What People Think About Scientists

Just in time to feed into the discussion surrounding Unscientific America, there’s a new Pew Research Poll about public attitudes toward science. As is usually the case with social-science data, there’s something in here to bolster every opinion.

The most striking of the summary findings, to me, is the second table down, in which the fraction of people saying that “Science/ medicine/ technology” is the greatest achievement of the last 50 years has dropped from 47% to 27% since 1999. About half of that shifted to “Civil rights/ equal rights,” which is hard to begrudge, but the other half seems to have gone to “Nothing/ Don’t Know,” which is kind of sad.

(There’s a note suggesting that this is probably a fishy result caused by using differently worded questions, but still…)

On the depressing end of things, roughly half of Americans still think that lasers work by focusing sound waves, and that electrons are at least as big as atoms. If you want evidence that there’s something wrong with the way we teach science, there it is. The numbers for evolution and global warming stink, too, but at least there you can point to large and well-funded operations promoting disinformation about those topics for political/ religious reasons. I haven’t noticed a large-electron lobby, though, and I’m pretty sure there are no sonic lasers in the Bible. This is just bad education.