The slide into ignorance.

Now one can argue the methodologies of the various surveys, but my point is this: there seems to be a war on science in the Western world. It's not just evolution, but a whole host of issues from climate change to vaccinations. The attack on science comes from all sides, both the political right and the political left. People with various political or economic agendas are attempting to destroy science for their own personal, corporate or ideological gains. All this in the face of the evidence that they are wrong.

The war started long ago with the erosion of education budgets in the US and Canada. As the Angus-Reid poll shows, those with more education are also less likely to believe in creationism (70% in favour of evolution for university grads vs 53% for those with high school or less. It becomes obvious why the political right hate education, with so much of the political right's support coming from fundamentalist Christians who as a rule are young Earth creationists. It also has come from the right due to economic reasons, oil and tobacco companies have spent billions over the years to convince people that global warming isn't happening and that smoking doesn't cause cancer. It is also in these groups' interest that the collective ignorance of society increases as it is easier to cause fear, uncertainty and doubt in an uneducated mob than in an educated people. Wouldn't want an educated society getting in the way of some CEO's summer home or some religious zealot's attempt at converting society.

Of course the war continues on the left front as well. Various groups on the left, from anti-vaxers to new-agers are pushing the bounds of ignorance forward. Again unevidenced belief is trumping science in society with more and more media time devoted to advancing these causes. These actions cause as much damage to the advancement of science and reason as anything the political and religious right can dish out, and needs to be treated in the same way. The risks and dangers to society from unevidenced new-age/homeopathic medicine, anti-vax mongers, and new-age religion are as great as those from groups espousing creationism and denying climate change. All these groups are undermining the public's scientific literacy for their own agendas.

The truly sad part is that whenever a scientist or a defender of science tries to stop the war, that person is viciously attacked (metaphorically speaking, for the most part) by people on both the right and the left. Unfortunately the attackers have turned off their brain and are letting their beliefs blind them to the world. So you have in one breath a scientist being attacked for showing that the Earth's climate is indeed warming by people who's belief in the opposite is so entrenched they won't even look at evidence to the contrary only to be broadsided by those who would normally support that scientist on climate change when that scientist provides evidence that challenges their firmly entrenched beliefs when it comes to say, vaccines.

Unfortunately blind ideology makes better press than good science. Further, many of our governments are run by elected officials who are more and more making their decisions about science education and science matters using that same blind ideology. This is further exacerbating the situation. By reducing the quality of science education by cuts to funding or changes to curriculum the science literacy of society is lowered and thus even easier to bamboozle by whatever pseudo-scientific claptrap is put out by the anti-science forces. This causes more anti-science press and yet more attacks on science, further reducing the public's desire for science education creating a nasty feedback loop where society collapses under the collective weight of it's own ignorance.

So what to do? It's hard to say given that the opposition has already shut it's collective mind. This means direct argument with them won't work as that's what they want. They can force us to play their game where they continually move the goalposts and require extraordinary evidence from science, but require none from their own side. The only hope is to get at the population that hasn't polarized itself. The difficulty there is that argument from ideology tends to be quite passionate, if not often wrong. Though scientists are often passionate about their work, it is difficult to translate a series of journal articles into compelling press. The evidence supporting science is often tedious, mathematical and sometimes appears to go contrary to common sense, further making it difficult to convince a public with at best a passing knowledge of science and it's methods. This is the fundamental question that remains.