Science In America… *Sigh*
Not that USA Today is exactly the pinnacle of science journalism in the ol’ U. S. of A., but this story kind of points, passive-aggressively in the approximate general direction of a scratch on the surface of a HUGE issue in this country.
The bulk of Americans seem to take the Miles Monroe attitude toward science: “Science is an intellectual dead end, you know? It’s a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants. ”
Cripes!
To make matters worse, USA Today reprinted a “true-false quiz” developed by the National Science Foundation to gauge science knowledge among the general populace. The last two questions cannot be answered “true” or “false”. This does not speak well of the government entity charged with guiding scientific research and education in our country.
What people seem to lose sight of is that science is a practice, not a set of facts.
That Earth orbits the Sun is not science. It is what we call a “fact”. How we came to know that the Earth orbits the Sun is through the employment of science.
That evolution of species occurs is not science. It is also a fact. How we came to understand the mutative and selective processes which drive and direct that evolution is through the employment of science.
Science is the process of identifying a question or problem, forming an educated guess as to the answer or solution (known as an hypothesis), testing the hypothesis, and forming a conclusion based on the results of the tests. Hypotheses which survive rigorous, repeated and ever broader tests, and are capable of allowing reliable predictions to be made based certain key pieces of knowledge are eventually elevated to the status of “theory”.
“Just a theory” is one of the most ridiculous phrases I have ever heard. It’s like saying, “The universe is merely enormous.” The implication is that one of these “little guys in tweed suits” just pulled General Relativity or Evolution through Natural Selection out of his ass one day and said, “Sure, that’s my theory!”
Idiots.
I think the larger problem is not that people can’t regurgitate rote-memorized facts, such as “It takes one year for the Earth to make one complete orbit around the Sun”, nor is it that the average citizen can’t name a single scientist worthy of admiration. The larger problem is that the average citizen does not understand and use the process of science in his or her daily life. That’s what’s sad and depressing. That’s what’s making this country a fourth-rate banana republic.
What’s to blame for this sad state of affairs? How did we get to this point?
Well, I’m fairly confident that the practitioners of science are not directly to blame.
No, I think we can confidently, squarely, and securely rest the blame for this on parents who put more stock in religious faith than in rationality, logic, and the natural world around them.
Again, I point the reader to Mike Judge’s fine film for study materials.