation of space, time and mass-energy and the subsequent expansion of space, dragging mass-energy with it and that this continues at increasing rates today – that is the Big Bang is not over. I am sure a professional cosmologist might state things more clearly than I.
The fact that the NSF asked the question with such a dumbed down and wrong characterization of the Big Bang suggests scientific illiteracy on their part or at least a very sloppy attitude – so what can we expect from the public but ignorance?
Agreed, it’s something I see quite often from creationists who use the wording itself as a point of absurdity (for those who have seen Expelled, like when Ruse talks about life forming on the back of crystals there is a cut to a “psychic” using a crystal ball).
I guess part of the problem is that there’s no real way one can convey the notion of the big bang to the layperson. Any wording must be an analogy, and any analogy is going to be taken literally because there’s no means to distinguish between the analogy of, and the theory itself. And can you really have the creation of space-time without a creator? ;)
#60 justagreenie
“teach both sides”, a “balanced” media, and an ideological objection to science, are really all the same thing; an idea that religious mythology (i.e. creationism) is a “side” and is contradictory to science (and also that religious mythology when contradictory to science is equally valid).
Thus we have the “apologist’s dilema”
1) Science is true.
2) We can’t tell people religion is false.
3) People think there is a conflict with science and religion.
Well, the obvious and tempting solution is to bend backwards and say “Science and religion aren’t in conflict! Everyone happy?” (And, hell, it could be true… of all the folks I know who kept their religion, *all* accept evolution without an apparent crisis of faith…)
‘Course the thing we want to do is teach kids to be intelligent and critical and put things to the test. But no-one wants to admit we also have to the ignoramuses and that pretty much consists of saying “it’s true ’cause I say it’s true”. Ask the average dullard why we have days and nights and he’ll probably say “because the world spins around so when we’re facing the sun it’s daytime and when we’re facing outer-space it’s night.” Then if you ask the dullard “If the world spins around why don’t we all fly off?” the dullard will probably answer “I don’t know, I’m not space scientist. I never really got it but someone’s gotta know.”
Part of me secretly wishes we could hammer the “’cause I say so” home so that if we were to ask the same dullard “If humans evolved from apelike ancestors, why does the bible talk of Adam and Eve” he’d answer “I don’t know. Maybe Adam and Eve were ape-men. I never really got it but someone’s gotta know” (or better yet, “I dunno. Adam and Eve was probably just a story.”) Actually isn’t this how things were thirty years ago?
The thing that really pisses me off, though, is that people are being *taught* by conservative right-wing fundimentalists that religion and science are in conflict and yet the onus to resolve the issue is burdened upon the scientists and teachers. Shouldn’t the onus (both that there *is* a conflict and what the resolution might be) be upon those claiming the conflict in the first place?
In explosions (at least the ones people are used to) matter flies outward while the surrounding space stays (for all intents and purposes) the same. In the big bang it’s space itself which is expanding. For more appropriate analogy see below.
I think most people here realize that when talking to general public you can’t be too hung up on details. However, the way it was phrased was extremely misleading and only furthers misconceptions. You’d expect better from the National Science Foundation.
Well, it is difficult. Any sort of explanation for the layperson is bound to have some distortions, but we can try to minimize them. For the big bang, the best analogy I’ve heard is imagining pennies on a balloon that is expanding. At least in this analogy the theists would be saying “God blows”. :)
Militant Agnostic @ 53:
Big freaking deal. Most Americans believe in some kind of woo. It should come as no great surprise that some woo-believers are rich, and a few of them become philanthropists. It does not follow that anyone connected to that philanthropy is ipso facto tainted by some tenuous chain of guilt by association.
You assert that significance, but you have provided no support for it. Neither has the original commenter.
If you go to the Foundation’s website you can find lists of the grants they funded in 2008 and 2009. So far as I can tell from reading the titles, they all look like legitimate research projects. The Foundation provides real money for real science. It’s likely that some of them turn out to be turkeys, but that’s probably inevitable for any major granting agency.
We often ridicule the Discovery Institute and the Templeton Foundation on this blog. I don’t recall any previous discussion of the JS McDonnell Foundation — I may well have missed it — but I don’t think it falls in the same category.
Of course I may be wrong. If there is any evidence that the McDonnell Foundation promotes woo at the expense of science and reason, by all means let’s discuss it. However the fact that the founder was “spiritual” (and I’ll take your word for that) does not constitute such evidence.
In particular I object to the conclusion that the Foundation’s published address is fictitious, on the basis of five minutes research, apparently with a flawed Google map. That conclusion, with its implicit suggestion that the Foundation is little short of fraudulent, was reckless and irresponsible. Even if we disagree with the aims of the McDonnell Foundation, it doesn’t deserve to be defamed.
Yeah, true. Unfortunately it seems that most people see “Big Bang” and assume a giant explosion and that’s where their education on the matter ends. And of course, an intelligent powerful deity sounds a lot better to explain the order of the cosmos than an explosion which to us is a means to create disorder.
For me, not being able to comprehend the mathematics (not that I’ve really looked into it, I think I might be able to understand it if I devoted enough time to studying it), I just look at the predictive success of the model. That it predicted the cosmic background radiation before it was discovered, that it predicted the ratios of hydrogen to helium to lithium in the universe, that it can explain the red shifting seen in the universe; those are to me are what make the model valid and why it needs to be taken seriously.
And there are different flavors of “poor education”. Too early? Too detailed to remember? To superficial? Too boring? Too many topics in a course?
I simply included: too little early emphasis on the reasons science better fits reality than folk history.
A test measures one’s ability to provide correct answers. If desire conflicts and wins, it is an inability.
One could instead refer to it as “the generation of space-time and matter-energy”…. But then someone might assume this implies the existence of at least one generator, or perhaps generations of space-time and matter-energy ancestors beforehand. Then again, if space-time itself didn’t exist “prior” to this, then there’s no reason to think anything could have any kind of existence or any conceivable properties.
So, as with all confusing topics, most people give up and say “Goddidit”. “God” is that mysterious thing that can do whatever makes them feel warm and fuzzy and makes them feel as if they have some profound, super-secret insider information about the nature of reality. Most people are dumb.
This got to send shivers down the spine and cause goose bumps to any sensible American. And,
From The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. Page 27.
I am not trying to be dense but the fact that the medium in which the explosion is taking place is also part of that explosion doesn’t make the analogy of an explosion invalid. Incomplete – but every analogy is going to be that.
And whether we like it or not, we are left with Hoyle’s big bang name. Maybe if Hoyle had called it the big balloon? And then there would be problems with the balloon too.
Would it be better if the question had been worded: the universe is expanding like a big balloon?
There is also a problem with when someone last studied cosmology. With the discovery of the cosmic background radiation not occurring until what the mid-1960’s; would not have made it into college textbooks until the 70’s? And then not into high school and the common consciousness until late 70’s? I don’t recall the balloon analogy even from the 80’s. So using the balloon for the question would exclude anyone who took their cosmology class before the balloon description became common. I think we are stuck with the explosion thing.
How should they word the question?
@75
As one who is charged with correcting the problem of ignorance, the difference is enormous. Understanding the flavors of “poor education” helps the correction.
Many of my students have never been taught anything about evolution* at all. In this case, I am dealing with remediation. It is a relatively straightforward problem to solve.
On the other hand, I have students who have been taught a tremendous amount about evolution*, and every word of it carefully and utterly wrong. This presents a much greater challenge. This ignorance is not just a hole to fill, but an edifice that has to be torn down, and rebuilt. This requires the cooperation of the student, which is rarely** forthcoming.
The survey can’t tell me which type of ignorance I am confronting, and that is why the question regarding the origin of humans is of little use to me.
*Substitute “science” here and the problem is the same.
**OK…In my experience, thus far, never forthcoming. Its a pisser when you have a student with an otherwise agile and capable mind who has been so thoroughly trained by liars, that they distrust me from the moment that the enter a classroom. We sent one of those to medical school last year.
Yes, no analogy is ever going to be perfect but some could be worse than others.
Maybe something like: “Do you think the Big Bang theory accurately describes the universe?” or “Do you think the universe started off really dense and then preceded with a rapid expansion of space itself?”.
These are just off the top of my head. There are dozens of ways it could have been better phrased without sounding overly technical. Again, you’d expect better from the NSF. It would have been akin to asking “Do you believe humans came from monkeys?”. Many people would understand what they were really asking, but it is needlessly ambiguous/inaccurate* and only furthers misconceptions. The way the evolution question was asked (or not asked, I guess) is better than asking if we came from monkeys. Likewise, they could have chosen a better way to describe the Big Bang than “a huge explosion”.
_ _ _
* Accuracy of course depends on how one defines “monkeys”. Needless to say, no biologists thinks we came from current non-ape/non-prosimian primates.
Jadehawk wrote:
But Jadehawk you see in Libertarianistan the addicted, sick, poor and poorly fed will PULL THEMSLEVES UP BY THEIR OWN BOOTSTRAPS. To diagram this out underpants gnome style, observe
1) Poverty, sickness, addiction, etc…
2) ????
3) Wellness, fitness, sex with pornstars, giant flatscreens…
Sure civilized countries have evil socialist programs where I’ve got ???? but we prefer our freedumb you fukin commie.
Back on topic, no it doesn’t matter what the source of the ignorance is. The big fail in the US is the general lack of emphasis on critical thinking society-wide. This translates into religiosity that leads to beliefs trumping reality but that’s no excuse for the root cause which has to do with popular hatred for public education and a long tradition of anti-intellectualism now encouraged by corporate media that values an ignorant public in the heart of the American empire above an educated one. This is helped by the fact that America was populated mostly by Europe’s misfits and shitheads. They taught their children well and here we are. I don’t see much hope.
Surely that we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than either of us and them do with new world monkeys dictates that if the word monkey has any meaning then we must be monkeys.
From the almighty Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey#Etymology
Also, the word ‘monkey’ came centuries before Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Again from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catarrhini
Let me guess, that’s the group of simians with runny noses?
:P
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say Kel. The definition there said that monkeys only included “some catarrhines”.
Making groupings of animals based on evolutionary history is a natural way to do it. However, this is one of those cases where the language came before the science. ‘Monkey’ does mean something, even if it arbitrarily doesn’t include some groups.
Yes, “old world monkeys” are more closely related to us than they are to “new world monkeys”. If someone wants to change the meaning of ‘monkey’ to make it a “good taxon” (i.e, monophyletic group) go for it, but for the time being we are stuck the current meaning.
Just something Don Prothero got me thinking about in his book Evolution, though in the book from memory it was the word reptile as a classification.
Yeah, I get that. Just be being annoying I suppose.
I see that as well as specialising in producing qualified lawyers who have no ability to think critically (many examples come to mind, Ann Coulter for one) the US is capable of producing philosophers who can’t do it.
That’s definitely an achievement that should be trumpeted by the NSF.
My point was exactly that: a test will only tell what was incorrect, not why.
Sorry, I overlooked your post about freshmen.
Where I diverged was that I took the survey as a critique of the initial elementary/hs education. A course that was presented too abstractly, lacking personal relevance, wouldn’t be helped by dumbing down for example. It still wouldn’t stick.
Fixing curricula the first time ’round (which would include evidence-based critical thinking as innoculation in early grades) is a different application of the survey than damage control and correction in college (which would be deprogramming).
From your latter pov, I agree there’s a huge difference between not-knowing/forgetting and willful disregard. From the former, it seemed a potentially manageable problem (when the obstinate worldview isn’t as entrenched).
I get the feeling I’m wandering into a “primary ed can’t be fixed” debate minefield…
Compulsory @75 said:
Not exactly correct. Tests may be devised to evaluate any number of things. Some tests are specifically designed to test attitude (learning in the affective domain).
Because the test questions were worded so badly we’ll never know if incorrect answers resulted from ignorance (ability) or attitude (unwillingness).
This would be required information for the instructor who must fix the problem.
I’m going to have to buck the trend here and agree with the people running the survey who said that it conflates knowledge of the theory of evolution with belief in the theory of evolution evolution, and that this is a problem if its purpose was to just measure knowledge alone.
If you don’t agree with that, let me make the following analogy. Look at these two questions:
#1 According to the bible, did it take 6 days to make the earth?
#2 Was the earth made in 6 days?
An atheist can answer “yes” to #1 but “no” to #2. #1 measures knowledge about the Bible, #2 measures agreement with it. They are not the same thing. If someone had made a survey that asked #2 instead of #1, and then took that result to then claim “see, atheists are not literate about what the bible says”, we’d be bitching up a storm about that dishonest conclusion, and rightly so.
If the test’s purpose is to measure scientific literacy rather than scientific agreement, then these questions on the test don’t actually do that.
Don’t get me wrong, given how utterly terrible the arguments of creationists are, and how based on strawman fallacies they are, I don’t doubt that if you measured literacy of what the theory of evolution actually says a lot of them would get that wrong too, but we can’t tell that from THIS test.
Some examples of better questions to test scientific literacy about evolution rather than agreement might be these:
“According to currently understood evolutionary science, did humans evolve from monkeys?” (If they say “yes” then they don’t understand the nuanced difference between “A and B share a common ancestor” versus “A evolved from B”,)
“Name three different techniques used to determine the age of a fossil”.
“According to the theory of evolution, which of the following processes can be random without violating the theory?: (A) neither mutation nor selection can be random, (B) Mutation can be random but not Selection, (C) Selection can be random but not mutation, (D) both can be random”
These touch upon how incorrectly the ToE is often taught in rare cases where it is actually taught, but none of them require that people agree with it to get the right answer. They would be an more accurate measure of scientific literacy.
Or, to put it another way, answering “true” to the question “Human beings as we know them today developed from earlier species of animals.” doesn’t prove a thing about scientific literacy about what the theory of evolution actually says. It only measures agreement with the conclusion of the argument the theory makes and says nothing about knowledge of the content of the argument itself.
It’s just like measuring Biblical literacy by using the question “Does god exist and is Jesus Christ his son?” It only measures agreement with the conclusion, and thus even people ignorant of the content of the Bible can get it “right”. (i.e. people who go to church and believe what their told but never actually read the damn thing cover to cover.)
The report itself indicates that the numbers, for evolution anyway, go up about 10% when you add ‘according to scientific theory’. So the numbers would swing a bit.
But that leaves us with why the US numbers are so much lower than other countries with the current wording (how come no such trouble with the wording in the rest of the industrialized world) AND why 10% of folks who know the scientific facts then choose to ignore them.
In a way — that makes the point of the poll even worse. More than 1/2 of the population does not know the science: that can be fixed with education. In opposition to: even if the time and effort is expended to teach the science it will still be rejected.
Well, here’s what this indicates. Medical doctors in the US will increasingly come from other countries. Advances in gene therapy will be done in other countries. Development of important pharmas will be done by those who don’t have ‘American-sounding names’.
The Teatards and Republicans want, need and demand sheep. The only way to preserve their last desperate hold on power is to have an illiterate population incapable of rational thought or critical thinking. Since they haven’t thought this all the way through though themselves, they’ve essentially given away the shop, thus assuring their eventual demise.
Funny how that all works out. Karma’s a bitch.
Thanks for mentioning the poor phrasing… as soon as I saw the question, my first thought was that I wouldn’t feel really comfortable answering either yes or no to that question. “No” seems to deny that cosmology is pretty much settled on the Big Bang or some variant theory as origin of the universe, while “Yes” simultaneously acknowledges a very sketchy description of the Big Bang while also implying that the origin question in cosmology is completely settled. If I had to give a succinct answer to that funky question, it would be, “Yeah, something like that”.
I think for once PZ is being too kind (dare I say accommodating!) here. It’s a false dichotomy to say that the study is measuring belief rather than knowledge. The study is supposed to be measuring how many people know certain scientific facts, such as that humans evolved from earlier species. (And looking at table 7.8 in the report linked from the ScienceInsider piece, there is no doubt that the survey treats this as a factual question that has a right and a wrong answer). Knowledge is usually defined as justified true belief, in other words in order to know something you have to (a) believe that thing, (b), that thing has to be true, and (c), you have to have valid reasons for believing it. People who don’t believe that humans evolved from earlier animals don’t meet criterion (a), so by definition, they can’t possibly know that humans evolved from earlier animals. It is perfectly justified to count them as lacking knowledge of evolution.
Alec.
Alec, but that is not what the test claims it’s measuring. It does not claim to be measuring whether or not people know what’s true. It claims to be measuring their scientific literacy. That means that knowing what science currently says is sufficient regardless of whether or not you agree with it. I think it would be highly instructive to show people that not only do creationists not agree with the ToE, they also don’t even know what it really says so they’re rejecting the theory out of ignorance of what it’s even claiming in the first place.
I don’t see much of a difference between those two things.
Steven –
Yes, the report as a whole is aimed at assessing scientific literacy. But one of the components of scientific literacy that they look at is “measures of factual knowledge of science”, and this is where the evolution question was asked. I’m sure you are right that many people who reject evolution don’t even know what the theory of evolution says. But I think my point still stands, that by definition you can’t “know” something without also “believing” it.
Alec.