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."

Comments

Re:Warm, salty, gritty...

[Foobar of Borg]

Yes, your post is primordial slime. It's not like it was intelligently designed.

They explain why

[geekoid]

in the article.

Re:They explain why

[spun]

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.

Re:They explain why

[Dahamma]

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?

Re:They explain why

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:They explain why

[jc42]

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.

Re:They explain why

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:So?

[spun]

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.

Re:Not the White House.

[ldconfig]

Looks like stupid and pissed off is the new cool. Science and facts just get you cussed at ... its sad.

No they did not.

[khasim]

From TFA:

The board member who took the lead in removing the text was John Bruer, a philosopher who heads the St. Louis, Missouri-based James S. McDonnell Foundation. He told Science that his reservations about the two survey questions dated back to 2007, when he was the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. He calls the survey questions "very blunt instruments not designed to capture public understanding" of the two topics.

That explains nothing.

And ...

When Science asked Bruer if individuals who did not accept evolution or the big bang to be true could be described as scientifically literate, he said: "There are many biologists and philosophers of science who are highly scientifically literate who question certain aspects of the theory of evolution," adding that such questioning has led to improved understanding of evolutionary theory. When asked if he expected those academics to answer "false" to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: "On that particular point, no."

So the guy pushing for the removal cannot maintain a consistent argument for that removal.

Re:So?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:So?

[Beardo the Bearded]

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.

Re:So?

[spottedkangaroo]

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.

Re:Something I've noticed...

[Tango42]

Where is the evidence that that happens more in the US than elsewhere?

Re:Something I've noticed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the evidence that that happens more in the US than elsewhere?

We took a poll.

Re:But it is sooo simple to understand

[Arancaytar]

Yeah I feel sooo dumb for wondering why the physical universe could not have just popped into place from thin air for no reason.

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.

Changing answers doesn't mean what you think

[Dr. Manhattan]

About the only thing we can be certain of with science is that the answers are always going to be changing.

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

Re:Not the White House.

[TapeCutter]

"not meant to be anti-agw, though obviously, until tried or proven from first principles, the jury is still out"

RF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1) = 3.71 W/M^2 for a doubling of CO2 concentration - Fourier's 1824 prediction of the GHG properties of CO2 derived from it's spectra. Faraday confirmed Fourier's predictions by experiment in the 1850's. A modern version of that experiment can be seen here.

"Anyone mentioning the subtle detail that climate is chaotic"

Usually doesn't know the difference between climate and weather, let alone the difference between forcings and feedbacks.

"The only systems we can predict are systems that are, thermodynamically speaking, in equilibrium."

Yeah right, the size of expansion joints in bridges and railway tracks are picked out of a hat.

"But if the AGW "debate" proves anything, it's that science is no longer allowed to tell people "we don't know"."

No, what it proves is that a measly few million bucks worth of anti-science propoganda can create a huge army of usefull idiots such as yourself to create the impression of a debate about a well understood climate forcing.

The rest of the "science" in your post is so wrong it makes creationist arguments look reasonable. The whole thing is an accurate demonstration of the GP's astute observation that "stupid and pissed off (at the IPCC) is the new cool".

Ironically, your post also contains the cure for your ignorance in your call to teach scientific philosophy, unfortunately you don't seem to have taken your own advise and uncritically repeat the misinformation and red-herrings fed to you by lobbyists.