The things, I don’t “believe” in evolution. Evolution is a fact, and the Theory of Evolution explains the fact visa vis the evidence which was discovered over a hundred years, hence.

I think people forget that the word “theory” is used the same way musicians the term, Music Theory. Music Theory is the accumulated knowledge of how music if practiced and understood, etc..

E

Carl Sagan always used to talk about this:
http://www.desipundit.com/ashutosh/2007/12/08/the-price-for-scientific-ignorance-will-be-liberty-itself/

It’s very important for citizens to have a clear view of policies toward science issues. Key for this is good science education. However the best way to achieve this is to show the direct connection of political-scientific issues to the daily lives of citizens. Unfortunately in some cases this is hard; for instance global warming is a kind of “slow” killer that does not affect people personally right away and even if it does, it’s not like AIDS where you can immediately show a connection to a causative agent. The only way to educate citizens about these issues is to keep on emphasize the long-term perspective, something that generally seems to be lost in this country and around the world, whether it’s people missing the long-term consequences of climate change, or Bell Labs missing the long-term consequence of cutting R & D

I’m certainly more in the *process* rather than *facts* school on scientific literacy.

However, I’m amazed that nobody includes in this discussion the aspect of public engagement with science that I consider most important–namely, citizens thinking about our policies toward science, and whether they’re the right ones.

This is an aspect of literacy that goes beyond fact, beyond process, and directly into full and immediate political relevance.

While science literacy is certainly a part of it, I think the bigger issue is to question the sources of information someone is getting on any topic. Obviously, people have to be selective in what they spend their time on, but if a topic is important enough to a person that they want to pass the information on, they need to do a little background research to verify it or at least look at the other sides so that counterpoints can be anticipated.

Another skill which is more on the social side is to accept that you won’t convince everyone that your opinion is correct, but progress is good.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out an effective way to measure this other than perhaps the silly measurement of fewer weird emails in my inbox sent by my friends.

(1) If you think it’s just the great unwashed with literacy and numeracy issues, you’ve not seen the video of MIT grads handed a battery, lightbulb, and single wire (quite long enough), being asked to make light, and failing. Or heard emeriti bemoaning a lack of quantitative feel among postdocs. Or been following physics education research’s evaluation of current practice (”epic fail” about covers it). You want to see scientific illiteracy? Ask a room of computer science professors an astronomy question.

(2) An under-taught perspective on science, is science as a set of practices designed to mitigate the common ways individual and group thought go wrong.

You log because you will forget and misremember tomorrow. You value evidence because people make lousy witnesses and believe silly things. You don’t believe nth hand reports because of, well, the “telephone game”. You get others to check your work because you always make mistakes. Confirmation bias, sampling bias, group think, etc, etc, etc.

So many phenomena, familiar or easily demonstrated. And with a potentially profound impact on how people conduct their lives.

(3) Why is everything “science”? Why do we describe all observations about the world, not claimed by another field, as “science”? Can we please stop?

Why is “lightning is electricity” science, but not “Protestants aren’t spawn of Satan”, or “you will be hurt if you get hit by a speeding car”. Sure, the nature of lightning was science 2 freeping centuries ago. But why still?

Yes, with policy issues dependent on things at the cutting edge of human knowledge, understanding the nature of that edge, of science, is valuable.

But perhaps it would be helpful to separate out the vast body of information gathered over the last century, and hand over the keys. It’s now no more science than it is engineering. Give it a name. “How things are”, “general situational awareness”, “having a clue”, “natural philosophy”, whatever.

The scientific community has its focus on a different task, pushing out the edge. It’s institutions, incentives, and training are all pointed at that. It specifically does not have the institutions, incentives, or training to pass on a century of learning to the public. It is an unambiguous, profound and utter failure at that. That’s just not where its interests or skills lie. Hell, it struggles to even get enough communication going to enable members of its own community to collaborate across disciplines.

Perhaps we need a new field of endeavor. Not education research, though its results would be important. Not research science, though one would need to read the primary literature of multiple fields. Not science journalism, for journalism lacks the scope. Not education, for it will be necessary to have a broader and deeper understanding than even most of the scientific community requires. Perhaps take some of the best gray beard professors, retask and support them, in revolutionizing how…

Ah well, not going to happen. At least the web is finally about to get computation and graphics. Perhaps the crowd can dig its own way out from under this mess.

(4) How to help the crowd improve science education? Most important – free public access to the literature. Nothing is more useless than an article in AJP that the person editing a wikipedia page can’t afford to read. Funding for outreach. And perhaps institutionalizing it – the tiny population of science journalists can go direct to researchers, but that doesn’t scale well as a broader population develops similar needs. And… perhaps most important, recognize this helping the crowd as an important goal.

1. Scientific thinking. Is a person aware of at least some of the ways in which human biases cloud our judgment? Do they know about the scientific method? Are they willing to be convinced based upon evidence?

A possible way to test this would be to have an essay answer question, where a couple of paragraphs describing some argument or other are presented, and the person is asked, “Is this evidence enough to convince you of the truth of the premise? Why or why not?” This becomes rather arbitrary because there are all sorts of different ways in which people fail to follow a rational argument, such that there really isn’t a good way to test them all. Francis Collins, for example, is well known for a number of ways in which he thinks rather poorly, but he is also well known for being a fairly well-respected scientist (at least for some things…) as head of the Human Genome Project. Would it make sense to call a working and successful scientist scientifically illiterate because they fail to present proper reasoning for certain arguments? Where would we draw the line?

2. Scientific facts. Of course, science is not just about a thought process, but also about the body of work of science which has been collected to date. It makes good sense that a person with scientific literacy should be aware of all of the most basic facts of science. Obviously, this is going to be very arbitrary. But one place to start might be to ask questions about the basic facts that affect our every day lives and our fundamental perspective on the world. Here is a short list of basic scientific facts and concepts which I would consider necessary to be understood for scientific literacy:

1. Newton’s first law.
2. First and Second law of thermodynamics.
3. Relative motion of Earth, Sun, and Moon.
4. The Sun is a star.
5. We live in the Milky Way galaxy. It’s really, really big.
6. The universe is really really big, and billions of years old.
7. The Earth is billions of years old.
8. The Earth has plates that move around over millions of years.
9. Some basic, basic understanding of the geologic cycle.
10. Evolution through random mutation and natural selection.
11. Common descent and speciation.
12. Electricity is electrons moving around.

At least, that’s what I could come up with off the top of my head, trying to narrow things down to sort of the bare essentials. I’m sure others would come up with very different lists, emphasizing different things and whatnot. But I would emphasize that it’s really not useful to have any sort of “pop quiz” type measurement of scientific literacy, which makes measuring this sort of thing at the survey level very difficult indeed. People need to actually be able to sit and think for a little bit, to give them a chance to think, and they need to actually demonstrate a level of understanding, as opposed to purely superficial knowledge.

For example, with Newton’s first law, the essence of that law is that “motion” and “rest” are arbitrary: something, once put in motion, will stay in motion unless acted upon by some external force, like friction. So you might ask a question that asks, for example, “If I fire a gun horizontally, and there is no air resistance, does the bullet slow down after it leaves the barrel of the gun but before it hits the ground?” or something to that effect.