Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
and number theory. One of them, 17-year-old Jeremy Bem,
commented 'Maths problems are logic puzzles. There's no routine
- it's all very creative and artistic' But here I'm concerned not
with producing a new generation of first-rate scientists and
mathematicians, but a scientifically literate public.
Sixty-three per cent of American adults are unaware that the
last dinosaur died before the first human arose; 75 per cent do not
know that antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses; 57 per cent do
not know that 'electrons are smaller than atoms'. Polls show that
something like half of American adults do not know that the Earth
goes around the Sun and takes a year to do it. I can find in my
undergraduate classes at Cornell University bright students who
do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the
Sun is a star.
Because of science fiction, the educational system, NASA, and
the role that science plays in society, Americans have much more
exposure to the Copernican insight than does the average human.
A 1993 poll by the China Association of Science and Technology
shows that, as in America, no more than half the people in China
know that the Earth revolves around the Sun once a year. It may
very well be, then, that more than four and a half centuries after
Copernicus, most people on Earth still think, in their heart of
hearts, that our planet sits immobile at the centre of the Universe,
and that we are profoundly 'special'.
These are typical questions in 'scientific literacy'. The results
are appalling. But what do they measure? The memorization of
authoritative pronouncements. What they should be asking is how
we know - that antibiotics discriminate between microbes, that
electrons are 'smaller' than atoms, that the Sun is a star which the
Earth orbits once a year. Such questions are a much truer measure
of public understanding of science, and the results of such tests
would doubtless be more disheartening still.
If you accept the literal truth of every word of the Bible, then
the Earth must be flat. The same is true for the Qu'ran.
Pronouncing the Earth round then means you're an atheist. In
1993, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik
Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the
world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in
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