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Evolution, Big Bang Polls Omitted From NSF Report
cremeglace writes "In an unusual last-minute edit that has drawn flak from the White House and science educators, a federal advisory committee omitted data on Americans' knowledge of evolution and the Big Bang from a key report. The data shows that Americans are far less likely than the rest of the world to accept that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang."
Wrong. They asked the questions and did not like the embarrassing answers America gave. Like our child mortality rate, our scientific literacy rate is not something to be proud of. The majority of American do not believe in the big bang or evolution. You may, but most do not, whereas in the rest of the first world, most people do believe in these things.
Where are you getting 'asshat within the White House' from? The National Science Foundation is not located in the White House. Why blame the President for this? This was not an editing error. The questions were asked, but the answers were deliberately omitted.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Looks like stupid and pissed off is the new cool. Science and facts just get you cussed at ... its sad.
The spelling and grammar police can kiss my ass
Between blinds, the one-eyed is king.
Unfortunately not. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is locked away in an insane asylum because he talks about things no one else can even conceive of.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The majority of American do not believe in the big bang or evolution
Good. I don't either. I merely accept them as models that make useful predictions and which are subject to amendment in light of experimental evidence. Mind you, that might be because I'm a scientist and not a priest.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Are you just proving you didn't read it either? It sounds like the NSB/NSF was choosing scientific method OVER politics and religion in this case.
Quote: "National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), says it chose to leave the section out of the 2010 edition of the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators because the survey questions used to measure knowledge of the two topics force respondents to choose between factual knowledge and religious beliefs."
They were badly formed questions for a literacy test. Instead of asking if they agree with the statement "The universe began with a big explosion", they should have asked something to determine IF people had a firm grasp of what the big bang theory WAS. Sure, personally I think that is by far the most likely theory (and that evolution is clearly fact at this point), but literacy is about comprehension, not belief.
It's like asking in a classics survey whether "Prometheus shaped man out of mud to be brought to life by Athena". No, I would have to answer I don't believe that. Does that mean I am not literate in Greek mythology?
See, this is why I like Electrical Engineering. Everything I work with is invisible, nobody can explain how it works (there aren't even any good theories*), and it can kill you if you forget to turn it off. Even if it doesn't kill you, it might give you cancer or muck up your offspring. The behaviour of any given device is erratic at best, taken for granted, or just plain whacky.
But for some reason, nobody comes up with a "God did it" explanation. Sure, we've got the magic smoke explanation, but nobody takes that seriously except the Rastafarians.
*No, really. Look at the quantum level, but try not to think about it or you'll go blind.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
No. Not in regards to scientific issues.
You can refuse to accept that the Earth is not the center of the Universe, but that DOES mean that you do not understand the SCIENCE behind it.
The above is the most important point in the thread. Science is not about belief -- it's about evidence. And the another important difference between belief and science is that science can change based on evidence and beliefs do not. They act as filters on new information instead.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
You seem to be quite confused. They do not explain why in the article.
The guy most singly responsible gives his public excuse as to why, but it isn't intellectually consistent and completely fails to address why this change (allegedly in the works for years) would have been left alone for all the drafts then changed between the last draft and the release.
"It's faith questions, not science questions" isn't an answer, it's an excuse. Why feel compelled to change it now when other countries are leaving it alone and if it's so useless, just include it and the people reading the results will ignore it. And, if it is a good thing to exclude, why wait until after the last draft to make the change?
It stinks of a political or religious move, not a scientific one. The real science one would be to leave it in and put an asterisk at the end saying *These results are faith oriented and should not be considered science questions." Or, at the very least, not "lie" by releasing drafts knowing they will lead to a misconception of what will be in the actual report.
Learn to love Alaska
Who is to say there was any state of existence before the Big Bang? Einstein has taught us that space and time are part and parcel of the same thing, that is the universe. Without the Big Bang there is no universe and therefore no time, and T-1 is a null pointer error. Hawking and Hartle have actually shown how time can emerge into existence during a Big Bang. cf. quantum cosmology.
From a philosophical point of view it can be argued that asking what happened before the Big Bang is the same thing as asking who created God. It is the same problem in a somewhat different context.
Einstein and Hawking have dealt with the question in a naturalistic setting, in this century Augustine of Hippo dealt with the question from a religious point of view some 1500 years earlier.
Having a degree in Electrical Engineering and also a second major in applied physics and time in grad school for nuclear engineering and physics, let me illuminate this subject a bit.
Engineers don't really delve into the why of things. The learn the basics and then hammer on the practical applications. You get just enough theory to get by.
Physics is more or less the opposite. They work with lots of theory and theoretical models. The applications they leave to the engineers ...and the applied physicists. Applied physics tends to be in the middle; they test the models in the real world and they try to find useful applications for the data/model/results.
The point is, though, engineers aren't taught things like high-level theoretical models because they wouldn't really be useful for them. There are certainly theories and models that explain 99% of what goes on in EE.
If you're asking what are fundamental forces like electricity, magnetism, and gravity... Well, people are working on that too, although progress is slow.
Where is the evidence that that happens more in the US than elsewhere?
Perhaps the real conclusion to be drawn here is that americans are more prone to be skeptical of absolute assertions based on prevailing theories.
While being decidedly unskeptical of absolute assertions based on a 2000 year old fairy tale.
On the other hand, much about evolution is, I think, less certain than most people make it
Unfortunately, you are entirely wrong on this point. Evolution is much, much more robust than most people think. It has literally mountains of evidence backing it from dozens of fields. There's is absolutely no possible way in which it could be entirely wrong, unless you are willing to go into solipsistic notions like "reality is just a big collective dream".
On the other hand, the Big Bang theory has only a small handful of evidence backing it. It is a very simple theory that makes few predictions, and offers few explanations or an underlying cause for any of it.
For example, there's still no clear picture of:
- why the universe is even expanding in the first place.
- what the "inflation" period at the very beginning was caused by or exactly how it occurred
- we still don't know why there's much more matter than anti-matter
- we still don't know precisely why matter is distributed the way it is at large scales
- we're still not entirely certain if the laws of physics were precisely consistent across all time (including the first few femtoseconds)
- I'm yet to see convincing evidence either way of whether the universe is going to keep expanding forever, come to a big crunch, or what...
If the Big Bang theory was as good as you make it out to be, all of those questions would be answered conclusively and rigorously. Right now, our understanding of the universe is not much better than epycicles. We can make good numeric or statistical predictions about a few things, but we have no idea why our models work, and everything breaks down at the extremes.
I pity you - you have been brainwashed into feeling stupid when wondering about these things. The smartest people on the planet wonder about the origin of the universe, and have discovered many wondrous things, yet you idly dismiss them.
Your overconfident arrogance would be annoying if the tortured remains of your natural curiosity were not pitiful.
Sometimes I just don't understand how the hell we've made it to superpower status...
Well, we might note that "superpower status" is in great measure made up of things like nuclear weapons, which the general population had no part in producing. There's also an economic component to that status, but again, those were built under the guidance of a rather tiny portion of the population (and regulated so that they wouldn't shoot themselves and the rest of us in our collective feet by a small population of anti-trust regulators ;-). The general population had little input to all this power.
The American anti-science, anti-intellectual attitude is a property of the masses; our super-power status is a property of the actions of a small minority of thinkers and doers. There's no difficulty understanding how we could have both.
Of course, most of the American industrial power seems to have been outsourced over the past decades, so we might be seeing the end of it all. And our government is more and more in the hands of know-nothings who are proud of their willful ignorance. So that superpower status may be reaching the status of "polite fiction". America's primary remaining power might be its military, which is more and more dependent on outsourced technology, and that's not a very stable situation.
Stick around and find out how it all develops. Maybe you'll live to see who inherits the top-dawg position among nations.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
"[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Isaac Asimov
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I don't understand why some people believe that it must be one or the other. I think I'm one of a large group of moderate conservatives who believe that religion and creationism can coexist. While I personally believe that none of this just randomly happened, I also do believe this is a good portion of the bible that is meant to be taken metaphorically, not to mention that a good deal of the meat of the bible has morphed over centuries of retranslations. Just as it is wrong for someone who is Pro-Creationism to call someone who is Pro-Evolution a moron who believes in fantasies, it is also wrong for the opposite to happen. Yet somehow our society has gotten to the point where if you do not agree with someone else, you are a radical quack who is doing the equivalent of smoking crack and jerking off to the *insert religious book or random science book here* and pictures of *insert random radical on the left or right here* having sex with a donkey. I mean seriously, it doesn't really matter what you believe anymore. There is a group of people ready to eat you alive metaphorically speaking no matter what you believe. I think most of us are sitting here in the moderate middle just shaking our heads and hoping all of the radical groups on both sides just shut the fuck up and go away.
religous zealots are the aggressors, not atheists. atheists only object when your religous dogma is being taught as fact or science. the rest of the time we are happy for you to live out your delusions.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's not a matter of belief. Scientific literacy requires an understanding of the evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming that all living things currently on Earth, including humans, evolved from earlier forms. Any person who is not aware of the evidence is scientifically illiterate, and any person who, when confronted with the evidence, refuses to accept it, is irrational. "Belief" doesn't enter into it ... unless you're talking about the relgious beliefs which seem to have a remarkable ability to make people act irrationally on this particular matter.
I know what you're getting at with your last sentence. If you want to push the "science is a religion" meme, go ahead, but if you're going to do that, you really should get rid of the fruits of rational scientific thinking ... such as your computer, and just pray really hard that your posts will appear on Slashdot. Be sure to let us know how that works out for you.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
... Just as it is wrong for someone who is Pro-Creationism to call someone who is Pro-Evolution a moron who believes in fantasies, it is also wrong for the opposite to happen. ...
Whoa there boy ... you seem to be attributing equal weight to both concepts. There is an unbelievably large amount of evidence to support evolution and in all the time that people have been finding fossil evidence not one piece has been found to support creationism, and if it had you can bet your bottom dollar it would have been splashed around the globe and lauded by the religious fraternity as proof of (their flavour of) god.
Comparing creationists to evolutionists without at least some nod to the different weightings attributed to their likelihood is akin to saying there's nothing to choose between the 'globe earth' and 'flat earth' camps, and people rightly pour scorn on flat-earthers!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I've thought about this for some time - the issue is not religion - it is a symptom (and certainly makes things worse). What is the real issue is that people do not know how to properly reason - we are not born with good reasoning skills and need to be taught how to do it properly. We don't do this and as a result you have people believing in ghosts, conspiracy theories, religions, psychic powers and any other bullshit that someone wanted to sell.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly