Well, maybe that’s not fair. It would be more like saying “RNA World in Warm Fissures Theory” was an accepted theory and all comers would be trying to knock it off the pedestal 🙂

You mean it isn’t? I’ve detested that theory since I first read of it, but AFAIK it pretty much is (accepted theory etc.). I may be biased of course, having read Kauffman’s Origins of Order years previously, but mostly when I read it, writers treat it like the “Received Wisdom of Blog”. Or perhaps that’s just the blogosphere, and the specific papers bloggers link to.

Like this: http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/presentations/microtubules.html

Superficially interesting, 99.999% likely to be completely irrelevant at the level of depolarizations and millivolt fields.

Some of my best friends are physicists, but there is a certain amount of hubris that occurs in that field which seems to cause otherwise perfectly intelligent (presumably) scientists to think that they can enter a non-cognate field and figure out everything about it without even considering what work has been done already.

Blockquoted for truth; that’s absolutely spot on 🙂

Doing even chemistry from “first principles” in physics would cause a headache, but that’s peanuts to biology, especially when trying to look for something that works akin to a ‘physical law’.

The strange thing is that physics has this problem all the time … people showing up with new and better theories to replace relativity or quantum mechanics … so they should know better!

There’s a constant stream of them that pop up on forums or even any time Einstein gets mentioned in an article in a newspaper – the comments sections go ballistic. There’s just so much garbage that it’s possible that we may suddenly encounter a better answer and never even know it.

At least relativity and quantum mechanics are relatively stable. The astronomical forays into dodecahedral universe and Big Bounce just make me tired; it ought to be big news if standard Lambda-CDM were really on the ropes. I even saw a video recently with someone berating theists from glomming onto the Big Bang because the Big Bounce research of late says that may not have been the beginning, so ha ha, theists.

Could you imagine the equivalents of these in biology? Every year or so, we would get things like spider monkeys being more related to real spiders than other monkeys due to some weird artifact of tree-of-life likelihood analysis.

Well, maybe that’s not fair. It would be more like saying “RNA World in Warm Fissures Theory” was an accepted theory and all comers would be trying to knock it off the pedestal 🙂

Back to the OP, I don’t know if we can really speak of a general scientific literacy; it would have to be field by field. We could talk of perhaps trust in either the people or the methodology, but it really is only that trust, not necessarily very much knowledge, that can be transferred or used between scientific fields.

At best, I think we could come up with a topic:literacy mapping. For example: health requires scientific literacy in subsets of biology, environment requires a slightly different overlapping set and climate science.

Maybe reverse the requirement a little bit to say “can you properly detect bullshit?” on topics on which science has something to say.

By that factor alone, faith and common sense are both “inherently uncertain”, it’s just that they insulate the applicant against realizing it.

When I said that common sense and faith aren’t inherently uncertain, I meant from the perspective of the individual. While sometimes both of them produce uncertainty, they often times don’t.

The problem here is that people can’t replicate scientific results themselves, so they have to “have faith” in the scientists making the claims. The problem is, people’s “having faith” in scientists is often mistaken (even by those people) as actual faith. In most cases, it’s well-founded belief in science as a process, rather than faith in a vacuum.

But in many cases it really is actual faith. That said faith has a strong grounding in an evidence based system, but due to the inability of a given individual to reasonably evaluate the evidence themselves, accepting the results of a given scientific endeavor relies on faith in the process used and in the scientists who developed that evidence. In the case of people who are scientifically literate, this would be an uncertain faith – but it is faith none the less.

I agree that there are people that simply accept what scientists say because they can’t apply the science themselves, but there are others who are willing to look at the reports and studies and judge them critically, based not on common sense or their understanding of the science but by a process that includes understanding that the preponderance of scientists accept the preponderance of evidence for any particular claim.

The problem with that is that there is a great deal of science that, unless you have the language (ie. have a solid educational background in a given subfield), you simply cannot evaluate it to any functional degree. So you have to take the voracity of the evidence on the word of people who actually do understand the language. They might even be able to explain much of it in laymen’s terms – that doesn’t mean the layperson can lay claim to any but a very superficial understanding of the issue.

I think it would help, in this context, to understand “faith” as referring to “trust.” Ie. “I trust Orac to provide accurate and reasonably critical evaluations of studies he writes about, that I don’t have the language to understand.” When I do that, I am having the faith that Orac has the ability to critically evaluate that information and that he will do so honestly. Now there is a good reason that I trust Orac. In my experience with him, he has never been dishonest in any context where I actually was able to evaluate the evidence myself – and because he makes his biases very clear. But it is also founded on the fact that he is something of a friend/ally.

And then there are the virtually innumerable issues in which I just don’t/can’t have enough interest to spend the time investigating the evidence. Indeed at this point, the only issues that I spend enough time on to actually evaluate best evidence, would be a certain set of psychology subs, gender, race (and other identity issues), rape and other interpersonal violence, inter & intrastate conflict, interstate cooperation, danger of/relevance of states and neurobiology. Further, I can only engage a small fraction of the research that is directly relevant to the fraction of those fields that is of particular interest to me.

I guess I just don’t see how, according to your definition, anyone can be scientifically literate. Nobody can investigate everything for themselves. Everyone either has to accept some things on authority, or just assume there are a hell of a lot of things that aren’t true. Now the latter is plausible, but pointless.

Should those who wish to be considered scientifically literate simply not make decisions based on things they haven’t investigated? There are many times and many decisions where what you are suggesting isn’t possible. Does that make those decisions irrational?

A geologist would need to understand plate tectonics.
However plenty of Creationists pass through college in these fields by understanding, but not believing these founding principles in their respective fields.

The problem here is that people can’t replicate scientific results themselves, so they have to “have faith” in the scientists making the claims. The problem is, people’s “having faith” in scientists is often mistaken (even by those people) as actual faith. In most cases, it’s well-founded belief in science as a process, rather than faith in a vacuum. So in that respect, I disagree with DuWayne. I agree that there are people that simply accept what scientists say because they can’t apply the science themselves, but there are others who are willing to look at the reports and studies and judge them critically, based not on common sense or their understanding of the science but by a process that includes understanding that the preponderance of scientists accept the preponderance of evidence for any particular claim. It’s those people that I would classify as scientifically literate, regardless of whether they can apply the science themselves or not.

The next step is turning this into standards. When doing that, specifics have to be introduced to some extent, for example, what are the general principles in each of the major fields that people should have some idea about (i.e, evolution, basic cellular processes, DNA replication and translation/transcription, etc. etc.). These standards are then turned into curriculum and coursework.

The people writing these definitions have that very much in mind

So your questions are all good questions, but they are the exact questions (and there are more) meant to be raised by the definition.

I don’t think I care for that definition much. It is really vague and makes some bizarre statements.

It means that a person has the ability to describe, explain, and predict natural phenomena.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? As written, the implication is that to be scientifically literate, one must know essentially everything about everything. If not everything, then which natural phenomena must one understand?

Scientific literacy entails being able to read with understanding articles about science in the popular press and to engage in social conversation about the validity of the conclusions.

So essentially, scientific literacy means you should be able to explain that with very few exceptions, you should take anything the popular press has to say about science with a grain of salt? That it is exceedingly likely that the popular press is sensationalizing to some degree, or another? That, in point of fact, they may actually be saying the complete opposite of what they are reporting on?

Scientific literacy implies that a person can identify scientific issues underlying national and local decisions and express positions that are scientifically and technologically informed.

The problem with this, is that there are far too many such issues to possibly know enough about all, or even most of them to the degree required to express such a solid position on them. For example, I can’t even begin to understand the science involved in the issue of river cleanup and superfund sites. I know that Michigan has a fuckton of trashed rivers that need to be cleaned up and that the process of cleaning them is complicated – and that this cleanup is pretty important. And there are innumerable such issues. I don’t understand the science that would indicate that a proposed (years ago)temporary storage platform for nuclear waste from the Palisades nuclear power plant (extremely close to the shore of lake Michigan) was unsafe – but a convincing argument was made so I apposed it.

A literate citizen should be able to evaluate the quality of scientific information on the basis of its source and the methods used to generate it. Scientific literacy also implies the capacity to pose and evaluate arguments based on evidence and to apply conclusions from such arguments appropriately.

This right here seems to be a perfect definition for scientific literacy. It is universal, but doesn’t imply that people need to know about nearly everything to be science literate. I am fairly capable of reading papers about topics I only have a peripheral understanding of and noting bullshit. It is impossible to do so perfectly, sometimes understanding the methods and their ability to support the conclusion absolutely requires too much technical language I don’t have. But more often than not, it is possible to evaluate methods in the context of determining if they could actually prove or disprove the null hypothesis and thus support any contextual conclusion.

I also know well enough, when regardless of the conclusions I have drawn, I just don’t understand it well enough to make a strong assertion about it. It is simply impossible to understand everything and being scientifically literate requires admitting you just don’t understand it. That doesn’t always mean you can’t make strong assertions about something. I can’t begin to understand the nuance of global warming, but based on the statistics, my understanding of the bigger picture and the visible evidence, I am more than comfortable with asserting it is a huge problem we need to be focusing a lot more resources on.

All the rest of that definition is distraction and confusion. There are two things I would add to the para above. First, there should be something to indicate the varying degrees of certainty a scientifically literate person should put to ideas they don’t fully understand. Second, the definition should also recognize the importance a scientifically literate person should put to understanding their biases, how those biases interact with their preponderance of evidence and how they might work to compensate for their biases.

And by that definition, someone who is willing to make the absolute assertion that their god created the heavens and the earth is unquestionably not scientifically literate. On the other hand, someone who makes the assertion that they recognize that the best evidence science has to offer would indicate that life as we see it today evolved, but that this contradicts what they were taught – generating uncertainty, I don’t think it could be argued that they are not science literate (at least based on that give factor).

This is not an argument that can be resolved in simplistic terms. The very difference between science as a way of knowing and both faith and common sense as ways of knowing, is that science is inherently uncertain. When beginning any study or experiment, we first make sure we can potentially prove our hypothesis is wrong and after we have drawn a conclusion, we might get excited about it, but we will also recognize that we still might be, indeed are likely wrong – in some way, or another. At best, we will maintain an optimistic skepticism.

Faith and common sense aren’t inherently uncertain, though they certainly can be. The problem I think, is that while science as a way of knowing isn’t inherent to people who understand things in terms of faith and common sense, faith and common sense as ways of knowing are inherent to being human. No matter how skeptical, how scientifically minded a person might be, we all take things on faith and common sense. That is just the way it is. What is important, is that we try to recognize where these other ways of knowing interfere with our science.

–bks

I mean, why does the Big Bang and evolution get a special mention here? You could accept both Big Bang and evolution — and by “accept” I mean “take them as reasonably accurate descriptions of the physical world” and be an anti-vaxxer. It happens. Somebody like that could fit the definition of scientific literacy you give above.

This is why I like the idea of being scientifically literate and that it is something we should strive for in the world we live in. But what that means in real terms seems a mite slippery. Maybe we go with a pragmatic approach, which is part of the definition there. (?)