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Belief In Evolution Doesn't Measure Science Literacy
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."
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While Dan has certainly taken pains to show the many correlations between one subset and another, I think the most important one to consider is this:
Those who firmly believe that a "God" was involved in the universe/mankind, were less likely to score at the upper tier 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.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
A scientific theory ties together a broad range of observations into a coherent model and makes testable predictions, that have since been tested and found to be accurate. It's still called the germ theory of disease, after all. 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.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.