Study Highlights Gap Between Views of Scientists and the Public 670
ZeroSerenity was one of many to write with news of a survey from the Pew Research Center which sought to find out how Americans feel about science and contrast that with the opinions of actual scientists. The study showed that "nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but just a third of the public does. And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." 27% of the respondents said that the advances of the US in science are its greatest achievement, down from 44% ten years ago. The study is lengthy, and it contains many more interesting tidbits. For example: scientists decry the level of media coverage given to science, and they also think research funding has too much influence on study results. 32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:5, Informative)
And if we also look at global warming with the same critical eye, can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
The story is about science but English is still important. The statement in the fine summary (Way too lazy to RTFA before coffee) says that scientists believe that humans are warming the earth, it doesn't say humans are the only thing warming the earth.
I'm not a global climate change denier. There is definitely something going on. Whether it is caused by humans or not, it doesn't really seem to matter.
FAIL! Just looking at CO2 alone, humans put somewhere between twice and an order of magnitude more CO2 into the atmosphere than volcanism. Since it's easy to see using physics that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and we KNOW that CO2 released from volcanism is a significant heater (we can observe the localized effects intensely) then we KNOW that humans are a significant source of CO2, let alone all the other things that we make that nature never will.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, for fuck's sake.
1. We, humans, are pumping over 27 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.
2. A corresponding increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration has been observed.
3. The interaction of CO2 with IR radiation is well-established and well-understood by anyone with an understanding of simple chemistry.
Which point, exactly, is in dispute?
Re:flat (Score:3, Informative)
No they didn't. Catholicism was the major driver behind geocentrism, and no-one with any sense ever believed the earth was flat.
"scientists" are from liberal think tank (Score:3, Informative)
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll. Anyone that wants to fork over $99 can join the AACS, including kindergarten teachers. Would you call the opinion of a kindergarten teacher the opinion of a scientist? The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization, so it's no surprise that 55% say they are Democrats.
Perhaps Pew could not do their research on such a decidedly biased sample to begin with -- but I suppose that is asking too much these days.
Re:flat (Score:1, Informative)
BTW, the general gist of TFA can correctly be summarized as "average modern human still a superstitious boob, status quo maintained".
Define "scientist" (Score:3, Informative)
The "Pew Research Center" canvassed the membership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS publishes the Science journal which has a distinctly liberal bias.
Note carefully: I'm not saying that's a bad thing. However, it means that the sample is biased. I'm actually surprised that as many as 6% of respondents identified themselves as Republicans.
Re:flat (Score:5, Informative)
This is just plain wrong. Even the ancient greeks knew that the earth was spherical. This has been the dominant scientific position for a long time. The wikipedia article on it is quite good flat earth [wikipedia.org].
Re:flat (Score:3, Informative)
Eratosthenes calculated the radius of the earth back then in 240 BCE, thats long before science as we know it today even existed.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:5, Informative)
and yet the world has cooled over the last 10 years so one of your assumptions is wrong. Which one is it?
Alternatively, you're wrong. NASA's figures [nasa.gov] says you are.
I can spot more than five decades of supposed cooling during the 20th century as per you definition, but as you can clearly see the overall trend is not cooling.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:5, Informative)
Citation please.
First Google Result [justfuckinggoogleit.com]: Volcanic Gases and Their Effects [usgs.gov]. Quotation follows: Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002) Hope that helps... lazy asshole.
Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll
I looked to find this "aacs" you refer to. I came up with several organizations:
None of those organizations seem particularly scientific to me. Perhaps you meant the AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Sciences [aaas]. And if we look at their membership requirements for the US [aaas.org] we'll see that only students can sign up for full membership at $99 per year. A K-12 teacher would pay $146, the same as the professional rate, though they do have a low-frills option at $99.
The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization
Not sure where you got their goals from, but we'll read their website: [aaas.org]
The same page continues on with some broad goals:
That doesn't really seem particularly liberal or conservative from a political standpoint, unless conservatives have a decidedly anti-science-education standpoint.
religion is not where the truth is (Score:4, Informative)
So here's the thing: We have 46 chromosomes. Our nearest great ape relatives have 48. On the surface, it looks like we must have lost two. But that's actually a huge problem. Made up of organized packs of DNA and proteins, chromosomes don't just up and vanish. In fact, it's doubtful any primate could survive a mutation that simply deleted a pair of chromosomes. That's because chromosomes are to the human body what instruction sheets are to inexpensive, flat-pack furniture. If you're missing one screw, you can still put that bookcase together pretty easily. But if the how-to guide suddenly jumps from page 1 (take plywood panels out of box) to page 5 (enjoy bookcase!), you're likely to end up missing something pretty vital. All this left scientists with a thorny dilemma: How could we have a common ancestor with great apes, but fewer chromosomes?
Turns out: The chromosomes aren't missing at all. Genetic investigators caught the first whiff of the prodigal chromosomes' scent in 1982. That year, a paper published in the journal Science described a very funny phenomenon. Researchers knew all chromosomes had distinctive signatures; patterns of DNA sequences that can be reliably found in specific spots, including in the center and on the ends. These end-cap sequences are called telomeres. Telomeres are like the little plastic tips that keep your shoelaces from unravelling. They protect the ends of chromosomes and hold things together. Given that important function, you wouldn't expect to find telomeres hanging out on other parts of the chromosome. But that's exactly what the 1982 study reported. Looking at human chromosome 2, the scientists found telomeres snuggled up against the centromere (the central sequence). What's more, these out-of-place human telomeres were strikingly similar to telomeres that can be found, in their proper location, on two great ape chromosomes.
This evidence laid the groundwork for a brilliant discovery. Rather than falling apart, the two missing chromosomes had fused together. Their format changed, but they didn't lose any information, so the mutation wasn't deadly. Instead, scientists now think, the fusion made it difficult for our ancestors to mate with the ancestors of chimpanzees, leading our two species to strike out alone. In the two decades since the original study, more evidence has surfaced backing this up, which leads us to 2005, when the chimpanzee genome was sequenced around the same time that the National Human Genome Research Institute published a detailed survey of human chromosome 2. We can now see extra centromeres in chromosome 2 and trace how its genes neatly line up with those on chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13. It's a great example of evidence supporting the common descent of man and ape. [EOF]
So all you christians are wack thinking some imaginary god did it.
Serious problem with this Pew poll (Score:3, Informative)
The Half Sigma [halfsigma.com] blog points out a serious flaw in the design of this poll...
There is a Pew research study purporting to poll "scientists." The question I immediately want answered is, what's a "scientist?" The answer, as far as Pew is concerned, is anyone who is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [aaas.org].
The AAAS is a liberal organization with stated goals such as "Increase diversity in the scientific community," "Use science to advance human rights" (sometimes in collaboration with leftist-sympathizing Amnesty International), "Sustainable Development" and "Women's Collaboration".
You don't in any way have to be a real scientist to be a member of this organization. All you need to do is send them $146. School teachers are especially encouraged to join, and no one should confuse a grade K-12 school teacher with a real scientist.
Re:Who? (Score:3, Informative)
The organization he's referring to is the American Association of Concerned Scientists -- which is not the organization used in TFA, but is an open-membership, left-leaning organization of scientists.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:2, Informative)
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:3, Informative)
So you progress to belittling. Right down the checklist of pseudo-think. And very mature.
You're right to criticize the predominant view of "critical thinking," since most of what goes by that name is not critical thinking, but pattern matching.
Setting that aside however (as it is a side-issue I have no desire to spend twenty posts digressing on) there is no valid DEDUCTIVE logical argument which goes from: Smart person says A, to: A must be true.
There is an INDUCTIVE argument which states that: Person A is often correct, so I may presume him to be so now.
However, inductive arguments are not proof (all arguments from correlation are inherently inductive--hence the claim correlation!=causation, because arguments from correlation cannot PROVE anything). Moreover in this case, claiming person A to often be correct is assuming facts not in evidence. On the contrary, I would assert that a scientist is NEVER absolutely correct (by the definition of scientific theories which are only falsifiable--and almost always falsified eventually in one aspect or another, never provable), except by blind luck.
The nature of science is such that it is an epistemology, and in that epistemology the only things that are regarded as true are those which can be concluded a posteriori without doubt from a set of assumptions and facts (the only things which qualify as facts are reproducible observations, and not the interpretations of those observations). EVERYTHING else is tentative.
Treating the results of any inductive argument as definitive (rather than tentative) is inherently unscientific. So, back to my original point: If you see this as a comforting sort of validation that you are right, then you aren't one of the most highly educated men and women.
The epistemology of science is a sort of radical skeptical empiricism--nothing is known to be true except what can be conclusively shown a posteriori from facts (reproducible observations). Everything else is tentative, and subject to skepticism. Your attitude childishly belittles that very epistemology, while trying to cite it as a vindication of your own beliefs. It'd be amusing if it wasn't so sad that this is exactly how most of the population approaches science.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:3, Informative)
The ice has stopped melting. You need to keep up with current events.
No, it hasn't [nsidc.org]. But if in the coming decade it will stop melting [bbc.co.uk], I'm sure that will be spun by some media as "there is no global warming, the north pole is'nt even melting anymore!" ;-)
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't even comment on the lack of citations. Your argument is purely an emotional one: we are emitting ${BIGNUMBER} of CO2, thus, we must be responsible for global warming.
This is equivalent to the long debunked denier argument: volcanoes emit ${BIGNUMBER} of CO2 thus we are not responsible for global warming.
The argument you probably meant to make, which is still unrigorous, unscientific and totally unreferenced, but is at least not meaningless is:
1) We, humans, are pumping a globally significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.
2) A corresponding increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration has been observed.
3) The interaction of CO2 with IR radiation is well-established and well-understood by anyone with an understanding of simple chemistry.
Alternately, you could keep your (1) and change (2) to:
2) A corresponding significant increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration has been observed.
My point is that your original argument uses the same impressively-large-sounding-number-with-no-context emotional appeal that is the mainstay of anti-scientific arguments from intelligent design to global warming deniers.
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:3, Informative)
That most highly educated men and women of science and reason are liberals. If you're a liberal like me...
Wow, biased much?
The Slashdot community prides itself on things like understanding statistics - so let's try to understand this one a little more objectively.
This article is media hype piece, about a study by an opinion polling group, asking questions about topics that are scientific in nature but tend to have political spin put on them every day.
I submit to you that by itself, the 55% statistic means *nothing*. Here's why.
If this were a scientific study instead of a public opinion survey, Slashdot would be ripping that number apart because the comparison is extremely non-scientific. For instance, compare scientists vs non-scientists by level of education. I strongly suspect that you'd find that the distribution of political orientation for those with an advanced degree was very similar between the science and non-science groups. Whereas you won't find any 'scientists' with only a high school education - you can't go into the sciences without at least a bachelors degree, and that will usually land you a lab tech position.
From there, you need to start comparing how each of the various demographics feels about politically charged scientific issues. But those statistics, too, are useless without understanding the political situation and correcting for education levels, etc.
This is a 'social sciences' sort of study, and its findings deserve to be scrutinized just as much as any other, because it suffers all the same sort of flaws as the vast majority of those sorts of studies. Do not be blinded by the fact that it deals with physical science topics.
This study, and the parent comment, show that you don't even have to lie with statistics. Just publish some crappy numbers with no real statistical rigor applied to them. If the numbers are sensational, or even leading, other people will do the job for you.
1. The majority of scientists are liberals.
2. I am a liberal.
3. By (1) and (2), I am like a scientist.
4. Scientists are always right.
5. By (3) and (4), I am right about every opinion I have.
6. We disagree.
7. By (5) and (6), you are wrong.
QED? Not so much.
Re:Serious problem with this Pew poll (Score:3, Informative)
You don't in any way have to be a real scientist to be a member of this organization. All you need to do is send them $146. School teachers are especially encouraged to join, and no one should confuse a grade K-12 school teacher with a real scientist.
It's interesting that you take another blog as the gospel here. Could it be that you want this study to be flawed, so you're looking for any tenuous excuse to discredit the methodology? I've seen this same argument repeated here numerous time. Did none of you bother to actually look at the study methodology? It specifically excluded AAAS members that were primary and secondary level educators.
The AAAS is a liberal organization with stated goals such as "Increase diversity in the scientific community," "Use science to advance human rights" (sometimes in collaboration with leftist-sympathizing Amnesty International), "Sustainable Development" and "Women's Collaboration".
I challenge you to support your claims. You have several quoted items there, but I sure don't see those quotes on the AAAS Website, so where are they from? The closest thing I see is the 6th of their stated goals which is "Strengthen and diversify the science and technology workforce;" which maybe you read as some sort of affirmative action or something, but which seems to be a practical goal, not a liberal agenda, to me. Diversity is a kind of strength, providing flexibility and range for organizations. Finally, although I don't see it listed as an AAAS goal, since when is advancing human rights a liberal agenda? I thought both liberal and conservative ends of the political spectrum were human rights advocates.
Re:reality is librul (Score:3, Informative)
Re:reality is librul (Score:3, Informative)
That should be "scientific research". The research line in the graph is generally the science. The development line is generally DoD projects, which are have been decreasing ever since the cold war ended.
Re:reality is librul (Score:4, Informative)
The Pew Research Center has little to do with reality.
How they choose to define "scientist" is relevant. That is, the population being sampled is one of the factors in what the results are. I'm guessing they oversampled university employees and people who receive government grants, who tend to be democrats, and undersampled people who use scientific method in their work, such as farmers.
According to the linked study, they used a sample of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and excluded those who resided outside the USA or whose membership was based on being primary or secondary level educators. Roughly half were in biological or medical fields, with the remainder in physical or earth sciences. http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1554 [people-press.org]
Re:55% say they are Democrats (Score:3, Informative)
Antarctic ice has increased, but only very very slightly compared to the immense loss of ice in the north (which has a larger impact on overall global climate). The increase in ice in the south is actually an expected result of overall warming, since it increases precipitation (Antarctica is very dry and the cold temperatures prevents the air from holding much precipitation).
And scientists aren't just pointing to the melting ice. That's just the most glaring observation that the climate is changing. There's petabytes of data, both modeling results and observations that show the climate is warming and within the bounds of prediction.
The IPCC report contradicts your statement that many scientists say what were adding is not having an effect. We're outputing orders of magnitude more than volcanoes, and the system has no way to immediately absorb the excess. Atmospheric CO2 levels are approaching 400 ppm, a level never before seen within the last million years.
We ARE having an impact, and we will have to deal with the consequences both good an bad. It's not going to be the end of the world, but only someone naive would believe that we are not impacting the climate in any significant way. Anyone who thinks we can't impact our environment on a large scale obviously never heard of acid rain and the ozone hole.
~X~
Re:reality is librul (Score:2, Informative)
Subtract military R&D from that, and you'll see that the Bush administration literally gutted the budgets of all of the major research labs across the country.
Re:reality is librul (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed, I had wondered about that for a long time — how such smart people can be so dumb. But the cause finally occurred to me — professors are idealists. This allows them into the same comfortable reality-distortion field as Leftists. Personally, I am a Centrist, which IS the reality zone on the political spectrum.
But they're not. If anything, professors teaching subjects relevant to government (Economics, political science, government, and history) tend to be moderate-leaning conservatives. (Any current students or recent grads are free to chime in and confirm/deny this)
Us physicists and chemists could generally care less about politics, except for when a certain political party goes around decrying science in general. That tends to get on our nerves.
(It's not that we're particularly partisan either. Ask any physicist about Bill Clinton's cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider, and you'll likely hear a great deal of profanity.)
Re:reality is librul (Score:2, Informative)
Switch-off the auto pilot and spew something other than liberal talking points
the gop has for the last 20 years engaged in an antiscience crusade
The GOP has NOT engaged in any anti-science crusade. Reagan, for instance pushed SDI claiming American Scientists who created "the bomb" were fully-capable of an equally challenging task of making it obsolete, while liberals claimed it was too hard. Republicans have been pro-nuclear, and many Democrats are terrified of it. Republicans tend to like the space program (Bush#2 told NASA to build new rockets capable of moon and mars missions and had a NASA administrator with multiple science and engineering degrees) while many Democrats see NASA as a department to be cut to get money for social programs (Obama promised to gut it, and put a PR hack in charge of reviewing it; she's now been nominated to an associate admin post). There was an active political movement on the left to make a political attack using that claim and to get certain scientists in more liberal fields to claim they were being muzzled. Notice how many times a certain lefty scientist at Goddard held press briefings to claim he was being muzzled? ( I seem to recall the count at over a hundred, which has got to be some sort of record for a person who is being muzzled)
They're the party that tries to teach creationism
No, the GOP never tries to teach creationism... what it DOES do, is assert the rights of parents in communities to have control over their schools (and that includes the rights of those people in those communities to have their schools not tell johnie and suzy that science has proven their religion false). The GOP ALWAYS favored local control of schools which the rare exception of when GW Bush went off-the-rails and teamed-up with Ted Kennedy on the big-government "no child left behind" malfunction. I, for one, have no problem with the schools teaching the theory of evolution as a theory just as I have no problem with the schools teaching various economic theories as theories, and I certainly do not want the school teaching some particular religion. I consider it totally unacceptable for some elementary school teacher to denigrate ANY kid in class, and certainly not MY kid, with some of the hostile God-is-dead and your-religion-is-an-emotional-crutch rhetoric that has been pushed in some classrooms in the country who then hides behind claims of academic freedom and claims critics are "anti-science". I am equally opposed to any teacher advancing communist economic theories as facts.
They're the party that band[sic] the creation of useful stem cell lines for research.
False. The federal government had not yet formulated policies on this before Bush, and Clinton/Gore had not been funding it. Bush did not ban ANY research. What Bush DID do, was say that the federal government would fund stem cell research (unlike previous presidents whom I presume you think were all "anti-science") but NOT FUND the creation of NEW lines using discarded embryos (an act that many taxpayers consider the taking of innocent life). Bush left it to states and private interests to spend THEIR money if they so chose on such research. THERE IS NO BAN ON THE RESEARCH, Bush was just not going to take money at gunpoint from taxpayers to fund research that those taxpayers consider murder.
They're the party that denies the overwhelming evidence of man made global warming.
Sorry, but this over-simplification of a very complex issue is getting tiresome. The evidence is NOT so overwhelming; there are MANY scientists who do not buy into this and many others who do, but who think there are smarter ways to deal with it than the Al Gore way. When anybody who disagrees is called a "denier", is denied grants, is denied tenured teaching positions, is accused of being in the hip pocket of evil polluters, and is shouted-down, SCIENCE is not at work. I learned long ago, that the person with the weakest argument is usually the one who resorts to shouting and name c