Science Literacy

[AstralTraveller (David)]

FASTS have just released the results of a survey on basic scientific literacy. How would you rate? How surprised/unsurprised and happy/disappointed are you?

The results are of mixed quality but I think it is well below the standard I would hope for.

http://www.fasts.org/images/News2010...l%20270710.pdf

[renormalised (Carl)]

Interesting....much better than a similar (but much larger) survey taken in the U.S. There, out of all the people they surveyed (including supposedly educated people) 75% didn't know how long it took for the Earth to orbit the Sun, 65% couldn't locate the U.S. on an unmarked world map and something like 55% didn't believe in evolution. This was taken in 1998....the results now are probably even more extreme, especially for the last result.

[bojan]

Yes, pretty bad.
It could be worse, though..

[marki]

This doesn't suprise me at all. No doubt most if not all were exposed to the facts at some time in their life but the old adage of "if you don't use it you lose" it comes to the fore. When I first started teaching science I thought the only difference between a sucessful student and a failed student was the amount of work they put in. Many years down the road I now know different. Still if they had asked me about evolution I would have got it wrong according to the survey answer. All the evidence I have gathered over the years suggests we are de-evolving because too many corrupted gene pools are becoming the dominant species through the sheer weight numbers (mate like rabbits ). Still where is that banannahhhhhhhhhhh, someone get that flea for me will ya .

Mark

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by marki

All the evidence I have gathered over the years suggests we are de-evolving because too many corrupted gene pools are becoming the dominant species through the sheer weight numbers (mate like rabbits ).

No-one said evolution was always an improvement. The intelligent are breeding themselves out of the gene pool by having small numbers of offspring.

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by mithrandir

No-one said evolution was always an improvement.

No, of course not. The indiscriminate and long-term nature of random variation and natural selection can lead to local optima that turn out to be dead ends. On a long-term scale the evolutionary mechanism would tend to achieve optimally adapted species unless environmental shifts change the goal posts faster than natural selection results in adapted species.

The intelligent are breeding themselves out of the gene pool by having small numbers of offspring.

Now you're being cynical

Cheers
Steffen.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

This is probably not the place for a discussion on the woes of society under the burgeoning pressure of post modernism - but as far as knowledge goes, you can bet that most people will have no problem sourcing an iphone 4, recently the subject of reverence during its launch in Melbourne...

"...and the people layed fronds at the feet of those who carried it, and bowed down and worshiped and gave thanks to Steve, that its antenna wasn't a dud after all"