Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg

Resistance to certain scientific ideas derives in large part from assumptions and biases that can be demonstrated experimentally in young children and that may persist into adulthood. In particular, both adults and children resist acquiring scientific information that clashes with common-sense intuitions about the physical and psychological domains. Additionally, when learning information from other people, both adults and children are sensitive to the trustworthiness of the source of that information. Resistance to science, then, is particularly exaggerated in societies where nonscientific ideologies have the advantages of being both grounded in common sense and transmitted by trustworthy sources.

Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: paul.bloom@yale.edu

Scientists, educators, and policy-makers have long been concerned about American adults' resistance to certain scientific ideas (1). In a 2005 Pew Trust poll, 42% of respondents said that they believed that humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that denies the very existence of evolution (2). Even among the minority who claim to accept natural selection, most misunderstand it, seeing evolution as a mysterious process causing animals to have offspring that are better adapted to their environments (3). This is not the only domain where people reject science: Many believe in the efficacy of unproven medical interventions; the mystical nature of out-of-body experiences; the existence of supernatural entities such as ghosts and fairies; and the legitimacy of astrology, ESP, and divination (4). This resistance to science has important social implications, because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning (1).

Here we review evidence from developmental psychology suggesting that some resistance to scientific ideas is a human universal. This resistance stems from two general facts about children, one having to do with what they know and the other having to do with how they learn.

The main source of resistance concerns what children know before their exposure to science. Recent psychological research makes it clear that babies are not "blank slates"; even 1-year-olds possess a rich understanding of both the physical world (a "naïve physics") and the social world (a "naïve psychology") (5). Babies know that objects are solid, persist over time (even when out of sight), fall to the ground if unsupported, and do not move unless acted upon (6). They also understand that people move autonomously in response to social and physical events, act and react in accord with their goals, and respond with appropriate emotions to different situations (5, 7, 8).

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. However, they also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn. The problem with teaching science to children is thus "not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach" (9).

Children's belief that unsupported objects fall downward, for instance, makes it difficult for them to see the world as a sphere—if it were a sphere, the people and things on the other side should fall off. It is not until about 8 or 9 years of age that children demonstrate a coherent understanding of a spherical Earth (10), and younger children often distort the scientific understanding in systematic ways. Some deny that people can live all over Earth's surface (10), and when asked to draw Earth (11) or model it with clay (12), some children depict it as a sphere with a flattened top or as a hollow sphere that people live inside.

In some cases, there is such resistance to science education that it never entirely sticks, and foundational biases persist into adulthood. One study tested college undergraduates' intuitions about basic physical motions, such as the path that a ball will take when released from a curved tube (13). Many of the undergraduates retained a common-sense Aristotelian theory of object motion; they predicted that the ball would continue to move in a curved motion, choosing B over A in Fig. 1. An interesting addendum is that although education does not shake this bias, real-world experience can suffice. In another study, undergraduates were asked about the path that water would take out of a curved hose. This corresponded to an event that the participants had seen, and few believed that the water would take a curved path (14).

Fig. 1. (A and B) Alternative intuitions about the movement of a ball out of a curved tube [from (13)]. [View Larger Version of this Image (23K GIF file)]

The examples so far concern people's common-sense understanding of the physical world, but their intuitive psychology also contributes to their resistance to science. One important bias is that children naturally see the world in terms of design and purpose. For instance, 4-year-olds insist that everything has a purpose, including lions ("to go in the zoo") and clouds ("for raining"), a propensity called "promiscuous teleology" (15). Additionally, when asked about the origin of animals and people, children spontaneously tend to provide and prefer creationist explanations (16). Just as children's intuitions about the physical world make it difficult for them to accept that Earth is a sphere, their psychological intuitions about agency and design make it difficult for them to accept the processes of evolution.

Another consequence of people's common-sense psychology is dualism, the belief that the mind is fundamentally different from the brain (5). This belief comes naturally to children. Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems. But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one's brother, or brushing one's teeth (5, 17). Similarly, when told about a brain transplant from a boy to a pig, they believed that you would get a very smart pig, but one with pig beliefs and pig desires (18). For young children, then, much of mental life is not linked to the brain.

The strong intuitive pull of dualism makes it difficult for people to accept what Francis Crick called "the astonishing hypothesis" (19): Dualism is mistaken—mental life emerges from physical processes. People resist the astonishing hypothesis in ways that can have considerable social implications. For one thing, debates about the moral status of embryos, fetuses, stem cells, and nonhuman animals are sometimes framed in terms of whether or not these entities possess immaterial souls (20, 21). What's more, certain proposals about the role of evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in criminal trials assume a strong form of dualism (22). It has been argued, for instance, that if one could show that a person's brain is involved in an act, then the person himself or herself is not responsible, an excuse dubbed "my brain made me do it" (23). These assumptions about moral status and personal responsibility reflect a profound resistance to findings from psychology and neuroscience.

The main reason why people resist certain scientific findings, then, is that many of these findings are unnatural and unintuitive. But this does not explain cultural differences in resistance to science. There are substantial differences, for example, in how quickly children from different countries come to learn that Earth is a sphere (10). There is also variation across countries in the extent of adult resistance to science, including the finding that Americans are more resistant to evolutionary theory than are citizens of most other countries (24).

Part of the explanation for such cultural differences lies in how children and adults process different types of information. Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source; it is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this type of information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called (25). Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." Hence, even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist (26).

Other information, however, is explicitly asserted, not tacitly assumed. Such asserted information is associated with certain sources. A child might note that science teachers make surprising claims about the origin of human beings, for instance, whereas their parents do not. Furthermore, the tentative status of this information is sometimes explicitly marked; people will assert that they "believe in evolution."

When faced with this kind of asserted information, one can occasionally evaluate its truth directly. But in some domains, including much of science, direct evaluation is difficult or impossible. Few of us are qualified to assess claims about the merits of string theory, the role of mercury in the etiology of autism, or the existence of repressed memories. So rather than evaluating the asserted claim itself, we instead evaluate the claim's source. If the source is deemed trustworthy, people will believe the claim, often without really understanding it. Consider, for example, that many Americans who claim to believe in natural selection are unable to accurately describe how natural selection works (3). This suggests that their belief is not necessarily rooted in an appreciation of the evidence and arguments. Rather, this scientifically credulous subpopulation accepts this information because they trust the people who say it is true.

Science is not special here; the same process of deference holds for certain religious, moral, and political beliefs as well. In an illustrative recent study, participants were asked their opinion about a social welfare policy that was described as being endorsed by either Democrats or Republicans. Although the participants sincerely believed that their responses were based on the objective merits of the policy, the major determinant of what they thought of the policy was, in fact, whether or not their favored political party was said to endorse it (27). Additionally, many of the specific moral intuitions held by members of a society appear to be the consequence, not of personal moral contemplation, but of deference to the views of the community (28).

Adults thus rely on the trustworthiness of the source when deciding which asserted claims to believe. Do children do the same? Recent studies suggest that they do; children, like adults, have at least some capacity to assess the trustworthiness of their information sources. Four- and five-year-olds, for instance, know that adults know things that other children do not (like the meaning of the word "hypochondriac") (29), and when given conflicting information from a child and from an adult, they prefer to learn from the adult (30). They know that adults have different areas of expertise: Doctors know how to fix broken arms, and mechanics know how to fix flat tires (31, 32). They prefer to learn from a knowledgeable speaker than from an ignorant one (29, 33), and they prefer a confident source to a tentative one (34). Finally, when 5-year-olds hear about a competition whose outcome was unclear, they are more likely to believe a person who claimed that he had lost the race (a statement that goes against his self-interest) than a person who claimed that he had won the race (a statement that goes with his self-interest). In a limited sense, then, they are capable of cynicism (35).

These developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and it will be especially strong if there is a nonscientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are thought of as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States, with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. These concepts clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals, and (in the United States) these beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities (24). Hence, these fields are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest.

References and Notes

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• 36. We thank P. Harris and F. Keil for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. Neither author received any funding for the preparation of this article.

Outsource Tudo

CALLING INDIA

L.A. students are hooking up with tutors in South Asia for help with their homework. Is this global economy cool, or what?

By Scott Kraft, Scott Kraft is national editor of The Times.
May 6, 2007

The scene in the Broder family's Beverly Hills home is, in most respects, a classic glimpse into the life of your typical Southern California teenager. Noah, a high school sophomore wearing blue-and-orange tennis shoes, is working out a quadratic equation under the watchful eye of his math tutor, Shani, a petite young woman in brown leather sandals who has a copy of his textbook open in front of her.

"Exactly, Noah," Shani says, flashing a thumbs-up sign.

"Cool," Noah replies.

Across town in Inglewood, a sophomore named Mariana Ibrahin is going over a biology assignment with her tutor, Roshan. They both hear the occasional roar of a jet on final approach to LAX over Mariana's house, but neither is distracted from the work at hand. Their twice-a-week sessions have helped lift Mariana's grade to a solid B, and Roshan adores her student. In fact, Roshan says later, "I'd love to meet my Mariana one day."

Nothing is quite as it seems here in the global village, where Noah and Mariana get their after-school help in a virtual classroom, separated from their tutors by 12 1/2 time zones. Tutors Shani Jose and Roshan Salim work beneath humming ceiling fans in a muggy port city in India, where, fittingly, today is tomorrow. They are connected to their pupils by a voice-over-Internet phone and an interactive computer "whiteboard" where teacher and pupil write using a stylus and pad and on which, when appropriate, the tutors can add a universally understood electronic symbol for a job well done: Thumbs-up.

The spread of outsourcing, especially to India, has touched millions of Americans in ways both frustrating and satisfying. Customer service agents answer our complaints from Bangalore. Law firms get their legal transcripts typed in Mumbai. Blue chip companies farm out high-tech work to engineers in Hyderabad.

In the last few years, a small group of companies, most started by Indian entrepreneurs, has tried a new twist on the theme. They've tapped India's pool of highly educated and, by American standards, low-paid men and women to shore up the math, science and even English skills of a new generation of Americans, catering to parents desperate to get their children into the best possible colleges. In Los Angeles, this flip side of the outsourcing debate unfolds in microcosm each weekday afternoon, in quiet moments between pupils and tutors.

Southern California's after-school landscape already is dotted with tutoring academies and SAT preparation classes. What these new businesses offer are lower prices, greater convenience and a window on the wider world—though sometimes with the same irritants that have made outsourcing so exasperating for so many Americans.

The tutors for both Noah and Mariana work for Growing Stars, a firm launched three years ago by Biju Mathew, a Silicon Valley software engineer. Mathew, a 42-year-old father of three, came up with the idea while hunting for a math tutor for his second-grade son. As a new arrival to the United States, he was shocked to find American tutors charging $40 to $100 an hour—prices that were "way beyond" his financial reach.

"I kept thinking: If I could just connect [students] with their teachers back in India it would be so much cheaper," Mathew says. "And then I realized there could be thousands of parents like me."

So, working from home at night, and enlisting friends in his hometown of Cochin, India, he set out to develop a computer program that would replicate the experience of one-on-one tutoring. He tested it on his children, developed a business plan, brought in an Indian American investor and leased a tiny office in one of the high-tech office parks on the 101 Freeway near San Jose.

Today, Growing Stars has 400 students, most in the United States, and its work force in India has grown to 61, including 49 tutors, four academic directors, and a sales and technical support staff. Growing Stars is the only U.S.-based firm whose teachers work together in a single academy in India. A competitor, Bangalore-based TutorVista, which has 2,000 students, has tutors who work mostly from their homes in India.

Mathew, his company's only full-time employee in the United States, is still waiting for his big payday. A slight, soft-spoken man, he rents his Fremont house and drives an old Toyota Camry with a missing hubcap. But he has high hopes. "If you have a great idea, you can make it happen in America," he says. "The [Silicon] Valley nurtures entrepreneurship, unlike in India. I don't want to remain small. I want to take it to the next level."

With a teacher shortage in the United States and a swelling demand for tutors, more companies with foreign-based tutors are diving into the market. "We're seeing a globalization of education," says Don Knezek, chief executive of the Washington D.C.- and Eugene, Ore.-based International Society for Technology in Education. "For years, tutoring was an elitist activity for the elite. Now, the offshore operations are making it available to the middle class. It really fills a need in the nation right now."

Growing Stars fields an average of 75 inquiries a month from parents in the United States, and Mathew says his biggest challenge "is to convince people that online tutoring is really effective."

Noah Broder's parents approached this novel tutoring arrangement with a fair degree of skepticism.

Noah, an affable, self-assured 16-year-old, goes to the private Wildwood School in West Los Angeles, which touts a strong academic program in a noncompetitive environment. His father, Michael, runs a consulting company and is an associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA. His mother, Donna, works in children's publishing. Although Noah's parents like Wildwood, they are concerned that the math program is too theoretical. And Noah feels he needs more practice problems to understand the material.

"I'm a kinesthetic as well as a visual learner," he says.

They decided Noah needed a tutor, but private tutors are expensive and the couple, with 11-year-old Maya and 8-year-old Jake at home, didn't have time to ferry Noah to lessons. They heard about Growing Stars from a neighbor, who had two children in the program. But Michael's experience with outsourcing at work hadn't exactly been a success. His company had tried to save money by outsourcing searches of medical literature to India, but dropped the experiment after missed connections and poor quality work.

Still, the Broders decided to give it a try. They paid a $50 initial fee for the program, invested less than $100 in a headset, stylus and pad and signed up for two sessions a week at the rate of $160 a month. Noah took quickly to the arrangement, in which he confers with Shani from 7:45 p.m. to 8:45 p.m. every Monday and Tuesday. His first tutor was hard to understand, and he had to adjust to the slight delay in the phone line. But there are positives. "One of the good things is that they are less of a 'teacher,'" he says. "There's less pressure. You can ask a question that you think they might have already covered."

His parents have had some trouble communicating with the academic directors who call to discuss Noah's progress. "They're really hard to understand," Michael says. "But Noah's of a different generation. I expect it just doesn't get under his skin the way it does with me."

No one in the family argues with the results. "It's really amazing. Amazing that it works," Michael says. "For sure, his grades have improved."

"The truth is," Noah's mother says, "if convenience wasn't important for us, we might not have done it. But it's definitely succeeded."

Mariana didn't need any lessons in cultural diversity. Her mother, Ana, is from Brazil, where Mariana was born. Her stepfather, Keith Laidley, a financial analyst at Northrup Grumman, is a Los Angeles native.

Mariana spoke only Portuguese when she moved to the United States five years ago to join her mother. Now a tall 16-year-old with dark, cascading curls, she speaks English and is enrolled at Alexander Hamilton High School, a magnet school where her specialty is modern dance. Mariana's family, which includes her Brazilian grandmother and her two siblings, 4-year-old Giancarlo and 7-year-old Isabella, live in a modest bungalow in Inglewood.

When she entered high school a year ago, Mariana was struggling with her grades. Keith enrolled her in a computer-based tutoring center, but, he says, they eventually decided "we needed something more aggressive." He looked into professional tutors, but they charged $120 an hour. Even a student tutor at UCLA, at $60 an hour, was too expensive. That's when a friend of the family suggested Growing Stars, where lessons are just $20 an hour.

"We were nervous at first," Keith admits, "but we had the luxury of saying, 'Let's see if this pays off.'" In November, Keith signed up Mariana for four hourlong lessons a week—Monday and Thursday in math and Tuesday and Wednesday in biology.

Mariana adjusted easily to the virtual classroom, connected to India through the laptop in her room. "She's already into the computer," her step-father says. "Even when she's not studying, she's into that space." When she mentions that her biology grade has risen to a B, the news takes her stepfather by surprise. "We didn't know that!" he says, smiling broadly.

The only hitches have been technological and logistical. Sometimes the computer link goes down, though it usually is quickly restored. And classes have had to be rescheduled twice because of transportation strikes in India. Also, Keith found it difficult at first "to get clear exactly what day it is there and here," he says. "There are some things lost in translation. But when we have trouble, we communicate with them by e-mail."

The day begins early—very early—for Growing Stars tutors in the city of Cochin, which rests on fingers of land reaching into the Arabian Sea. Cochin is the largest city in the state of Kerala, where 32 million people live in an area smaller than West Virginia. And this stretch of the Malabar Coast, 1,600 miles south of Delhi, is the world's center of ayurvedic medicine, a holistic treatment of massage and oils that is said to rejuvenate body and mind.

Drivers collect the early-shift tutors from their homes shortly after midnight and deliver them to a two-story office building, where work begins at 1:30 a.m.—just after school lets out on America's East Coast. Noah's and Mariana's tutors, like others catering to West Coast students, are on the "late shift," which starts at 4:30 a.m. Soon after the late shift arrives, the sun begins to rise on a lush Indian neighborhood of houses and apartments, palm and banana trees. The temperature is already 88 degrees, and rising.

Inside, the tutors sit in high-backed desk chairs in plywood cubicles that stretch across a gleaming white tile floor. Math tutors are on one side, science on the other. A few English tutors and administrators sit in between. Bookshelves against the unadorned walls are filled with American textbooks. It's library quiet, save for the air conditioners and fans mounted on the ceiling and walls. Tutors spend about half their day preparing lessons and the rest speaking into headsets to students half a world away.

Most of the tutors are young, in their 20s, with résumés that include teaching stints as well as master's degrees or other postgraduate work in India. As everywhere in India, the women are dressed in saris of dazzling color, while most of the men wear jeans. The early hours are tough, but the salary helps make up for it. Tutors here earn from $250 to $400 a month, compared to less than $200 a month for public school teachers.

The center is run by Bina George, a former banker, whose most difficult task is finding tutors. "You can find good English speakers, and there are plenty of people with master's degrees," she explains. "But it's hard to find people with master's degrees in science or math who also speak good English."

The primary language in Kerala is Malayalam, and although English is taught at school, very few people speak it at home. Even fewer have contact with native English speakers. When Shani Jose came to work here two years ago, she says "I had never even spoken to an American before." Overhearing her remark, George adds: "Actually, none of us had."

Poor English is the biggest complaint from parents, so new tutors attend a daily "accent reduction" class taught by 24-year-old Greeshma Salim, one of a handful of English tutors at Growing Stars. She received her own offshore tutoring in accent reduction—on the telephone from a language specialist in California. She admits that having a nonnative English speaker tutoring American students in English "might seem ironic." But, she says, "when you learn English as your mother tongue, a lot of colloquialisms come in. I can treat it like any other language."

The Indian tutors often are amused and sometimes baffled by the expressions of some students. Greeshma was tripped up by "leaping lizards."

"Now I know it just means something you say when you're surprised," she says. When another tutor's student made an error on a problem and declared, "I'm thick," the tutor shared it with the group.

All new tutors are warned about the informality of the Americans. "It was a shock, initially, to hear them call me by my first name," says Leelabai Nair, one of the academic directors. "But now we're used to it."

It's tempting to see this virtual bridge that links the California and Malabar coasts as a healthy cross-cultural experience created by the combination of entrepreneurship and technology. But that's only part of the story.

Noah jokes that he imagines Shani and the other tutors being whipped by evil taskmasters as they toil away in small cubicles. He doesn't know, though, that Shani lives in a small home with her parents and brother, who gives her a ride to work each morning at 3:30. Or that her father, who works at a naval base, didn't go to college but was determined that his daughter would.

Mariana knows that her math tutor, 24-year-old Vineetha Vijayan, spends her weekends studying for a national exam to teach in college. She doesn't know, though, that the hardest part of her biology tutor Roshan's day is when the alarm goes off at 2:30 a.m. and she rises to make steamed dal and chapatis for her two children to take to school.

In fact, these new relationships are built on a simple economic principle—giving American pupils homework help at a low price by paying Indian tutors more than their country's classroom teachers. And growing numbers of American parents are learning that the cheapest way to sharpen the skills their youngsters will need to survive in the competitive global economy is to move, posthaste, into that global village.

Pesquisa Animal

Elevage industriel, usine à souffrance
LE MONDE | 05.05.07

©

216 milhões de norte americanos são analfabetos científicos

A boa notícia: a percentagem de norte-americanos alfabetizados científicos subiu dos 10% em 1988.

A má notícia: A percentagem continua baixa 28%.

"A ignorância se alimenta de ignorância" - Carl Sagan

histórico

Vamos começar falando do histórico da pesquisa que afere o nível de entendimento da população norte-americana quanto aos assuntos relacionados à ciência e tecnologia.
Segundo os critérios da pesquisa alfabetizados científicos não precisam ter um profundo conhecimento das equações de Maxwell ou da Teoria Geral da Relatividade, mas precisam ter uma noção geral dos conceitos e dos métodos científicos.

A primeira pesquisa nacional norte-americana a respeito do analfabetismo científico foi completada dois meses antes do lançamento do Sputnik 1, em 1957, servindo como medida a respeito das opiniões públicas relacionadas a ciência antes do início da corrida espacial.

A partir de 1977, Jon D. Miller, cientista político da Universidade Estadual de Michigan, começou a conduzir a pesquisa tentando replicar as perguntas utilizadas na primeira pesquisa, como a respeito do Estrôncio 90 (um elemento radioativo produzido a partir dos testes de bombas nucleares) e a vacina contra a Pólio – temas que dominavam as notícias naquele período, no entanto, foi claro que perguntas baseadas em manchetes de jornal não podiam dar a noção da variação do nível de alfabetização científica no decorrer do tempo, "é preciso encontrar medidas mais duráveis,"ele diz.

Então foram desenvolvidas questões envolvendo átomos, moléculas e outros conceitos básicos. Os resultados destas pesquisas servem como base para as políticas de C&T produzidas pelo legislativo e executivo federais norte-americanos e são publicadas pela National Science Board.

Prováveis boas notícias

Em somente 18 anos, mais de 50 milhões de pessoas entraram para o conjunto de americanos que conseguem ler e entender uma notícia de jornal envolvendo ciência e tecnologia, de acordo com pesquisa apresentadas na semana passada no encontro anual do American Academy for the Advancement of Science's em São Francisco.

Jon D. Miller, atribuiu parte do crescimento dos alfabetizados científicos às faculdades, pois diversas delas recentemente obrigaram os estudantes a terem ao menos um ano de curso de ciências, como química, física e matemática para qualquer curso de graduação.

Miller diz também que o acréscimo do conhecimento em ciência pela população se deu através de aprendizado informal: lendo artigos e assistindo reportagens a respeito de temas científicos na internet e na televisão.

O entendimento da população a respeito de antibióticos, por exemplo, cresceu vertiginosamente nos últimos 18 anos.Em 1988, apenas 26% dos adultos norte-americanos sabiam que antibióticos não matavam vírus e bactérias. Em 2005, 54% sabiam que antibióticos matam apenas bactérias.

Certas más notícias

Tudo bem, agora vamos falar dos aproximadamente 200 milhões de norte-americanos que não conseguem ler uma simples notícia na seção de ciência do New York Times ou do Washington Post e entender o mínimo a respeito do DNA, de nanotecnologia ou sobre o aquecimento global.

Este nível de analfabetismo científico pode explicar porque apenas de 14% dos norte-americanos aceitam a Teoria da Evolução das Espécies e aproximadamente 20% da população dos Estados Unidos da América, quando perguntados se a Terra orbita ao redor do Sol ou o contrário e qual o período de translação, dizem que o Sol gira em torno da Terra e não sabem o em quanto tempo a Terra percorre a órbita solar– estatísticas que colocam estas pessoas no mesmo lado da Inquisição que puniu Galileu Galilei há 400 anos atrás.

Isto também explica a distância homérica entre cientistas e parte do público a respeito das pesquisas feitas atualmente como: nanotecnologia aplicada na indústria têxtil produzindo tecidos resistentes à manchas e que não amassam e a utilização de organismos geneticamente modificados em plantações agrícolas.

Como Carl Sagan disse eloqüentemente no "O Mundo Assombrado Pelos Demônios", a ignorância reina na nossa sociedade num momento em que a ciência está no auge da produção de conhecimentos incríveis e maravilhosas, mas também possivelmente de conseqüências perigosas.Ignorância, diz Sagan, não é uma opção.

Este cenário é problemático numa democracia que assume que a sua base é o conhecimento. Vivemos numa sociedade na qual uma pequena elite conhece e entende o essencial da ciência que transforma a nossa forma de viver, enquanto o restante da sociedade usa e depende da ciência sem conhecer o mínimo a respeito.

Esta situação pode levar os analfabetos científicos a se tornarem temerosos quanto à ciência e tecnologia, ressabiados quanto aos interesses das elites, poderão exigir a desaceleração das pesquisas científicas, ou até mesmo a sua interrupção.

Ou o oposto pode ocorrer: a elite científica pode crescer frustrada com os analfabetos científicos e tentarão controlá-los.

As forças da ignorância já silenciaram a ciência no decorrer da história, desde a horda que na antiga Alexandria expulsou o astrônomo Aristarco da cidade por ter proposto o heliocentrismo, até as atuais restrições de verbas federais, provocadas por grupos religiosos, para a pesquisa de células tronco.

Para calcular a extensão que o fundamentalismo religioso alcançou na sociedade norte-americana, Miller fez uma pesquisa entre adultos com as seguintes três perguntas:

a Bíblia é a palavra de Deus e deve ser lida literalmente?

Existe um Deus pessoal que é responsável por cada oração de todos homens e mulheres?

Os seres humanos foram criados por Deus já na forma atual e não evoluiu de outras formas de vida?

Em 2005, 43% dos norte-americanos adultos concordaram com as três perguntas.

Darwin injuriado

A elite utilizar o seu conhecimento científico para dominar a população também não é algo novo. As elites Maias, por exemplo, usavam seu extraordinário conhecimento em matemática, engenharia e astronomia para construir grandes templos e cidades – e produzirem calendários com a previsão de eclipses solares - para atemorizar e controlar as massas através de uma religião que exigia ritos de sacrifício.

Os europeus durante a era colonial utilizavam armas de fogo e navios capazes de cruzar oceanos para ocupar territórios dos chamados "povos selvagens".

Pseudo-Conclusão

A era da ciência apartidária acabou,devemos os cientistas e os educadores aprender as regras da política para continuar estudando e ensinando ciência.

Talvez possamos lançar uma campanha contra o analfabetismo científico semelhante à lançada nos meados do século XX e que triplicou a percentagem de alfabetizados no mundo inteiro.
A questão é, a população está realmente interessada em saber como celulares e computadores funcionam ou como os organismos agem?

E no Brasil, quais são os números? Qual é a nossa taxa de analfabetos científicos?
Quantos sabem o que e um organismo geneticamente modificado?

E os cientistas e os que controlam o conhecimento científico querem dividir, isto é, gastar algum tempo, e talvez utilizar parte do seu conhecimento para dar acesso ao saber?

Em outras palavras, é um problema global o analfabetismo científico permanecer nestas bases ou não?

Música e Matemática

Qual são as relações entre Música e Matemática
além de serem palavras iniciadas com M e proparoxítonas?

Quem quiser diga as suas experiências músico-matemáticas.

Segue uma definição em português mal e toscamente traduzida
e a versão em inglês:

"Música é o prazer que a mente sente de contar sem perceber que esta contando."

“Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting
without being aware that it is counting.”

Gottfried Leibniz