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Most people take science courses in high school or college that are required of them, and once they graduate their science education stops. They learn no more, because science is not central to their chosen careers, and so they tend to ignore advances in science made since they left school. These people may be considered “scientifically illiterate”, tending to forget or distort what little they learned.
Some people, who actually become scientists, are on the cutting edge of their field and deal with very complex issues and problems that the average scientifically illiterate person would not even begin to understand. As a result, there is a huge gap between the average person and the typical scientist that makes communication almost impossible.
And there there are people like myself, who did take science courses in school, but are also self-educated about science. They were originally inspired by scientists like Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, or David Attenborough, who dedicated themselves to popularize science via books and television series. Once I as a child became enthusiastic about science, I kept going, because the more I knew, the more I wanted to know. And unlike many people among those who are scientifically illiterate, I recognize that science is not merely a collection of facts, but that it has a methodology for confirming those facts and that its ultimate goal is to explain those facts via the establishment of theories. A theory, such as those of evolution or the Big Bang, is the most powerful thing in science. Saying that evolution or some other concept in science people may find objectionable is “only a theory” is a bit like saying Barack Obama is “only the President of the United States”.
Pseudoscientists who have an ideological ax to grind, such as Creationists, global warming denialists, or AIDS denialists, can take advantage of the limited knowledge of the average person to decieve him with fallacious or even outright false claims that then lead that person to conclude that science itself cannot be trusted to provide reliable information. Thus, they perpetuate the cycle of ignorance.
Scientists who attempt to popularize science for the common people must symplify what they do to reach them. But that symplification is itself a distortion of science. For example, it is common knowledge that Gideon Mantell and his wife Mary discovered Iguanodon, one of the first known dinosaurs. What is not so well known is that Mary later left Gideon because he had abandoned medicine to focus totally on paleontology. Also, Sir Richard Owen, another paletonologist who actually coined the term dinosaur, was a bitter enemy of Gideon and even attempted to destroy Gideon's reputation after his death. Owen was also an enemy of Charles Darwin, denying his theory of evolution. Such things, which clearly show that even the most brilliant and dedicated scientists have character flaws, are ignored by most of those who write popular science books. But this does science a disservice, since it gives the impression that scientists tend to be infallible and thus the average person can never hope to understand what they do. When common people see people with science degrees promote bogus ideas, they mistakenly think the fake expert and his fake ideas are as legitimate as real experts with real ideas and thus there is a “controversy” that really does not exist.
Even worse, some people get so attached to personalities within science that they forget that science as an enterprise can only suceed by moving forward, rather than be attached to any individual. This attitude of attachment is derived from religion and should have NO place in science. We can admire the works of Sir Isaac Newton, but we should never be limited to what he did. Otherwise, Albert Einstein would not have developed his theories of relativity. Science in Europe ground to a halt during the Dark Ages because certain Greek philosophers and scientists, such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen, were thought to have found all the right answers and thus were venerated as infallible.
This is why we make such a strong effort to guard against attempts to mislead children in schools with pseudoscience masquading as science. We have to fight a constant uphill battle, because if even one generation is misinformed about the real issues in science, we will be set back decades or even a century in the effort to gain more public support for scientific research as well as in the effort to recruit more scientists.
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