Belief In Evolution Doesn't Measure Science Literacy 772
cold fjord writes: "Dan Kahan at the Yale Law School Cultural Cognition Project says, 'Because imparting basic comprehension of science in citizens is so critical to enlightened democracy, it is essential that we develop valid measures of it, so that we can assess and improve the profession of teaching science to people. ... The National Science Foundation has been engaged in the project of trying to formulate and promote such a measure for quite some time. A few years ago it came to the conclusion that the item "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals," shouldn't be included when computing "science literacy." The reason was simple: the answer people give to this question doesn't measure their comprehension of science. People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren't any more likely to get this item "correct" than those who do poorly on the remaining portions. What the NSF's evolution item does measure, researchers have concluded, is test takers' cultural identities, and in particular the centrality of religion in their lives.' Kahan also had a previous, related post on the interaction between religiosity and scientific literacy."
Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
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Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Informative)
"observation" (Score:3)
easy there...you're cutting off your nose to spite your face
we don't need to exaggerate scientific claims to counter arguments, ever...
"belief" is too complex of a human action to describe with scientific level certainty, so the notion is useless to this discussion...people "believe" things strongly yet directly contradict their beliefs with action depending on the situation...the word is not fit for comparison
no one has "observed" evolution in the same way we observe a snake molting or a comet
it's just a f
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IV fertiliztion != fsking (Score:3)
yeah...see your comment is the problem
by your definition, watching a lab tech fertilizes a human egg with sperm in a dish is the same as watching two people fsk
in another context (not evolution) your description of what constitutes "direct observation" is not proper for comparison
you're exaggerating and you ***DONT NEED TO***
it's like you're padding your resume for a job where you're the only applicant
also, the condescending tone is alienating..."just go to your local university...fruit flies!...direct obse
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You should read what "speciation" is, and then maybe you'd grasp why a single comment such as the one you replied to really does close the debate on this subject.
Unfortunately, speciation is not as simple as you make it out to be. [wikipedia.org] The fact that two animals cannot breed does not necessarily mean they are different species, and the fact that two animals CAN breed does not necessarily mean they are the same species.
I agree with globaljustin [slashdot.org] that in many cases those who seek to defend the elegant, transcendent concept of evolution against the slavering masses of religious extremists all too often stoop to the level of their opponents, using anecdote, exaggeration a
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Technically it is "a" scientific explanation, not "the" explanation. It may be the most prominent, most widely accepted etc etc. But there is no such thing as "the" explanation for anything, unless there is literally nobody who disagrees. There are a number of sub-theories within evolution for a start. "The" explanation for continents in the 19th century repudiated continental drift as bunkum. Everything is tentative.
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there is no such thing as "the" explanation for anything, unless there is literally nobody who disagrees
Even if "everyone" agrees, there is still no such thing as "the" explanation in that it is still not infallible. For example, if everyone believed in Jesus, that wouldn't make him any less fictional.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Informative)
lol... I love it when atheists say that Jesus is fictional. It's low hanging fruit to debunk since the existence of a man named Jesus who was crucified in the first century is one of the most verified humans in antiquity. Saying that Jesus is fictional is as bad as believing in geocentrism. In fact, many atheists encourage their fellow unbelievers to stop saying nonsense like "Jesus is fictional" since it is such low hanging fruit for an apologist to debunk.
Agreed. (Score:4, Informative)
For the record, my ancestors killed him a couple millennia ago. Trust me, when we kill 'em they stay dead.
Now, back to the main point - evolution is a theory, like Einstein's theory of general relativity. It's not a fact like "two plus two equals four", it's a theory. It has been tested in laboratory experiments with lower life forms and appears to have produced accurate predictions. It explains observed phenomena well and has not been contradicted by any documented observations to date. It is not accepted as scientific fact. It remains a theory.
And . . . I do believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. That theory most certainly exists. I happen to believe that it is a correct theory which explains the state of life on our planet.
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I will admit that you're correct that it is often times not an intelligent debate. It makes sense. Not because I think the divinity of Jesus is false, but rather those who are quick to debate are those who are quick to draw attention to themselves. Quite the opposite of what Jesus teaches. Now don't get me wrong. The Bible instructs Christians to be able to have a response to questions and criticisms, but I think that's very different from the Harold Campings of the world.
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Now, back to the main point - evolution is a theory, like Einstein's theory of general relativity. It's not a fact like "two plus two equals four", it's a theory. It has been tested in laboratory experiments with lower life forms and appears to have produced accurate predictions. It explains observed phenomena well and has not been contradicted by any documented observations to date. It is not accepted as scientific fact. It remains a theory.
Evolution is a fact in much the same way that the existence of gra
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus the son of God most certainly is.
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Mmmm. Gotta argue with that. I mean, it almost sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure that you are saying exactly what you meant to say.
"The" explanation, would actually be "proven beyond any possible doubt". Such proof, of course, would require a time machine, and a LOT of observation and recordings from eons past.
The fact that some "consensus" has been reached, or that no one has a reasonable argument against an explanation doesn't make it "the" explanation.
And, wouldn't it be funny as hell, if we DID send a time machine back, and as it drifted further and further back, we gathered shitloads of evidence that evolution really is real - BUT, there was also an entity at the beginning that started it all off? Then, EVERYONE would all be embarrassed! Yep, evolution is real, alright, but I've not given up on intelligent design, either.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolution says nothing about how it all started so even if there was an intelligent designer it doesn't matter as far as theory of evolution is concerned. What it does do is raise the question of where the intelligent designer came from and how it evolved.
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Various Christian churches accept evolution ... (Score:4, Informative)
Why does your faith in G*d preclude accepting Darwin's theory of evolution as valid? Genesis tells us what G*d did, not how she did it.
Various Christian denominations and churches accept evolution, accept cosmology, accept genetics, ...
Hell the Big Bang Theory was introduced by a Catholic Priest while teaching at a Catholic University.
Re:Evolution is not an Observed Phenomenon (Score:5, Informative)
The theory of evolution interprets this observed phenomenon and posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal.
"posits the completely unobserved transition between kinds of animal"
Well, no, there's no transition between "kinds of animal" really. I suppose you could say such transitions happened when different "kingdoms of life" appeared (we really have no clue how exactly that went down, just wild speculation), but not between animals. Or to put it another way, cat will not have evolutionary transition to a dog, just to a different cat. From this follows, humans, cats and dogs are just different tetrapods. Earlier tetrapods had "transitions" to cats (still tetrapod), dogs (still tetrapod) and humans (also still tetrapods).
To repeat, there is no transition between "kinds of animal" in the theory of evolution. And rest of your post kinda falls apart from this simple misunderstanding.
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I do realise this is incredibly unlikely but was trying to make the point that there's no reason a species can not become a different species.
Species evolving into new species is not incredibly unlikely, it's basically inevitable. A species evolving into another *existing* species, like some population of cats evolving to become dogs (able to breed with other dogs) genetically, that's much less likely than "incredibly unlikely", it's so unlikely it's indistinguishable from impossible.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
[..] you can believe that this particular theory is the right one [...]
This is not a belief, since I wouldn't say that I *believe* that it is the right one, no...
I would rather say that I'm convinced and that I agree with the reasoning of this theory, given the facts and using logic.
And it is by far the best, and in fact the only one that is still valid and was reinforced during a century of observations, also with predictions comforted by new observations.
There is no other theory left about evolution, and this one was remarkable for its scientific validation.
With all those facts and observations, if you still have doubts, then you must also have some about any theory, even wonder is Earth is flat or not, who knows ?
And have absolute doubt, question even reality...
You can, if you want.
BTW, "believe" might be an ambiguous word in English, like "Free" (Libre or Gratis?), this can be confusing for some people.
Do they say "believe" for "having the belief" - with faith - or just "thinking it's right and valid" - no faith needed - as it can be used casually.
Mixing the two is really confusing.
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Evolution did not stop changing and become static after Darwin, it has also "evolved" and become refined and better understood, along with lots of disagreements amongst the scientists. And yet society seems somewhat stuck with a 19th century view of evolution, albeit with some DNA handwaving thrown in.
The reason the "belief" is there is because most of the people who say they agree with the theory of evolution really don't know what that theory actually says and have not learned the science behind it. Evo
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Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Not terribly relevant in most cases: virtually nobody can personally validate, or even hit the primary sources, for more than a tiny fraction of what we collectively know. Their relationship with the rest is pretty much a belief state (though, of course, there is a very significant difference between "I believe X because recognized X experts suggest that X is the best available theory, given their understanding of the data" and "I believe X because $HOLY_BOOK says so.")
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Once you are aware of evolution, it is easy to see it in everyday existence, but you subscribe to it because the information was made available to you. "Hmmm, that makes sense. I believe that." God worshippers undergo a similar belief in information present
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And yes yes, there are loads of otherwise intelligent people who are deeply religious because of their nurturing environment. If the whole family respects and honors a belief, it can be difficult to overcomoe this early brainwashing, to the point of ignoring all Bayesian inference.
While you may have identified some segment of religious people, there is a large segment, especially falling in the "otherwise intelligent" category, that you have decided do not exist: Those people that hold their religious / spiritual beliefs because of their own subjective experience. This, in fact, is the essence of virtually every religious movement or reawakening in history (Scientology and other scams not withstanding). Sometimes people's experience is so profound they are able to guide other people
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"there is a very significant difference between "I believe X because recognized X experts suggest that X is the best available theory, given their understanding of the data" and "I believe X because $HOLY_BOOK says so."
I don't know that the difference is as epistemologically different as you make out. You believe an expert because he perhaps witnessed some experiment or gathered certain pieces of evidence, and you believe that he did so. You believe $HOLY_BOOK because it purports to be an eyewitnesses sayin
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Insightful)
>quote>I don't know that the difference is as epistemologically different as you make out.
Reproducibility and falsifiability.
Just because I don't go around reproducing every bit of science that I "believe" is true,
that doesn't suddenly make my acceptance of its truth = religious beliefs.
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There are experts on various scriptures, they are things like academic historians, philosophers, scholars in theology. Of course most of them say that the widely held interpretations of those holy books are questionable.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it doesn't. That is in no way an idea that can be attributed to Christianity. Neither is an original idea of Christian philosophers(we definitely see it discussed by Plato), nor is it directly in the bible to show a fundamental connection.
What you're doing is a pretty dumb thing: "Intuitively true thing must come from my religion, and since it's intuitively true, it must validate that religion"
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I think that is a rather limited view. It may not be a religious system of thought, but it is based on various philosophies and systems of thought. Empiricism, naturalism, and so forth are subjects of belief, like it or not. If you dig deep enough, belief is at the bottom of everything.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
You can still "believe" in true things. I fully expect the average Joe's belief in how electricity makes their lights work as substantially similar to belief in $Deity - They have no clue at all about the underlying principles at work, and just blindly repeat the same things their parents did out of indoctrinated habit.
Ask ten random people whether TVs "attract" lightning (as opposed to your antenna simply counting as the highest good conductor in the immediate area), and you'll probably weep for humanity at how many of them say "yes".
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Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, people can "believe" in science. Just as they can believe in anything else, including religion. Most people actually do that.
They hear that some scientist found out something awesome. Like, say, how a laser works. And they might use a DVD player which incidentally use a laser, without having the slightest clue just how that thing works, or what the science behind it is. For all they care, or know, it could as well work with pixie dust and magically operated by faeries.
The difference is that they have the option not to believe but to test what is scientifically produced. They can build their own laser (time, money and skill provided) and it WILL work.
It's not that easy for stuff that you can ONLY believe.
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You can try. But no matter how exactly you follow the description, your experience will very likely be very different from that of someone else.
Not so in science. Provided the description of the experiment is accurate and you follow it well enough, you WILL end up with the same result.
Science (Score:2)
Science eliminates the need for believing -- holding an unsubstantiated opinion.
Re:Science (Score:5, Insightful)
I don’t think you’ve got your definition of “believing” quite right - there’s no reason to require “belief” to be unsubstantiated. In fact we very often hear scientists say things like “I believe that [x], and here’s why”. To “believe” just means to hold something to be true.
In fact, philosophers have long defined “knowledge” as “justified true belief”. There’s lots of variations on that theme, and arguing about whether that’s a right definition - but the argument is not about the “belief” part as much as the “justified” and “true" parts.
So, it is in fact incorrect to say that science eliminates the need for believing - what it does, however, is provide reasons or justification for our beliefs.
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You can believe that evolution happened, or that we were all made by the magical sky wizard.
Just because you believe evolution is real and actually happened, you may or may not know a damn about science.
Some people do not believe evolution is a real thing or that it happened.
What part are you missing?
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Insightful)
You're probably just a random troll, but in case you're not ...
Any entity which can create the vast, complex and wondrous universe that I see around me and live in is not going to be some petty, childish idiot bent on vengeance and scaring me with bed time stories, and demanding blind obeisance to metaphor and mis-interpretation by puny humans.
If such a god exists, he/she/it/they will be capable of much broader thinking than those who claim to represent him/her/it/they.
If not, to hell with him.
Now, go put away your childish things.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you misunderstand.
Everything you think is true is something you believe. If someone says, "1+1=2," you say, "Yes, that is true." What you really mean is, "Yes, I believe that to be true." Certainly, things are true or false absent of any belief, but when we're asking about whether or not an individual thinks something is true or false, we're exactly talking about belief. We're not talking about accuracy of scientific or mathematic laws, theories, or models. We're talking about the nature of knowledge, perception, and human understanding.
Think of it this way. For thousands of years humans believed that when they saw a sunrise that the sun had revolved around the earth on a crystal sphere. That's what their knowledge of the universe told them was true, so that is what they believed, and that's what their knowledge told them they saw. That was as true to them as the truth you belive in when your knowledge tells you that the earth is held in orbit by gravity and rotates to bring the sun back into view. The fact that your knowledge might be more accurate or might have more evidence behind it is irrelevant. Your belief that it is true, or belief that it is false, or fundamental misunderstanding of what is truly going on doesn't change what's really going on. Nevertheless, knowing who agrees with your beliefs and therefore agree with what the common knowledge tells us about the universe can be valuable.
You can do the same thing with any scientific model. Consider big bang vs steady state theory. Did you know that, to this day, scientific papers are published in journals relating to the steady state model of the universe? Consider the model of the atom. We've gone from the plum pudding model, to the ring model, to the Bohr model, which is still the most commonly taught model, I believe. None of them really represnt the atom that well, of course, but people still imagine the Bohr model when you say "atom" to them. That's not what an atom actually is or looks like, but that is what people believe.
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There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, that would leave "belief" up to the opinions of the individual.
Imagine Alice and Bob are both physical anthropologists. They both agree that evolution is the parsimonious explanation for the fossil record, but Alice believes it actually happened; Bob, an evangelical Christian, thinks of it as a useful model.
We all have a number of useful models in our head we know are untrue, or rather mostly untrue. I have a number of inconsistent models of the atom in my head,
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You do realize everyone has Faith, right?
If you didn't have faith in your beliefs, then why do you even have them in the first place ??
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Yes yes, that's nice and all. Actually it's kind of a dickbag move by an antagonistic atheist with a bone to pick against the religious types and it's this sort of behavior that makes the ignorant religious get in a huff and brews an anti-science sentiment. I get the sentiment, but you're technically wrong.
People certainly "believe" in evolution.
Just the same way that you believe that 1+1=2.
You're not going to say something crazy like you DON'T believe that 1+1=2, right? Cause that's crazy talk. 1+1 obviou
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Insightful)
Scientific Theory = A model of how something works, able to make predictions.
Scientific Law = A set of equations, stating in mathematics what a Scientific Theory states in plain language.
Scientific Hypothesis = An idea of how something might work, without a way to make or test predictions. It will eventually move on to become a theory, or get shut down.
Contrast with:
Theory = An idea of how something MIGHT have happened
Law = A set of rules enforced by the police
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Disagree. What is "hypothesis testing" (a well-established element of inferential statistics) if a hypothesis is "without a way to make or test predictions" (according to you)? And other problems.
"For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it." [Wikipedia: Hypothesis]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis_test [wikipedia.org]
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Strongly disagree.
Scientific Theory: A set of equations with associated explanation in words, stating in mathematics and natural language how something works, able to make predictions supported by observation.
Scientific Law: Outdated term for a particularly well-tested Theory. Not used outside of historical naming due to the difficulty in defining "particularly well-tested".
Scientific Hypothesis: An idea of how something might work, with a way to make or test predictions. If its predictions are tested and s
No. "Theory" is not "hypothesis". (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. "Theory" is not "hypothesis". (Score:4, Funny)
Or the theory of Relativity, which you use every time you use a GPS. Without Relativistic corrections, the whole system would drift to the point of uselessness within six hours.
Crap! Thanks dude... now I have to spend time looking that up instead of working.
Re:Wait a sec (Score:4, Insightful)
Selection of genetic traits over generations based on fitness/utility is a fact, not a theory. This process has been directly observed over time in the wild in various species, and is the entire foundation for selective breeding activities undertaken by humans for crop and livestock improvement over several thousand years. By pushing layman's version of the term "theory" and framing evolution as a single claim, you do a gross disservice to the scientific process and truth. Please educate yourself [wikipedia.org], as the topic covers a tad more in breadth and depth than you're implying.
It's worth mentioning that special relativity [wikipedia.org] is a theory, and yet mass-energy equivalence [wikipedia.org] is a demonstrated fact. Again, please stop diluting the discourse.
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I'm not trying to sell you anything. In fact, you just reinforced my point. Recognition of and debate on the specific mechanisms and historical data associated with a theory are critical to the process of scientific examination. Abusing the word "theory" to the point that the implication becomes minimization or outright dismissal is at best a poorly executed deflection, as handily demonstrated by the GP.
Again, thank you for supporting proper open discourse via notation of avenues for further research and de
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Hint: biologists don't differentiate between "micro" and "macro" evolution, as they are the same things on different scales. If you hear someone using those terms without explaining this, they are not arguing from science, which is to be avoided when discussing scientific principles.
What the GP said was correct - genetic traits which are not entirely disadvantageous will be more likely to pass on to further generations than those which are disadvantageous. Couple that with the fact that genetic mutations
Re:Wait a sec (Score:5, Insightful)
it has not been promoted to the level of law (in the sense of the law of gravity or the law of thermodynamics
The funny thing is, we know less about gravity than we do about evolution.
We know that there is something that causes attraction between objects and can make predictions based on our observations of that effect, but we can't explain with any certainty how it actually works or why it exists. There are a variety of competing theories [wikipedia.org], but we don't have enough evidence to determine if any of them is even close to correct.
Thanks to the development agriculture, selective breeding, the sacrifice of billions of fruit flies and the
abundance of fossil evidence we've uncovered, we actually understand evolution far better than we understand gravity.
The thing is... it's a lot harder to deny the existence of gravity when someone can throw you off a cliff to prove it.
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You're confused about fundamental vs. derived theories in science. As another poster said, when you start asking questions like why do natural laws exist?, "this is not the realm of science": it's philosophy.
We can explain evolution in terms of more fundamental mechanisms: selection, mutation, etc. With gravity, there is (currently) no underlying theory. And if we found one, you'd just ask why that theory exists. At some point, you hit the bottom, and it doesn't mean you understand the theory "less",
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Your response makes no sense.
Science involves making observations, but making observations is not science (otherwise every guy at the beach would be a scientist).
Not being able to fully explain how something works, on the other hand, is where science starts. When we start questioning what we've observed, developing theories to explain it and gathering evidence to support/disprove those theories... that's science.
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Maybe it doesn't measure science literacy (Score:5, Insightful)
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
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Re:Maybe it doesn't measure science literacy (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not really faith. I, coming from a mathematics background, would rather call it interpolation. You have a few findings that you have, these are (more or less) well dated and they tell you some kind of timeline. What you do now is fill in the blanks. As science progresses and we find more, fewer blanks need filling, and some of the stuff that people filled in will have to be erased and reworked because what we found contradicts what they envisioned.
That's the main difference between a scientific and a faith based system, not so much the steps "research" is done, but rather their order.
Science goes
observation of nature
pondering of meaning
formulation of theory
more observation of nature
adjustment of theory
Religion goes
creation of holy text (aka "truth")
observation of nature
pondering how observation can be interpreted to fit holy text
more observation of nature
discarding observations that don't fit holy text
The main difference is that science adjusts its theory to fit the findings, religion accepts or rejects the discoveries depending on whether they fit into the holy scriptures.
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Very true and that makes people uncomfortable (Score:3, Insightful)
Short of actually being able to understand and verify every single piece of data that has gone into proving it - like it or not you take it on faith. Faith is a measure of trust in your sources in the same way that people respond differently to news from different outlets. I can walk outside and prove gravity. I cannot do the same with evolution.
The basic fact of most information we receive on a daily basis is that we trust it until we have a reason to question it. Evolution has zero effect on the daily liv
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That's really nothing to be embarrassed about: if one wants to live a decent life -- or just live, really --one has to accept much more as known by science than one can comprehend to any meaningful degree.
What is embarrassing, though, is for those who don't understand something to claim that their "belief" in it demonstrates that they have a greater comprehension of science than someone who says he or she "doesn't" believe it.
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But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
No it doesn't. If you want to measure something like that, you take a poll on something like that. Here are some recent figures [harrisinteractive.com]:
74% of Americans say they believe in God, 72% believe in miracles, 68% believe in heaven and angels, 65% believe in the resurrection of Jesus, 58% believe in the devil, 57% believe in the Virgin birth, etc.
Meanwhile, the same poll found only 29% say they "don't believe in" evolution, and 25% "aren't sure." If you combine those responses, you still only get to 54%, which is l
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Statistics are very dependent on how you ask, what you ask, and what ELSE you ask. If they really asked the whole bunch in the same survey (i.e. UFOs, miracles, astrology, witchcraft, etc), I don't doubt that you'd get a higher turnout of people believing in god than when simply only asking that question. This is due to some psychological effect where people don't want to give one "kind" of answer to a whole survey (people don't like to say "yes" or "no" to every question asked). I'd take that whole thing w
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But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
I think this is a flawed perception of how people think. Religious people's thinking is the product of cultural and familial influences that are proven to have great impact on the way one perceives the world. Its not as simple as "want to put" a wizard in as an explanation, like its some multiple choice decision. Its more like a lens through which things are viewed. Their choices are not the same as yours.
I know some firmly religious people that are off the charts smart. I'm not religious, but I don't t
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Not completely accepting one scientific theory, does NOT imply that you default to supernatural explanations...
Hell, how did intelligent people *LIVE* before Darwin came along? Did their heads explode when someone asked them how humans came to exist? Or was Darwin the first atheist EVER, and scientists came to exist only after he was born?
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Problem is, science doesn't need the wizard for its explanation. That's the main problem the religious have with the whole deal, from big bang to evolution.
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Lacking evidence to suggest the existence of a wizard, if science is exploring how a wizard did it, it has ceased to be science.
For the same reason that science doesn't start with the explanation that 16 drunken squirrels salsa dancing in yellow thong bikinis were the cause of the universe, and then try to explain how the hell that happened.
Science doesn't start with a premise that something external and
From many points of data (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who firmly believe that a "God" was involved in the universe/mankind, were less likely to score at the upper tier [culturalcognition.net] of scientific knowledge. Everyone else drew mixed results.
I also like this quote here:
Nevertheless, the subgroup of such students who did back away from two particular beliefs hostile to naturalistic evolution (that the “living world is controlled by a force greater than humans” and that “all events in nature occur as part of a predetermined master plan”) consisted of the students who scored the lowest in critical reasoning skills.
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The point of a multi-question test is that the questions should measure different things - they won't all necessarily correlate well with each other. Measuring someone's inclination to believe religion over science would seem to be a valuable part of assessing their scientific literacy.
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Um, you've just ignored the data in front of you - the data collected shows no correlation between "someone's inclination to believe religion over science" (ie their position on the evolution v creationism debate) and scientific literacy. There is no value in that measurement - it has no predictive power of the scientific literacy.
Re:From many points of data (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you've misrepresented the data. Right in the summary:
"People who score at or near the top on the remaining portions of the test aren't any more likely to get this item "correct" than those who do poorly on the remaining portions."
"What the NSF's evolution item does measure, researchers have concluded, is test takers' cultural identities, and in particular the centrality of religion in their lives."
They're trying to measure "scientific literacy" (which is a stupid term). The answers to the evolution question don't correlate with the answers to the other questions because it's measuring something different. They've concluded it's measuring people's inclination to believe in religion, presumably over science. That would seem to be an important factor in scientific literacy, so the evolution question is actually capturing something that is missed by the other questions.
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Yes, isn't believing in the truth of something that has been rigorously proved part of scientific literacy?
What would happen if the ones that don't believe humans evolved were forced to deal with some of the unequivocal data that backs it up, like genetics, would they still deny it and cause practical problems?
Further it raises the question as to who is trying to change the test, and why ;)
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The main difference, independent of how "well" religious vs. non-religious people scored, would probably be how they accept those "scientific facts".
I'm inclined to think that a non-religious person is more inclined to doubt what is presented to them if they see some kind of discrepancy with their own findings and hence more likely to make new discoveries.
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Looking at the actual data ( http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/... [nsf.gov] ), it seems that answering the question in TFS with true is very much correlated positively with 'verbal ability', 'family income', 'formal education', 'science mathematics education', 'trend factual knowledge of science scale' (whatever that may be) and negatively with 'age'.
The same pattern is visible in the other questions, just more pronounced.
Considering the retarded way the 'uncorrelated' questions were posed, I can imagine that respondent
Why would it? (Score:2)
A person can "believe" in evolution or general relativity or the Higgs boson the same way they can believe in Zeus or Jesus or the Easter Bunny. In the former set of cases, they hold true beliefs entirely by coincidence, with no more solid basis than those who adhere to the latter set.
The difference between the two domains of belief comes from the demonstrability of the former as viable hypo
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Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
What is embarrassing, though, is for those who don't understand something to claim that their "belief" in it demonstrates that they have a greater comprehension of science than someone who says he or she "doesn't" believe it.
I've witnessed and do witness over and over. Whether it's about evolution, dark matter, global warming, etc. It's just a basic fallacy of human nature. I know something you don't (even though I'm not privy to a complete understanding of how it works) therefore I must be smarter than you and you must be dumb... but don't you dare challenge me any questions on it because I will get super pissed. Kind of the applied definition of "ignorance" in action.
Or in other words, believing in science others have painstakingly proven for you is not an automatic cure for ignorance. When you put it that way, it's common sense isn't it?
Science literacy sans the philosophy of science? (Score:2)
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Willfull blindness (Score:5, Interesting)
What this says is people will accept science except where they feel it contradicts with their beliefs.
Gravity - ok
Electricity - ok
Evolution - nope
I think this says it all. Even with the one nope they have proven themselves not to be scientifically literate. They have proven that they have a rational space that cannot be challenged by science. No matter how rational you might otherwise be if there is a think-space where you refuse to be rational you are at root irrational.
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I could also go to a 3 year old and ask him, the main difference would probably be that his explanation is very likely more entertaining.
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The belief of a creation event and the existence of evolution are not mutually exclusive.
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Indeed
Science doesn't disprove "Creation" although scientific evidence does suggest that the event of Creation was 13 and a bit billion years ago.
And the fossil evidence suggests that life on this planet has evolved over the last couple of billion years or so.
But both of those facts are contrary to the words of Genesis. So many Bible literalists refuse to acknowledge the facts.
Its easy enough to prove that the universe was around for way longer than 6,000 to 10,000 years, just look at other galaxies that ar
Re:Disbelief in evolution=proof of science illiter (Score:4, Interesting)
Literally or figuratively. The only way they can't work together is if you believe the Bible is a literal document. If you have any basic ability to read literature as symbolism you can easily see the creationist story as a story of evolution. If you believe everything happened in six literal 24 hour days not so much so.
Again society is pitted against literalists with no imagination and those that can think beyond the rigid parallel lines. It's always the same thing.
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That's correct, belief in God does not measure biblical literacy. A good many atheists are very well acquainted with the bible, and can offer cogent exegesis of its contents, even if they don't believe a word of it.
Re:Here's an inconvenient question (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, I couldn't let this one go. It's not just 'a large number'. It's the same DNA code across all organisms we know of. There are a couple of exceptions - but they edit the code back to the 'standard' one before the proteins are transcribed.
And the pattern of 'common DNA' confirms common descent to a ridonkulous degree [talkorigins.org].
Books used to be copied by scribes, and (despite a lot of care) sometimes typos would be introduced. Later scribes, making copies of copies, would introduce other typos. It's possible to look at the existing copies and put them into a 'family tree'. "These copies have this typo, but not that one; this other group has yet another typo, though three of them have a newer typo as well, not seen elsewhere..." This is not controversial at all when dealing with books, including the Bible.
Now, this process of copy-with-modification naturally produces 'family trees', nested groups. When we look at life, we find such nested groups. No lizards with fur or nipples, no mammals with feathers, etc. Living things (at least, multicellular ones, see below) fit into a grouped hierarchy. This has been solidly recognized for over a thousand years, and systematized for centuries. It was one of the clues that led Darwin to propose evolution. (Little-known fact: Linnaeus, who invented the "kingdom, phyla, genus, species, etc." classification scheme for living things, tried to do the same thing for minerals. But minerals don't form from copy-with-modification, and a 'nested hierarchy' just didn't work and never caught on.)
Today, more than a century later, we find another tree, one Darwin never suspected - that of DNA. This really is a 'text' being copied with rare typos. And, as expected, it also forms a family tree, a nested hierarchy. And, with very very few surprises, it's the same tree that was derived from looking at physical traits.
It didn't have to be that way. Even very critical genes for life - like that of cytochrome C - have a few neutral variations, minor mutations that don't affect its function. (Genetic sequences for cytochrome C differ by up to 60% across species.) Wheat engineered to use the mouse form of cytochrome C grows just fine. But we find a tree of mutations that fits evolution precisely, instead of some other tree. (Imagine if a tree derived from bookbinding technology - "this guy used this kind of glue, but this other bookbinder used a different glue..." - conflicted with a tree that was derived from typos in the text of the books. We'd know at least one tree and maybe both were wrong.)
The details of these trees are very specific and very, very numerous. There are billions of quadrillions of possible trees... and yet the two that we see (DNA and morphology) happen to very precisely match. This is either a staggering coincidence, or a Creator deliberately arranged it in a misleading manner, or... universal common ancestry is actually true.
(Single-celled organisms are much more 'promiscuous' in their reproduction and spread genes willy-nilly without respect for straightforward inheritance. With single-celled creatures, it looks more like a 'web' of life than a 'tree'. But even if the tree of life has tangled roots, it's still very definitely a tree when it comes to multicellular life. Which is the area that people opposed to evolution most worry about anyway.)