The point has ultimately arrived where public ignorance of the progress and purpose of science is not only harmful to the field, it also promotes an entire litter of pseudoscientific disciplines that suck away time, money, and brainpower.
Has science literacy amongst the general public really declined, though? Was the general public more interested in science in the past, or just interested in the products of science? Victorian spiritualism thrived alongside major strides in biology, chemistry and physics, for example. I'm not certain that the crackery has necessarily grown more pronounced. It may just be more visible due to the current political regime.
While I agree that science needs to explain itself better I'm not certain the general public is interested in listening unless it can somehow be made important to them for reasons other than intellectual curiosity. The same is true of matters such as international politics. Ask the average person about the conflict in Nepal and many won't have heard about it. On the other hand people appear to me more naturally interested (on the whole) in matters like the affairs of celebrities. How does one package science to be more appealing? Pay Angelina Joli to wear clothes featuring drawings of molecules perhaps? Perhaps it's not that science isn't explaining itself well enough, but that it lacks sex appeal. While I would fervently like to believe that people generally would be interested in science and the message just needs to be reformulated for greater clarity to bolster understanding and appeal, the pessimistic part of me isn't so sure.
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Has science literacy amongst the general public really declined, though? Was the general public more interested in science in the past, or just interested in the products of science? Victorian spiritualism thrived alongside major strides in biology, chemistry and physics, for example. I'm not certain that the crackery has necessarily grown more pronounced. It may just be more visible due to the current political regime.
While I agree that science needs to explain itself better I'm not certain the general public is interested in listening unless it can somehow be made important to them for reasons other than intellectual curiosity. The same is true of matters such as international politics. Ask the average person about the conflict in Nepal and many won't have heard about it. On the other hand people appear to me more naturally interested (on the whole) in matters like the affairs of celebrities. How does one package science to be more appealing? Pay Angelina Joli to wear clothes featuring drawings of molecules perhaps? Perhaps it's not that science isn't explaining itself well enough, but that it lacks sex appeal. While I would fervently like to believe that people generally would be interested in science and the message just needs to be reformulated for greater clarity to bolster understanding and appeal, the pessimistic part of me isn't so sure.