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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Science Literacy

We talked about this rather humorous and startling video some time ago, but it's worth bringing back. Fifty six percent of French people polled on this game show said that the sun revolved around the earth. Now France, of course, is a very secular nation in which evolution is taught in school and over 80% of the people believe it to be scientific fact. Yet a majority of the viewers of this show hold a pre-Copernican belief about the solar system.

The next time you hear someone trot out the old canard that if we allow evolution to be challenged in our schools it'll be the death of science literacy, point them to this video as anecdotal evidence that evolutionary belief and science literacy have very little to do with each other.

RLC