31 In a recent PEW report, scientists rank roughly equal to doctors (those are “real” doctors) and slightly less than teachers in the public’s eye. In other words, if the public had a giant T-Mobile cell phone their fave-5 would be Military>Teachers>Scientists>Doctors>Engineers. This is a good thing, I suppose, but I still don’t think we’ll be getting discounts on cars or preferred air travel.
On the other hand, 85% of scientists think the public is full of retards and 50% feel as thought the public has unrealistic expectations of what scientists can do. I quoth:
While the public holds scientists in high regard, many scientists offer unfavorable, if not critical, assessments of the public’s knowledge and expectations. Fully 85% see the public’s lack of scientific knowledge as a major problem for science, and nearly half (49%) fault the public for having unrealistic expectations about the speed of scientific achievements.
Then there is a section for bellyaching on the lack of funding…
If you follow down that long list of questions two things popped out at me:
87% of scientists believe in natural selection compared to 32% of the general public. I’m concerned about that number. 87%? 1 out of 10 scientists think God did some magic shit? hmmm… That’s a fucking shame. I’d accept 95%, just because people are weird and there’s nothing you can do about that but 87% seems awfully low. While I can dismiss the public as being horribly educated (thanks teachers – who are more loved than us!) and thus more likely to reject something that has been horribly explained to them, I have a hard time doing the same for quote-end-quote scientists. Coincidentally, roughly the same number (84%) think the earth is getting warmer due to man’s involvement. At the very least, we can all agree 84% is a consensus, since, apparently, 13% of “scientists” haven’t yet discovered the first chapter of a biology textbook.
Then, at the very bottom, the partisan breakdown occurs with an astoundingly low 6% calling themselves Republican (so shut up Bill Carroll) with a slightly higher number (9%) calling themselves conservative. (I think they’re mostly engineers.)
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Who the hell did they ask? Maybe I’m in a weird place, but I figure that at least half the science people at work are Republican (with a chunk being the vocal Coulter/Limbaugh loud irrational kinds), and sure as hell more than 10% don’t think natural selection is anything but an evil atheist fantasy. I would guess that many more than that believe that global warming is an evil liberal fantasy. Grad school was less conservative, but probably a majority of the students were Republican.
At this point I lack enough empathy to try and understand how these positions make any sense, let alone fit well with any philosophy other than nihilism (considering a lot are conservative Christians, you’d think that might be a problem at some point…)
Which region of the US are you reporting from?
I went to grad school in the Boston area. Now, I’m in OH (with >50% of my coworkers being native to the region) – that would explain a lot of the current political ratios, but not the previous ones. I wouldn’t have thought the population ratio of chemists on the coasts (NE/SF/SD) to those in the Midwest/West/South would be that high (>20:1), but maybe it is – that would explain the opinion ratio as well.
News alert: the general public is retarded. Also, I’ve met some of these non natural selection believing scientists. I wouldn’t say that they are deficient in their work on any technical level. But rather they have a screw loose somewhere.
I have met them, too. I try to be accepting and understanding and, you know, if they were the general public I’d preach them to more power but somehow, when they have the banner of “scientist” I have a hard time accepting it.
It can take an unfortunate amount of time to reverse the total psychological damage that a “religious upbringing” can cause. I would be willing to bet that most of these socially conservative, “shopping cart” scientists were brainwashed when they were little by their rich parents. I usually just laugh to myself and ignore their crazy close-minded rants. Remember, these are the same people who ridicule those on welfare while still getting an allowance from their parents.
The people where I am – I don’t know. I think a chunk are probably rural conservatives, so I think the silver spoon theory is not operating for them. Most of the conservatives I have know have been rural conservatives with not a whole lot of money or privilege. They probably grew up around and learned from people who desperately wanted the world to stay the same around them and found a belief system that fit that (and enabled them to more easily model the world around them, or at least sort it into “bad” and “good” piles). In that environment, your belief system is likely to be formed similarly, and to be highly resistant to change (since leaving it behind is an all-or-nothing proposition, and nothing is hard even for people with less inflexible backgrounds).
I can’t honestly figure out the Coulter/Limbaugh brand of “true believer”, though – they can’t be pondering the philosophy of their icons much, or how the actions of their icons might achieve their desired ends (or might not). They’re sort of like the Old Testament God (”all rules, no mercy”) except their rules are internally inconsistent and not applicable to their most vocal supporters. Libertarianism seems nuts to me because its activity in practice seems so at odds with its claimed ends, but at least it is internally consistent. The intransigent stupidity of C/L conservatism combined with its rabid support makes the scenario of Left Behind look almost plausible (with the “wrong” people on the wrong side) – the irony of that would be pretty amusing, if they got it.
Fun fact: I was a card-carrying six-day creationist until, oh, 2006 or so, even after having graduated with honors with chemistry and math degrees and enrolled in a PhD program in p-chem at an R1 university.
While “I”’s comment contains a hella unnecessary level of snark, he or she is basically right; when you’ve been told since you were wee that something is true, you are unlikely to change your opinion unless confronted with massive evidence to the contrary – and “confronted” is the key word here. Chemists and mathematicians on the whole just don’t see a lot of evolution unless they happen to work in a bio-heavy field. It wasn’t til I took the time to learn about the field in my spare time that I became convinced of the age of the universe and the plausibility of the abiotic origin of life.
I also find among the younger set of my co-religionists (Protestant Christians) a much greater willingness to consider the possibility of evolution being compatible with their faith. I think my parents’ generation was exposed to too many culture wars with cult-of-personality religious leaders looking for a touchstone issue they could use to divide themselves off a sect of the faithful, and evolution was a good one because you HAD to drink the Kool-Aid to doubt it; once you buy into the young-earth creationists’ argument line, you have to reject basically all of modern geology and cosmology and biology as a big conspiracy, becoming that much more dependent on your Fearless Leader.
Now, a generation later, YEC arguments have propagated themselves across Protestant circles, to the point where you walk into a pretty normal church but they have a stand of magazines about Deconstructing Darwin. I do what I can to try to dialogue with people in a civilized way, but you run into a complex tangle of beliefs pretty fast. Also, there are plenty of angry atheists out there whose screeds seem to confirm what the YECs believe about the godless heathens. All I can say is – be polite, clearly explain the evidence, and people will do with it what they will.
87% believe in *natural selection*. Maybe that just means the other 13% don’t believe that natural selection is the *only* mechanism for evolution. That would be true. Random genetic drift is another.
I’m not so hopeful.
I scond CW’s comment. (being one of that 13%) Where I still believe in evolution but I think there is perhaps a better mechanism to explain it than natural selection. It is only a theory right, not a law so I feel completely within scientific right to question it in the persuit of something that is a bit more elegant on a cellular mechanics level which has always strck me as clumsy in the Darwiniam paradigm.(my expertise addmitedly not in genetics or mol/cell bio but I try to be informed on the topics if I’m going to question accepted science)
But that’s it – it’s clumsy. Elegance need not apply to every system. Chance dictates change, circumstance dictates survival. We can see that much in a test tube. I don’t see the leap from there to the real world as that large of one.
If a more elegant theory comes along and better fits the facts, so be it, as long as it’s backed by data. The alternatives suggested most publicly don’t seem to have the data to back of their claims (the most public ones lack even the possibility of finding data to support their claims, being untestable hypotheses).
Adopting a theory is sort of like marrying someone – it’s nice if they’re physically beautiful, but if there’s no brains or substance behind the looks, then you’ve probably chosen a particularly painful way to kill yourself. Beautiful people without brains = beautiful theories without data (or evidence). Theories are chosen even more ruthelessly, though – even average-looking theories without supporting evidence are dead, while ugly theories that fit (all of) observed data are alive and gold.
“Adopting a theory is sort of like marrying someone – it’s nice if they’re physically beautiful, but if there’s no brains or substance behind the looks, then you’ve probably chosen a particularly painful way to kill yourself.”
QED… String theory.
25% survey completions out of ~10,000 AAAS members. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like a pretty small sampling to draw conclusions about Science in general.
Also, if I remember correctly, you don’t have to be a scientist to join AAAS.
The data is more likely to have been skewed by a biased question, i.e. religion. It prompts those passionate to complete survey over those impartial people who disregard.
Its hard to correct for this. From the survey methods, In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.. Religious people were more likely to complete the survey and artificially increase the numbers.
Also from the report, the most notable differences were that the sample underrepresented student members and overrepresented those with emeritus status. Old people skewed the results. Old people can do strange things.
love that comment about conservative engineers…
Look, half of the population is below average but I don’t believe there is much condescention from people who do science for living – scientist are on average rather fussy and cynic and if you ask them about their opinion on the current state of affairs in business, politics, military, education and mass media etc I bet you will get even more bitchy commentary
so… democrats think that the public is full of idiots? pretty intolerant if you ask me.
Your logic needs work.
It’s not only scientists that think half the world is stupid. Ask anyone on the street how much of the population is composed of idiots, and they’d answer the same. Especially in the US, since Republicans think Democrats are idiots hellbent on destroying the nation and vice versa.
Also, they should have asked the scientists the question “How many of your colleagues/peers do you feel are inept/unqualified for their jobs?” and see what results they got. I have a sneaky feeling the answer would have been about 50% as well.
tl;dr everyone thinks everyone else is retarded.
Of the 40% of California students who graduate high school, the California Academic Performance Index-tested average IQ is 91. Remove Whites (100 IQ baseline, 816 raw score) and Yellows (106 IQ, 866 raw score) to leave ~83 IQ (677 raw score with 200 awarded for signing your name). God save us from the congenitally inconsequential.
Los Angeles Times “California section” page B3, 05 September 2008.
http://ca.rand.org/stats/education/api.html
Are the general public a bunch of retards… or have scientists lost the ability to communicate?
Scientists, in general, have never been able to communicate to the general public. Liaisons like Feynmann are the rarest of events in all of science.
I think PZ Myers thinks we’re just not loud enough. Maybe I quote poorly.
Didn’t Ted Nugent say it best first?
The problem with that is that scientists do actually have something of import to say. Saying it louder isn’t going to make people listen, and at some point people will take it as hostility and act accordingly. Population ratios make the likely outcome of that (for us, and eventually for everyone else) not so good.
Q.65 How often, if ever, do you do any of the following?
a. Write for a blog about science
2(often) 5(occasionaly) 11(rarely) 82(never) 1(no answer)
Wow! Over 7% (+-3.5%) of AAAS members admit to having blogs.
Back off, man – I’m a scientist.
The public appreciation for scientists is misleading. They probably support cool gadgets like computers and iPods and predominantly think of science in that context. Yet more than 50% don’t believe in evolution. Clearly there is a gap between what the public perceives as science (technology, cool gadgets, men on the moon etc.) and what we think is science (critical thinking, the scientific method, conservative optimism etc.) Clearly we are in trouble because the latter definition of science is crucial to the former.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
sweet ghostbusters reference