Science Illiteracy is Real

Earlier this month results of a worldwide survey, the 3M State of Science Index, made a few headlines.  It asked participants a number of questions to discover the general attitudes toward science: do people trust science, do they find it scary, do they take science for granted, do they think science is generally good or bad.  The results were mixed, but disturbing enough to motivate former astronaut Scott Kelly to begin a project promoting an appreciation of science.

After hearing of this survey, I went to the source and found a 46-page slide presentation with the detailed results.  One of the two key findings appears on page 10: “People are unaware of the impact of science in their everyday lives.”  More detail is given below that heading: “Nearly two out of five (38%) believe that if science didn’t exist, their everyday lives wouldn’t be that different." 

It’s hard to believe that people living in the twenty-first century could be so out of touch.  It’s true that it was an international survey and not specifically broken down by country, but they do show a “Science trust index” for each of the 14 countries based on the overall answers and the US comes in very close to the average.  We could attribute this misunderstanding of the benefits of science to the fact that most people (66%) spend little or no time thinking about science. But it’s still hard to believe!

This is extremely unsettling and so easy to confront. It isn’t about the Theory of Relativity or Quantum Mechanics.  Just think about the ideas of two people and about two contrasting events.

The two people are Ignaz Semmelweis and Thomas Malthus .  One was right and the other wrong.

In 1847 while working in a Vienna hospital, Semmelweis observed that the ward where doctors delivered babies had a 10% mortality rate for new mothers, three times the rate of the ward where midwives worked.  After checking many factors he hit upon the fact that the doctors were moving directly between performing autopsies and delivering babies. He suggested that everyone wash hands before entering an obstetrics ward.  As obvious as that sounds today, “his ideas were rejected by the medical community."  They weren’t accepted until after his death when Pasteur and Lister did further work with germ theory – more science.  Common advice today is to wash your hand before eating, and it's based on science.

Thomas Malthus, an Englishman, lived around the time of the American Revolution and believed the increase in food production could not keep pace with the increase in population, leading to famines and a stagnant standard of living.  "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."  He believed that since land was limited, food production could never keep up.  Science, however, proved him wrong, allowing farmers to grow enough for a world population of nearly nine billion with a standard of living he never would have imagined.  His name has become synonymous with baseless pessimism, but up to fifty years ago others were preaching the same gloom and doom about overpopulation.

Developments like these contributed largely to the increase (almost doubling) in life expectancy during the 20^th century.

The two events were the 1918 flu epidemic and the H1N1 scare of 2009.  The first was a worldwide disaster as reported here by the Washington Post.  “Experts believe between 50 and 100 million people were killed” by the flu epidemic in 1918 including 675,000 in the United States.  By contrast, what the media called a pandemic in 2009 resulted in between 10,000 and 12,000 deaths.  That is less than 2% of the devastation from 90 years earlier.  Numbers for this year will not be available until next year, but it’s certain that this flu season, again labeled an epidemic and hyped daily in the news for months, will result in fewer deaths.

What we have today are flu shots, better drugs and advanced medical procedures to treat the complications that arise from the flu particularly in seniors and young children.  We owe that kind of progress, those lives saved, to science.

These are just some quick examples.  In 2018 a person cannot go five minutes without encountering some contribution science has made to our lives. The effect of science on our lives goes beyond everyday conveniences; it’s the reason many of us are alive. This lack of appreciation is not only a sign of ignorance, but it causes people to make costly and dangerous errors about their health and safety.