Try these three true or false statements before you read on:
1) The continents or land masses on which we live have been moving for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.
2) Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
3) The earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
...
Now that you've had a chance to say True, False, False, and "Why are you asking me such easy science questions?" you may be shocked (as I was) that only 23% of respondents, when posed these questions, were able to answer all three correctly. 69% of the respondents had college education, with 27% holding college degrees and 14% having attended graduate school.
The interesting thing is that the survey, reported in the newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, then went on to ask respondents' views on the teaching of creationism, "intelligent design," and evolution in high school science classes. It turns out that those who answered all three questions above incorrectly were much likelier to support creationism while those answering all three correctly strongly favored evolution.
What surprises me is not the trend of low science literacy and favoring creationism, but that the bar for discriminating "low" science literacy can indeed be set so low and still yield the suspected underlying trend.
It also doesn't bode well for science education in America.
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