NCSE Evolution and Climate Education Update for 2013/04/26
Submitted by Peter Burns on Fri, 2013-04-26 15:06.
National Center for Science Education
(by NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch)
Dear Friends of NCSE, A new poll offers a degree of insight on American scientific literacy on issues connected to evolution and climate change. And a new issue of Reports of the NCSE is published.
POLLING AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC LITERACY A new poll from the Pew Research Center andSmithsonian magazine offers a degree of insight into American scientific literacy on natural selection, the age of the earth, and climate change, although there were no questions directly addressing evolution in the sense of common ancestry or climate change in the sense of anthropogenic global warming. Presented with "The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millons of years and will continue to move into the future," 77% of respondents said that it was true, 10% said that it was false, and 13% said that they didn't know or volunteered a different answer. The results were comparable to earlier results from Pew and the General Social Survey. Asked "Which of these is a major concern about the overuse of antibiotics," 77% of respondents selected "It can lead to antibiotic resistant bacteria," 6% selected "Antibiotics are very expensive," 10% selected "People will become addicted to antibiotics," and 7% said that they didn't know or volunteered a different answer. And asked "What gas do most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise," 58% of respondents selected carbon dioxide, 10% selected hydrogen, 8% selected helium, 7% selected radon, and 16% said that they didn't know or refused to answer. The percentage of correct responses was down from 65% and 66% in two 2009 polls. "Education is the strongest demographic predictor of knowledge about science and technology," the report observed: while 85%, 95%, and 76% of college graduates correctly answered the questions about continental drift, antibiotic overuse, and atmospheric warming respectively, only 68%, 58%, and 49% of those with a high school education or less did so. There were only minor differences with regard to political opinion (63% of independents, 58% of Republicans, and 56% of Democrats correctly identified carbon dioxide as responsible for atmospheric warming), age (although respondents 65 or older tended to score lower), and sex (men slightly outperformed women, except on health-related questions). According to the poll report, the poll was conducted "in telephone interviews conducted March 7-10, 2013[,] among a national sample of 1,006 adults 18 years of age or older living in the continental United States" and weighted by gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, region, and telephone status. The margin of error for the total sample was +/- 3.7%. For the poll report (PDF), visit: http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/04-22-13%20Science%20knowledge%20Release.pdf And for NCSE's collection of polls and surveys, visit: http://ncse.com/creationism/polls-surveys RNCSE 33:2 NOW ON-LINE NCSE is pleased to announce that the latest issue ofReports of the National Center for Science Educationis now available on-line. The issue -- volume 33, number 2 -- features Minda Berbeco's "Political Bias Meets Climate Bias: Overcoming Science Denial in a Politically Polarized World" and Barbara Forrest's "Intelligently Designed Data: The Bogus Louisiana Teacher Survey." And for his regular People and Places column, Randy Moore discusses the career of the paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. Plus a host of reviews of books on human evolution: Matt Cartmill reviews Michael Ruse's The Philosophy of Human Evolution, Holly M. Dunsworth reviews Anne H. Weaver's Children of Time, Anne D. Holden reviews Brian Sykes's DNA USA, Andrew Kramer reviews Dean Falk's The Fossil Chronicles, Elizabeth J. Lawlor reviews Mary Bowman-Kruhm's The Leakeys: A Biography, and J. Michael Plavcan reviews Rob Brooks's Sex, Genes, and Rock 'n' Roll. All of these articles, features, and reviews are freely available in PDF form from http://reports.ncse.com. Members of NCSE will shortly be receiving in the mail the print supplement to Reports 32:2, which, in addition to summaries of the on-line material, contains news from the membership, a regular column in which NCSE staffers offer personal reports on what they've been doing to defend the teaching of evolution, a regular column interviewing NCSE's favorite people, and more besides. (Not a member? Join today!) For the table of contents for RNCSE 33:2, visit: http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/issue/current/showToc For information about joining NCSE, visit: http://ncse.com/join Thanks for reading. And don't forget to visit NCSE's website -- http://ncse.com -- where you can always find the latest news on evolution and climate education and threats to them. -- Sincerely, Glenn Branch Deputy Director National Center for Science Education, Inc. 420 40th Street, Suite 2 Oakland, CA 94609-2509 510-601-7203 x305 fax: 510-601-7204 800-290-6006 branch@ncse.com http://ncse.com Read Reports of the NCSE on-line: http://reports.ncse.com Subscribe to NCSE's free weekly e-newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/ncse-news NCSE is on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/evolution.ncse http://www.youtube.com/NatCen4ScienceEd http://twitter.com/ncse NCSE's work is supported by its members. Join today! http://ncse.com/join
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