Sunday, December 22, 2013

Scientific Illiteracy Growing Worse

5% Increase In 8 Years

A new Harris poll of 2,250 Americans reports that belief in Darwin’s theory of evolution has risen five percentage points since 2005, from 42% to 47%. This number has been steady for decades so it is difficult to know if this uptick is the beginning of a new trend or merely a temporary swing. But the fact that so many Americans believe that the species spontaneously arose, does not reflect well on science education. This pedagogy failure is not buried in a subtle detail of science. It is not as though Americans have failed to grasp a technical aspect of quantum chromodynamics. On the contrary, it would be difficult to find a more wrongheaded, anti scientific view than spontaneous origins. Scientific illiteracy, it seems, is at an all-time high.
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4 comments:

  1. bornagain77December 22, 2013 at 3:28 PM

    Red flag? "Because the sample is based on those who agreed to participate in the Harris Interactive panel, no estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. "

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  2. JeffDecember 22, 2013 at 4:04 PM

    We don't know what it means. Think of how many people in the world blindly accept authority. When the authority changes what they dogmatically emphasize, so do the fideists change what they believe. There is no inductive evidence for UCA, naturalistic or otherwise.

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  3. UnknownDecember 22, 2013 at 4:28 PM

    The theory of evolution is not about origins, spontaneous or otherwise. If it has made these very modest gains in popular belief, perhaps it is because people are coming to understand that in spite of sustained efforts to mislead them.

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  4. JeffDecember 22, 2013 at 5:45 PM

    There is no theory for which anyone can count the total number of necessary a-plausible hypotheses to IMPLY the lineages or the morphological/phenotypical change per time-frame ratio entailed in any UCA tree.That number would be mind-bogglingly huge. Never mind the number of a-plausible geological/taphonomic hypotheses one would have to make to reconcile the lineages with known stratigraphic ranges and the absence of discovered intermediates. Inductive criteria applies to ACTUAL explanations, not hunches or personal credulity.

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