carl sagan science as a candle in the dark

I said so at a talk on this same literacy topic at UCLA to over 1,000 people. As a geologist, I was especially happy about this, because I thought we must be doing a good job teaching about plate tectonics, convection, and Earth structure. Cigarette smoking causes cancer Ninety-one percent agreed, and it is true, yet 30 percent still smoke! Why is this question answered so positively? Because it is an issue that has been in the press and on TV for years.Interestingly, that percentage is identical to what newspaper editors believe! And they control our news. Forty-eight percent of Americans agreed, and every single one of you graduates know it is wrong. Humans lived with dinosaurs, and I don’t mean birds, I mean T.Seventy-two percent agreed but you know that’s wrong. Eighty-five percent agreed, and it’s right, and I have no idea how they knew that one. The oxygen we breath comes from plants.The other choices, however, did not add up to 100%, because some people (15 percent) thought that no answer was correct, because the Sun goes around the Earth! How long does it take Earth to go around the Sun? One day, week, month or year? Forty-seven percent knew it took a year.I’ll let you keep your own score, and I’ll give you only eight of the questions. The National Research Council (NRC) questioned a random sample of Americans with ten science questions. Americans are woefully inadequate both in their understanding of how science works and in their knowledge of basic scientific facts. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most critical elements profoundly depend on science and technology. So what? Is it important that people be scientifically literate? You bet! The late Carl Sagan said it well in his 1996 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Worldwide, that will be over 5 billion, 400 million scientifically illiterate and a mere 285 million scientifically literate people, more or less, in the year 2020. In just twenty years, those numbers will rise to 240 million illiterate and only 12.6 million literate in science. In fact, more than 197 million have little idea how science works at all. Fewer than 10 million other adults in the U.S. He or she has become part of that 2-3 percent of Americans who understand the process of science-how it works, how science is done and applied. Your graduate has joined a tiny percentage of Americans who are scientifically literate.

I want to focus on one reason why the graduates here are unique and special, and suggest a way that they might change the world. The following is an excerpt from the keynote address given at the Integrative Biology and Human Biodynamics Commencement, University at California at Berkeley, May 16, 1999.

Carl sagan science as a candle in the dark