Science literacy in Australia and the US

A survey (pdf) commissioned by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies of Australian science literacy has somewhat mixed results.

(Update: See also an ABC News (Australia) report on it here. )

The report on the survey, which was conducted just over a week ago by Auspoll, seems show some disturbing results, though others are mildly encouraging.

For example, 30% of Australians think humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and 39% don't realize it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the Sun. On the other hand, I found that 13% of people knew that 3% of the world's water was fresh surprisingly high.

The survey replicates a survey conducted in 2009 by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences. The press release (which contains all the information I can find online) only describes a brief subset of the results, but I have compared everything I have information on.

Steve Novella commented on the US survey last year; his questions and criticisms would apply to both surveys.

Summary of the results of the Australian poll (correct answers underlined):

Q1: How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun?
 One Year: 61
  One Day: 28
One Month:  2
 One Week:  1
 Not Sure:  8

Q2: Is the following statement true or false? The earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
   False: 70
    True: 30
Not Sure:  0

Q3: What percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered by water?
  0-25% :  0
 26-50% :  2
 51-60% :  4
 61-69% :  9 
    70% : 41
 71-80% : 33
 81-100%:  6
Not Sure:  6

Q4: What percentage of the Earth’s water is fresh water?
      0%  0
      1%  5
      2%  5
      3% 13
  4%-10% 23
 11%-25% 19
 26%-50%  9
 51%-60%  3
 61%-70%  1
 71%-80%  0
81%-100%  0
Not sure 22

Q5: Do you think that evolution is occurring?
Yes, I think evolution is currently occurring:       71
No, I do not think evolution is currently occurring:  8
No, I do not believe in evolution:                   10
Not Sure:                                            11

Q6: Do you think that humans are influencing the evolution of other species?
Yes, I think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:       77
No, I do not think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:  7
No, I do not believe in evolution:                                         9
Not Sure:                                                                  7

Q7: In your opinion, how important is science education to the Australian economy?
Absolutely essential: 42
Very important:       38
Somewhat important:   16
Not at all important:  2
Not Sure:              2

One highly amusing outcome of this survey is that even though only 71% of people think "evolution is currently occurring", 77% think that "humans are influencing the evolution of other species". Presumably at least six percent of people think humans are affecting evolution while isn't happening. The cognitive dissonance must be astounding.

Here's the corresponding information I was able to pull out of the Calacademy press release:

- 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.

- 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time

- 47% of adults can approximate (within 5%) the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.

- 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%

- Less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet's water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%).

- Science eduction: Essential or Very Important to the US economy: 77%


The Calacademy press release didn't mention the evolution questions, but we can do a comparison with another Harris Interactive poll (pdf) which suggests that rates of "do not believe in evolution" and "not sure" in Question 5 above are about half of the equivalent rates in the US, roughly consistent with other figures I have seen.

Here's a graphic showing a comparison of the corresponding the percentage of correct answers from the two surveys on Questions 1-4 and the percentage rating science education as "essential" or "very important" for the national economy:



(Graphic generated in the free statistical package R)

Australia is outperforming the US (pretty handily on some questions), but that may not be saying a whole lot.

Australian Tyrannosaur

Well, the headline is overblown, but it's still interesting; I wouldn't have expected a tyrannosaur would be found in Australia

You can't quite see them waving, yet.

Images of planets orbiting other stars.

Magnetic cows? Well, maybe not.

Science journalists love a kooky headline.

The latest is magnetic cows. It seems rather blown out of proportion.

Google earth photos indicate a tendency for cows (and some other grazers) to line up north-south. But supposedly you can't tell if they are facing north or facing south or any mixture of the two.

So, here's a conjecture*:
In the morning, cold cows stand side on to the sun (which is in the east), thus exposing a greater area to the sun.
In the late afternoon, cold cows stand side on to the sun (which is in the west).
In both cases, they will face either north or south (and probably won't prefer one much over the other).
In the middle of the day, warm cows in a paddock with little shade might even stand backside toward the sun (thus reducing sun exposure when they're hot)... and thus tending to face either north or south, depending on the hemisphere.
Consequently, there would be some tendency for cows to line up north-south, purely as a way of managing sun exposure in order to be more comfortable.

[*Yes, yes, I know it says in the BBC article Their study ruled out the possibility that the Sun position or wind direction were major influences on the orientation of the cattle. Dr Begall said: "In Africa and South America, the cattle (were) shifted slightly to a more north-eastern-south-western direction."
"But it is known that the Earth's magnetic field is much weaker there," she explained. How does that establish anything? If sun and wind hypotheses have been ruled out, why not explain how? The bit about Africa and South America really doesn't help that much, so if that's what they've got, it's damn weak.]

Edit: Well, reading the physorg link more closely, it looks like they used "shadows" to discount the effect of the sun. It's not clear what precisely they did -- there are a variety of possible conjectures that might involve the sun. I'll have to try to get the PNAS paper. I just went looking for it, but in spite of the fact that the library supposedly has electronic access, the article is not showing up, either in the most recently available issue there, nor in the articles that have immediate access.

Indeed, I can think of several other perfectly simple explanations that I'd want to eliminate before I start hypothesizing magnetic cows.

Does that mean that I assert cows don't have a magnetic sense like some birds?
Not at all. Such a thing would be particularly useful for some migrating animals, say, caribou or wildebeest, so it's certainly not completely out of the realm of possibility. But you have to at least show that it's not some rather obvious and simple thing like sun exposure before you take it at all seriously. And you need a lot more than "they looked at shadows" or "the cattle were at a slightly different angle in Africa" before concluding that you've eliminated alternative explanations.

That cows tend to align north-south is interesting. But magnetic cows is a bit overblown on that basis alone. At best its a plausible conjecture.

Well, I guess we wait and see. If anyone does see the paper, I'd be curious to know just how strong the arguments for the elimination of alternative explanations actually was.

Quantum computers, RSN?

Graphene seems to be the new favourite material - it's cropping up everywhere, the way that fullerenes were a few years ago, and recently SWCNTs in particular. Just lately, it's specifically graphene.

At the same time, quantum computers have a number of serious technical hurdles to deal with.

Well, as highlighted at the physics arXiv blog, in a recent paper at arXiv, "Z"-shaped pieces of graphene nanoribbon are being suggested as a solution to several of those issues. Specifically, you need to have things that don't readily interact with the environment, yet can be manipulated and can interact with each other; electrons are problematic because they interact with the environment (which is why a fair bit of quantum computing focus has been on photons - but they have their own problems). The "corners" in the graphene Z's are where the action happens - the electons are "stored", not interacting with the environment, but where their spins can interact with each other.

The authors say: “Due to recent achievement in production of graphene nanoribbon, this proposal may be implementable within the present techniques.”

You won't see quantum laptops in stores for next Christmas. But instead of "decades" we're maybe now looking at a few years for something on a lab bench, and maybe getting closer to a decade for practical devices, and perhaps another 5 years after that for consumer products. Maybe.

But Vista will still suck on them.

"Quantum computers will be better than..."

ordinary computers programmed by publicists or reporters.

The story I linked to yesterday on a quantum computing development says this:

If a traditional computer were given the task of looking up a person's phone number in a telephone book, it would look at each name in order until it found the right number.

That's just stupid. The phonebook is in order for a start. So at worst, you'd use a binary search (but there are better things to do than that). That's already "exponentially better" (using their own words).

Tyson

Saw Neil deGrasse Tyson on Colbert last night.

He was very quick with his response to Colbert's bit about "Goddiddit" ("You can say that, but then you can't find out anything," if memory is working okay).

Then again, I guess he's been on enough to know it was coming.

Is the man hot, or is it just me?

(Link now goes to correct segment, not just the right show, so you don't have to find it in the list.)

Contingency in evolution vs the journalists

Answers in Genesis BUSTED! points to New Scientist's reporting of the interesting story of contingent evolution in e. coli.

Fortunately, nowadays we have the resource of actual scientist-bloggers rather than being restricted to what passes for science reporting these days, because the New Scientist story drives me nuts. As much as I love being able to hold a magazine in my hands to read, this reminds me why I decided a few years back that New Scientist was too expensive for what I was getting. (I have boxes and boxes of the things. Is there a good charity that needs a whole lot of old science magazines that I won't go broke getting them to?)

Frankly, it's entirely typical of science reporting, and another example of why science reporting sucks, and why blogging by scientists beats it hands down.

Aside from the fact that the New Scientist report has the emphasis wrong, it's just a generally typical sucky example of science reporting, with distortions of fact and silliness. (To be fair, here and there it does an okay job of explaining some bits, but really, I'm no expert, and I could tell it sucked before I'd read about it anywhere else.)

[Actually, what used to really drive me to screaming fits of rage was whenever they let Ian Stewart start talking about statistics. The guy may be a reasonable mathematician, but his explanations of statistics sucked dogs balls.]

I highly recommend reading the Pharyngula
discussion.

For goodness sake, even the abstract of the paper he quotes (jargon aside) is in many places better written than the New Scientist article.

Let me quote a paragraph from the New Scientist report:
"In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories."

Gah!

"doors ... that remain forever closed to other populations" is one of the more ridiculous statements I've seen from New Scientist, and they've had some doozys.

forever closed? forever??

Bullshit. If the "tricky part" - the enabling mutation - evolved once, in only 20000 generations (which then further evolved several times to produce the ability to metabolize citrate), it's obviously possible for it to happen again. The probability of it evolving is not zero.

The fact that Blount, Borland & Lenski couldn't get it to evolve independently a second time just means that probability is likely very low. Maybe extremely low.

But forever is actually a pretty long while. You might think it's a long time 'til lunch, but forever is such a really long time that any mathematically nonzero probability of it evolving in a finite amount of time (as was observed to occur) means that by forever, it will have evolved an infinite number of times. And, if you're not real good with the counting thing, take it from me that infinity times is just a tad bit bigger than zero.

And what's with that bit about "evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome"? Which cryptotheist retarded version of evolution do they think they are arguing with there? All you have to do is take a look at a human eye (heck, just get a small light and grab a handy animal with a spine) to know that. The blood vessels of the eye lie on top of the rods and cones! They're in the way! Anyone can see them! And the nerves, too - that's why we have a blindspot. And, funnily enough, the light sensitive bits point backwards, away from the light. Our eyes are arranged ass-backwards!
(That it needn't have happened this way is obvious from squid and related creatures, whose eyes are not arranged "backwards" like ours. And there are hundreds of little examples of this sort of thing.)

Evolution is completely cobbled-together (i.e. contingent), and it's already completely obvious that it's so - to anyone with eyes. Well, and maybe a brain.

[based on a comment I made at AIGBusted.]

God of the non-gaps

Evolved and Rational's latest post is another delightful snark, with which I am nevertheless going to take issue.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, Evolved is being far too kind this time, I'm afraid.

She says: "Behe's theology is one where god resides in the gaps of human knowledge [...] his criteria for detecting design is merely what has not been explained by science at the time. "

I think the first part of that quote is what Behe was aiming for. Unfortunately, he missed - Behe's examples of gaps, his cases of "irreducible complexity", his examples of non-evolution, are wrong.

On HIV, Behe was wrong. He was thoroughly spanked by erv (erv is now at scienceblogs), pursued at Panda's Thumb (e.g. ), and eventually forced to admit that he was wrong. A sucky admission, but still, he finally noticed he'd been pwned.
On the bacterial flagellum, Behe was wrong. Epically wrong.
On the immune system and much else besides, Behe was wrong

These are just examples, there are lots of others.

I'm not aware of a single instance where Behe managed to pick an actual legitimate gap.

[It's not like it's hard. As the cryptotheist evolution-denialists are so fond of pointing out, just like building a drystone wall, every time a gap is filled in, there are more (but much tinier) gaps around it - so these days there are plenty of little gaps to go around, if you have even the slightest clue about where to look. Of course the big problem for the cryptotheist is that to actually find the genuine gaps you have to know enough science to be able to read a few papers - that is, to display a basic competence one might expect from a beginning science postgrad.]

While trying to construct a God-of-the-gaps (a trivial exercise for even the barely competent), Behe - doubtless inspired by God - constructed a God-of-the-non-gaps, a God-of-the-reducibly-complex, a God-of-the-already-explained-by-science.

Behe's work is a masterpiece of epic fail. Perhaps God is trying to tell you something, Michael. Like how much you suck at science. (As Abbie pointed out, you also suck at Google.)

(I won't even bother with Dembski. His work is more incompetent, contentless and pathetic than that of Behe. And he's an unrepentant - and incompetent - thief. Why pussyfoot about, let's just go the whole hog. Dembski just generally sucks.)

Science, FTW

Evolution on the tabletop

Students will soon be able to watch evolution occuring. Except the deluded cryptotheists, who will, as usual, be poking their fingers in their ears and shouting "la-la-la-la".


Update: lungless frog, 92 mya snake with legs.

Oh noez! now there are four more gaps!!!

X-chromosomes major drivers of speciation

X-chromosomes a hot-spot for genes that prevent sperm production in hybrids.

Assisted suicide

This news is getting on a bit now, but I still wanted to mark it here.

Study finds no evidence to justify concern about the potential for abuse in physician-assisted suicide.

The concerns people raise don't turn out to be a problem in places where physician-assisted death is legal.