"The truth can be made up, if you know how."
~Lily Tomlin, performing as Edith Anne
My friend Em posted this video to my Facebook wall, and I found that I had more to say about it than would lend itself to a short comment, so my response is below.
I applaud AngryLittleGirl's effort to encourage logical thinking, and she reveals her balanced perspective by using both scientific claims as well as religious ones. She's right: all results and statements of fact put into some claim on a label, or an official announcement should be checked; and that this one should be too. The statistic cited ("98% of Americans are scientifically illiterate") was based on outdated (but accurate) data and while the numbers are still high, it is not 98% anymore. I'm sure her professor was trying to communicate the fact that scientific knowledge is sorely lacking, but he did so by citing an outdated though not-inaccurate resource. And because a statement can be true in some cases and false in another, he should have checked new data, and used specific examples in the way he phrased that statement. Like, "49% of Americans don't know that the Earth revolves around the sun." There are many versions and disciplines of scientific knowledge, and blanket statements like the one her Professor made, are, indeed, counterproductive, and do nothing to advance the very real benefits of understanding science and the knowledge we have gleaned from it.The New York Times interviewed Dr. Jon D. Miller, "political scientist who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at the medical school," and who "studies how much Americans know about science and what they think about it."
His findings are not encouraging....
While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process..
...Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century..."
Dr. Miller also said, "seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun ONCE A DAY." Considering that we now know what the facts are regarding the movement and position of planets in our solar system, this statistic is disturbing in its own right. According to Literacy News,
- "64 per cent of people questioned for a recent poll said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution in schools
- 38 per cent favored replacing evolution with creationism.
- 80 per cent of Americans surveyed by the CNN TV news network believe that their government is hiding evidence of the existence of space aliens.
- 70 per cent believe it likely that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
- 40 per cent of Americans believe in the “endtimes”, according to a survey carried out in 2002. Of those believers, almost half thought this would occur in their lifetime with a return of Jesus from heaven.
- The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
- The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy
- 55% of Americans believed they’ve been assisted by “guardian angels”
is America really #1…or is that just propaganda?" [1]
Kudos to AngryLittleGirl for pointing out the things she did in her video, as I am a strong proponent of truth, and a strong opponent of the falsehoods so often found in mainstream culture, to include medicine, general science and religiosity.
Even when science clarifies our understanding, it is often rejected by the American public. The American Dialect Society chose "Plutoed" a neologism, as their word of the year in 2006. "I was plutoed" became a colloquialism springing from the retraction of Pluto's status as the 9th planet in our solar system. It rendered the mobiles above our baby cribs outdated, and parents everywhere were then charged with snapping Pluto from the danglous collection. [2] Some mobiles ceased to hang properly and became lopsided, and this was simply unacceptable. Underlying this sarcasm is the point that when science recognizes an erroneous conclusion, they adjust the data accordingly, and we should not become so overly attached to ideas that when new information contradicts it, we come unglued and seek to protest it in favor of maintaining the beloved status quo.
According to Authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kitshenbaum, in their book "UnscientificAmerica: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future,"
Even when science clarifies our understanding, it is often rejected by the American public. The American Dialect Society chose "Plutoed" a neologism, as their word of the year in 2006. "I was plutoed" became a colloquialism springing from the retraction of Pluto's status as the 9th planet in our solar system. It rendered the mobiles above our baby cribs outdated, and parents everywhere were then charged with snapping Pluto from the danglous collection. [2] Some mobiles ceased to hang properly and became lopsided, and this was simply unacceptable. Underlying this sarcasm is the point that when science recognizes an erroneous conclusion, they adjust the data accordingly, and we should not become so overly attached to ideas that when new information contradicts it, we come unglued and seek to protest it in favor of maintaining the beloved status quo.
According to Authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kitshenbaum, in their book "UnscientificAmerica: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future,"
"The problem isn't merely the dramatic cultural gap between scientists and the broader American public. It's the way this disconnect becomes self-reinforcing, even magnified, when it resurfaces in key sectors of society that powerfully shape the way we think, and where science ought to have far more influence than it actually does—in politics, in the news media, in the entertainment industry, and in the religious community. Consider:
In the political arena from 2001 through 2008, we saw the United States governed by an administration widely denounced for a disdain of science literally unprecedented in modern American history. Judged next to this staggering low, the Obama administration gives reason for hope. But science continues to occupy a ghettoized section of the political arena, one that few elected officials really understand or prioritize. Too many politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, fail to see the underlying role of science in most of the issues they address, even though it is nearly always present. In fact, politicians tend to be leery of seeming too scientifically savvy: There's the danger of coming off as an Adlai Stevenson egghead.
We're still struggling with the problem that historian Richard Hofstadter outlined in his classic 1962 work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which documented how the disdain of intellectuals had become such a powerful fixture of American culture. The problem is particularly acute when it comes to scientists, and has been to varying degrees since our nation's inception: We've even rewritten the biography of one of our most cherished founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, to recast him as a tinkering everyman, rather than a deep-thinking scientist of the first rank. Alexis De Tocqueville similarly remarked upon Americans' interest in the practical, but not so much the theoretical, side of science—the goods delivered at the end, rather than the intellectual challenges and questioning encountered along the way. For a very, very long time, American scientists have found themselves pitted against our businesslike, can-do attitudes as well as our piety. When John McCain and Sarah Palin made fun of research on fruit flies and grizzly bears on the 2008 campaign trail, they were appealing to precisely this anti-intellectual strand in the American character. They thought they'd score points that way, and probably they did.
And if you think politicians are bad, let's turn to the traditional news media, where attention to science is in steep decline. A 2008 analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that if you sit down to watch five hours of cable news, you will probably only see one minute's worth of coverage devoted to science and technology—compared with 10 minutes of celebrity and entertainment content, 12 minutes of accidents and disasters, and “26 minutes or more” of crime. From 1989 to 2005, meanwhile, the number of newspapers featuring weekly science or science-related sections shrank by nearly two-thirds, from 95 to 34. And since then both trends have continued or perhaps even accelerated: In 2008 the esteemed Washington Post killed its science page and CNN laid off its entire science, technology, and environment unit.
As a result of this upheaval, what we might broadly call science communication—the always problematic bridge between the experts and everybody else—is in a state of crisis. For even as business-driven cutbacks the “old” media are killing science content, the “new” media are probably hurting science as much as helping it. The Internet has simultaneously become the best and also the worst source of science information. Yes, you can find great science on the web; and yet you can also find the most stunning misrepresentations and distortions. Without the Internet, the modern anti-vaccination movement probably wouldn't exist, at least not in its current form. Jenny McCarthy, celebrity vaccine critic extraordinaire, is proud of her degree from the “University of Google.”
More generally, thanks to the Internet and ongoing changes in the traditional news industry, we increasingly live in an oversaturated media environment in which citizens happily pick and chose their own sources of information. This means they can simply avoid learning (or even hearing) anything meaningful about science unless they're already inclined to go looking for it—and most won't be. And they can shop online for “expertise” as easily as they can for Christmas gifts.
When we shift our gaze to another extremely powerful source of information about science—the entertainment media—we find the situation more complex but still dismaying. From Grey's Anatomy to CSI to The Day The Earth Stood Still (the Keanu Reeves version), science and technology provide fodder for many popular television and film plotlines. In fact, there appears to be a growing trend of basing stories on scientific themes, especially in the case of primetime medical dramas. But whether such entertainment depictions contribute to a science-friendly culture is less clear. Often we see little effort devoted to achieving basic scientific plausibility or getting the details right; and we simultaneously find Hollywood obsessed with paranormalist UFO and “fringe science” narratives and recurrent stories of “mad scientists” playing God. Scientists in film and television tend to be depicted as villains, geeks, or jerks. Rare indeed is the Hollywood film or scripted drama that tells a story about science that's both serious and also entertaining. That strongly affects how we think.
And then there's religion, the source of perhaps the single deepest fissure in the science-society relationship. Surveys overwhelmingly show that Americans care a great deal about faith; many scientists, by contrast, couldn't care less. There's nothing wrong with that, except that some scientists and science supporters have been driven to the point of outright combativeness by the so-called New Atheist movement, led by Sam Harris, Oxford's Richard Dawkins, and others. Meanwhile, many U.S. religious believers are just as extreme: They reject bedrock scientific findings—an entire field, evolutionary biology—because they wrongly consider such knowledge incompatible with faith. The zealots on both sides generate unending polarization, squeeze out the middle, and leave all too many Americans convinced that science poses a threat to their values and the upbringing of their children.
For all these reasons, the rift between science and mainstream American culture is growing wider and wider. Nearly a decade into the 21st century, we have strong reason to worry that the serious appreciation of science could become confined to a small group of already dedicated elites—something like eating caviar, rather than a value we all share."
Other points AngryLittleGirl made...
"Gullible is not in the dictionary" (title of her video, and statement within). This is (I can only assume and hope) a sarcasm based on the fact that you have to be gullible to believe the statement. Gullible is, of course, in the dictionary. Still another example of an erroneous statement that people believe without checking the facts. So while some pick this point out of the content and argue that she must be "retarded" as one commenter posted about her video, they are showing their own GULLIBILITY. She was making another point, lost on some of her critics.
"Airborne is not regulated by the FDA" - hopefully she was again being sarcastic, because herbal products are regulated by the FDA. It gets complicated and often convoluted, however, when the details are considered. The FDA regulates products considered drugs; the herbal supplements are marketed and labeled as "dietary supplements" which makes them a FOOD product. The criteria for the labeling and sale of these items is not the same as that for drugs. So general claims such as "glucosamine chondroitin is important for joint health" is a factual claim. However there are variables like the purity of the raw material used to make that supplement, and whether or not any particular supplement will function as well taken as a dietary supplement, as it would when garnered naturally through foods ingested. An article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology contended, "adulteration, inappropriate formulation, or lack of understanding of plant and drug interactions have led to adverse reactions that are sometimes life threatening or lethal." [3] Certain species of echinacea (the main active ingredient in Airborne) are medicinally beneficial, but this is where non-regulation by the FDA plays a role--they do not control whether or not a manufacturer uses the medicinal version, nor whether or not the preparation is handled properly to maintain those beneficial properties. And of course there are conflicting results in the way of clinical studies of the effectiveness of echinacea as a beneficial health supplement, or if it is merely useless, or even that it acts only as a placebo. Until there is more conclusive scientific evidence, either could be true.
"Airborne is not regulated by the FDA" - hopefully she was again being sarcastic, because herbal products are regulated by the FDA. It gets complicated and often convoluted, however, when the details are considered. The FDA regulates products considered drugs; the herbal supplements are marketed and labeled as "dietary supplements" which makes them a FOOD product. The criteria for the labeling and sale of these items is not the same as that for drugs. So general claims such as "glucosamine chondroitin is important for joint health" is a factual claim. However there are variables like the purity of the raw material used to make that supplement, and whether or not any particular supplement will function as well taken as a dietary supplement, as it would when garnered naturally through foods ingested. An article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology contended, "adulteration, inappropriate formulation, or lack of understanding of plant and drug interactions have led to adverse reactions that are sometimes life threatening or lethal." [3] Certain species of echinacea (the main active ingredient in Airborne) are medicinally beneficial, but this is where non-regulation by the FDA plays a role--they do not control whether or not a manufacturer uses the medicinal version, nor whether or not the preparation is handled properly to maintain those beneficial properties. And of course there are conflicting results in the way of clinical studies of the effectiveness of echinacea as a beneficial health supplement, or if it is merely useless, or even that it acts only as a placebo. Until there is more conclusive scientific evidence, either could be true.
Thus, when a particular statement is circulated, one must always check the facts and variables behind it to see if it is an HONEST statement through implication or suggestion--whether or not it is actually "factual."
Regarding her comments on religion, she is also correct in her assessment, as historicity and research has shown.
Regarding her comments on religion, she is also correct in her assessment, as historicity and research has shown.
A 2007 study by Michigan State University determined that just 28 percent of American adults could be considered scientifically literate. In February, the California Academy of Sciences released the findings of a survey which found that most Americans couldn’t pass a basic scientific literacy test. The findings:
* Just 53% of adults knew how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
* Just 59% knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as dinosaurs.
* Only 47% of adults could provide a rough estimate of the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water. (The Academy decided that the correct answer range for this question was anything between 65% and 75%.)
* A mere 21% were able to answer those three questions correctly.
In July, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released the results of a survey of 2,001 adult Americans regarding science issues. Among the findings: just 46% knew that electrons are smaller than atoms.
Those findings shouldn’t be surprising. Ignorance of the sciences and the natural world has plagued the world for centuries. This centuries-long suspicion of science,
which continues today with regular attacks on Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, was recognized by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow in the 1950s when he delivered a famous lecture called “The Two Cultures.” Snow argued that there was a growing disconnect between the culture of the sciences and the culture of the humanities, and that bridging that gap in understanding was critical to understanding and addressing the world’s problems. Snow placed “Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists…Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” Snow then laid out a critical point about the general public’s lack of understanding of energy and thermodynamics. As Snow put it:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
Indeed, while most moderately cultured people will be familiar with the Bard’s A Comedy of Errors or The Merchant of Venice, the laws of thermodynamics -- the rules that ruthlessly police the world of energy -- are considered by most people to be the domain of nerds and wonks. Thus, the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed; and the second law: energy tends to become more random and less available -- are relegated to the realm of too much information. For most people, basic physics is seen as nerdy, beyond their ken, too troublesome to learn.
This apathy – or perhaps it’s antipathy -- towards science makes it laughably easy for the public to be deceived. Alas, this apathy toward science in America is matched – or perhaps even exceeded – by the lack of interest in mathematics. Over the past few years, the US has been inundated with depressing data about the state of our country’s mathematical skills. A 2008 study published by the American Mathematical Society put it bluntly: “it is deemed uncool within the social context of USA middle and high schools to do mathematics.” It went on to explain that “Very few USA high schools teach the advanced mathematical skills, such as writing rigorous essay-style proofs, needed to excel.” Another report issued in 2008, this one from the Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel declared that math education in the U.S. “is broken and must be fixed.” The report found “that 27% of eighth-graders could not correctly shade 1/3 of a rectangle and 45% could not solve a word problem that required dividing fractions.” The report also found poor math skills among adults:
* 78% of adults could not explain how to compute the interest paid on a loan.
* 71% couldn’t calculate miles per gallon on a trip.
* 58% were unable to calculate a 10% tip for a lunch bill.
Given these disheartening numbers, there’s little reason to be surprised that so many Americans are ready to embrace fallacious claims by the many energy charlatans who insist that the US could quit using hydrocarbons if only there were more political will to do so. Those claims ignore the vast scale of US energy consumption. On an average day, the US consumes about 41 million barrels of oil equivalent in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. That’s nearly five times as much energy as is produced by Saudi Arabia in the form of oil on an average day. (Since 1973 the Saudis have pumped an average of about 8.3 million barrels per day).
It has taken the US more than a century to build a $14 trillion economy – an economy that is based almost entirely on abundant supplies of oil, coal, and natural gas. No matter what energy technologies come along in the near future – electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, etc. -- moving the US and world economies away from hydrocarbons will take most of the 21st century.
That’s the reality – and it doesn’t take a calculator to confirm it. " [4]
The need here, is for more and better science education. The problem with meeting that need is that scientific concepts are often prohibitively complicated and the average American has neither the patience nor the education to understand those concepts, and so the issue becomes one of inaccessibility. In order to change this paradigm, science must cultivate spokespersons capable of communicating difficult concepts in a clear, concise (and though I hate to suggest it) more colloquial and simplified ways. (we should be thankful for the legacy of people like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson in this regard). The challenge is about insuring that this simplified version of teaching does not venture over into misleading conclusions, or the watering down of facts, and continues to be accurate and truthful while still communicating the necessary information.
--------------------------------------------------------------
[1] "'1 in 5 adult Americans think the sun revolves around the earth' ...how is that possible?" http://www.literacynews.com/2010/03/1-in-5-adult-americans-think-the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth-how-is-that-possible/
[2] (oh look: i just invented another neologism. danglous [adj.]--something with the characteristic of dangling. Sort of like one of my other neologisms: Protuberous--adjective version of the noun, protuberance.) [3] Elvin-Lewis M., "Should we be concerned about herbal remedies,"Journal of Ethnopharmacology 75 (2001) 141-164.) also Refer to the US Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.
[4] Posted on Aug. 21, 2009. By Robert Bryce. Scientifically Illiterate and Innumerate: Why Americans Are So Easily Bamboozled About Energy. http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2210)
No comments:
Post a Comment