Where are the antiscience attitudes? Not among the general public

Indeed, support and appreciation for science among the general public has held remarkably strong and steady over the decades, according to the study's survey. (For more than two decades the National Science Board, NSF's policy-making body, has issued biennial reports on the state of science in the U.S. The chapter on public attitudes and public understanding in the 1996 report was prepared by Jon D. Miller and Linda Pifer of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, under contract to NSF.)

For instance, 86 percent of American adults surveyed in 1995 for the new report agreed that "science and technology are making our lives healthier, easier, and more comfortable," up slightly from the 84 percent in 1983. And 72 percent agreed that "the benefits of science are greater than any harmful effects," up from 57 percent in 1983.

About 40 percent of Americans expressed a high level of interest in science discoveries and in the use of new technologies. The NSF says this level of interest has been relatively stable for the past decade, "indicating that science and technology have become an integral part of American culture."

Similarly, the survey's tracking of public confidence in the people running various institutions, surveyed every year or so since 1973, shows the scientific community ranked second among thirteen institutions, behind only medicine. Third was the military, followed by the U.S. Supreme Court. At the bottom of the list were Congress, the press, and TV.

Remarkably, among the thirteen institutions, the scientific community and the military were the only two that showed an increase in public confidence from 1973 to 1994. The survey data confirm the widespread drop in public confidence in U.S. institutions that virtually everyone has noted. For instance, public confidence in Congress, the executive branch of the federal government, and the press each dropped by about a factor of three over those two decades, and confidence in the leaders of education and organized religion dropped by about one-third. Confidence in the leaden of major companies dropped by about 15 percent.

Yet the percentage of adults who expressed a great deal of confidence in the scientific community rose slightly from 37 percent to 38 percent during the same two decades, with only slight year-to-year variations (low of 36 percent in 1977, high of 45 percent in 1987). Medicine retained its top ranking despite dropping over the two decades from a 54 percent to a 41 percent rating.

When the report was issued earlier this year, most of the attention was devoted to the public's generally poor understanding of scientific vocabulary and concepts. Only 21 percent could give a satisfactory explanation of DNA and only 9 percent could explain what a molecule is. Only 44 percent knew that electrons are smaller than atoms, and 73 percent knew that the earth goes around the sun, meaning that 27 percent got it the other way around. As might be expected, only 44 percent said it was true that human beings developed from earlier species of animals. This less-than-majority agreement is probably at least as much a measure of religious resistance to the idea of evolution as a lack of knowledge. For example, a concept at least equally nonintuitive - that the continents on which we live move over periods of millions of years and will continue to do so - was correctly rated as true by 79 percent.

The more education, the more science education, and the more the respondents rated themselves as attentive to science, the better the scores. Males generally scored better, except on several biomedical-related questions.

Several questions asked about the nature of scientific inquiry. These asked about such things as the meaning of scientific study and the reasons for the use of control groups in experiments. The study found that only 23 percent of Americans understand the nature of scientific inquiry well enough to make informed judgments about the scientific basis of results reported in the media. Again, higher levels of education and greater exposure to science courses resulted in higher results.

So, as other commentators have noted before, the American public seems to have a strong appreciation for science but little substantive knowledge of it.

So what about the antiscience sentiment that has so concerned scientists - that has been the subject of books, articles, debates, and symposium sessions at the recent CSICOP twentieth-anniversary conference "Science in the Age of (Mis)Information"?

Well, this survey didn't seek out attitudes among the populations where scientists say antiscience attitudes are rampant - in university humanities and social science departments and among other intellectuals and writers and opinion leaders. The concern, they say - and this was emphasized several times at the CSICOP conference by Nature's John Maddox and others - is that antiscience attitudes are endemic among a relatively small but especially articulate and influential group of academics, including numbers of teachers of the next generation of liberal arts majors, our future politicians and business leaders.