Americans are big believers in weird science.
A new poll shows that we’re a bunch of skeptics when it comes to science about the environment, evolution and even the origins of the Earth.
But most Americans are confident about scientific concepts when they relate to health and genetics, The Associated Press poll found.
Only 4% of Americans doubt that smoking causes cancer.
And only 6% question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain.
The vast majority accept that we carry genetic codes inside our cells. Only 8% quibble with that finding.
Far more people — 15% — question the safety of childhood vaccines, the AP poll revealed.
About four in 10 Americans are unsure or don’t believe in global warming.
The same ratio eschews the commonly accepted scientific belief that the Earth is billions of years old and that life was formed through a process of natural selection.
But the biggest group of doubters — 51% — clustered around the Big Bang theory, the AP found.
A narrow majority of Americans question the idea that the universe originated sometime between 10 billion and 20 billion years ago from a massive explosion.
The results depressed and upset some of America’s top scientists, AP said.
“Science ignorance is pervasive in our society and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,” said 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley.
Political values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change.
Religion was a major factor too, the poll showed.
Confidence in those same scientific issues decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the AP.
“When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can’t argue against faith,” said 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University.
“It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable,” he told the AP.
But while some Americans balk at knowing what they prefer to think is unknowable, they embrace science when it relates to their bodies and their health.
Jorge Delarosa, a 39-year-old architect from Bridgewater, N.J., pointed to a warm 2012 without a winter and said, “I feel the change. There must be a reason.”
But he questions the Big Bang theory because “I wasn’t there.”
With News Wire Services
