There Are Moral, Ethical And Practical Things To Consider

We can’t be good citizens without more study of science in this highly developed society.

In the future, we will have to make tough decisions as we face profound ethical dilemmas. Without the requisite scientific information, we will have no alternative but to turn the choices over to people who do, but who may have other hidden agendas.

A balanced democracy can survive only if we start learning more about the scientific magic that can make or break us.

Homo sapiens - man the knower - is turning inevitably into homo mechanicus or homo technicus. Even a relatively small city like Spokane would be in perilous chaos if it ever lost electrical power for a long time, so dependent are we all on a technology we both require and take for granted.

The densities of our population centers would be unthinkable without an extraordinary support system, bringing water and food in, taking waste out, and delivering to us all the extras we require for a civilized and comfortable life. Getting merely the ink for The Spokesman-Review in place and on time requires production and delivery systems simply not possible without an army of people who understand science and engineering.

Shrinking resources, increasing populations and constant new research and development all mean that we have lost the luxury of not paying attention to how our world works and what it costs us to cause it to work the way it does.

Studying science requires effort and the price of not making that effort is high. You can’t blame students for preferring easier courses, or people in general for wanting relaxation instead of the effort of thinking. But the Chronicle of Higher Education reported a year ago that only 5 percent of adult Americans meet basic standards for scientific literacy. This is dangerously low, given the ethical choices we face and the desperate need to tell the difference between the real and the bogus.

One-fourth of our U.S. population believes the sun revolves around Earth. Thirty percent of Americans believe in ghosts. Most of us don’t know how to calculate the astronomical odds against winning the lottery and last year, we spent more than $12 billion on “alternative” medical treatments that have never been proven effective.

Most of us can’t explain how a car, television and computer all work, yet we depend in varying degrees on their doing so.

Enormous numbers of people believe that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, don’t know that a molecule is bigger than an atom or that an electron is smaller, and don’t seem to know that objects fall at the same rate, regardless of their size.

In the late Carl Sagan’s valuable book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” there is this provocative sentence: “When is the last time you heard an intelligent comment on science by a president of the United States?”

His rueful observation is true. We don’t hear any deep outpouring of scientific knowledge from the bully pulpit that is the White House. Not even Jimmy Carter, who had some training in nuclear physics, managed to give us a sense of value or perspective in the technical wizardry that drives much of our American Century.

For that matter, I never hear laudatory remarks about science from secretaries of education, which may be even stranger.

About all we ever get from these public figures is a slogan or two about landing on the moon, about curing a disease or building a space-shield of weapons - political jargon that merely serves political ends.

The rhetoric we do hear revolves around our building of competitive job skills, which, while clearly important, is distinct from the evaluatory ability necessary to determine public policy.

The scientific method is so necessary for critical thinking, for making judgments based on evidence, that our wholesale abandonment of it can only lead us into peril and loss.

Our entire culture depends for its very existence on sound, ethical scientific applications of complex technology. How can we expect to keep producing these wonders if we keep our people ignorant of science?

The future of the United States depends more on those quiet guys in the corner, the ones with pocket protectors and a yearning for research, than on athletes who blast their way to dramatic touchdowns.

Athletics and healthy bodies have their place, of course, both in a balanced curriculum and a strong society, but why do we worship so much the agony and triumphs of the athlete while we all too often call the scientists, the students who will actually invent more of what we need, “geeks” and “nerds?”

We make a great show in the United States of praising our heroes, but in today’s complex global economy, heroism comes more from the lab than from the arena, or even from the battlefield.

We have the institutions of higher learning already in place. It’s an amazing irony that the best students from around the world flock here to learn at the same schools where so many of our students don’t. Our nation, with its hopes and plans to lead the world, won’t be able to keep up with the technology if we raise a whole host of people who have no scientific curiosity and receive no scientific training or education.

If we want continued democracy, we need to learn more science.