Directions: Please read the material provided and then craft a response to the following main questions posed to you. Once you have posted an original thread/reply, please respond to two other students’ posts in order to receive full credit. All entries must be thoughtful and convey your understanding of the biological aspects of the material. You must post an original thread in order to see other threads and responses. Postings and replies must be completed by midnight on the due date. Biweekly discussions will always be due on a Tuesday (by midnight), but it is strongly encouraged to complete at least your original response earlier than the due date so that other students may reply to your post in a timely manner. As always, be courteous to your fellow classmates. You do not have to agree with them. This is a classroom style discussion and not a courtroom. Always be civil and respectful in your answers.Discussion Topic 7: One of my biggest fears for our immediate future is not cancer, it’s not a bird flu mutating into a human flu (like Spanish Flu did in the early 20th century). It’s not even our current COVID-19 pandemic. For that matter, disease and internal genetic maladies are not my main concern. What really does scare the crap out of me is the current move toward deliberate ignorance of scientific facts and scientific realities fueled by the laziness of people’s thought processes which has crept into our daily social fabric.In today’s day and age, there is an immense amount of knowledge out there. In most cases, there is too much misinformation backed only by people’s opinions. These positions lack contextual and factual backing and have become a mainstay in peoples minds. People gravitate toward information that validates their suspicions even if those personal convictions directly contradict clear, objective, and observable scientific conclusions. Our electorate (YOU) in the US has never been this educated and flat out intelligent. We are the smartest we have ever been by any academic measure, but this intellectual inflation combined with the willful lack of fundamental scientific understanding creates mindsets in people where they THINKthey are informed/educated enough, well equipped enough, and even powerful enough to say “no that’s not true, I won’t believe it” based solely on their feelings while blatantly refusing to give deference and respect to the scientific process. The move toward anti-intellectualism is astounding. Furthermore, many treat science and the scientific process as a belief system. It is not. Viral kinetics do not care about your beliefs. Viruses will continue to do what they do regardless of human consciousness. “Science is a fundamental part of the country that we are, but in this the 21st century, it seems to me the ability for people to judge what is true and what is and what is not reliable has been lost. When you have people that don’t know much about science standing in denial of it, and rising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.” – Neil DeGrasse TysonWe currently have 535 people in Congress that run this nation. There are only 2 people with PhD’s from a STEM field, Bill Foster of Illinois (Physics) and Jerry McNerney of California (Mathematics). This lack of scientific input at the top of power in our country worries me greatly, and further, the complacency of our nation in the outright denial of basic science truly terrifies me. This is slowly changing as the new 117th Congress set the record for the number of degrees coming from STEM fields by members of Congress. A bachelors degree is a great start, but our leaders need to be doctorally educated in their fields in order to provide the soundest scientific judgement as we move forward as a species. (From the previous 116th Congress)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/mrs-bulletin/article/us-116th-congress-sets-new-record-for-members-with-stem-backgrounds/6BAADCDA3CAB1925EEA62FDACF24F7C4 (Links to an external site.)
Please view this promo for an upcoming series and then answer the questions below.
Scientific Literacy
1. What are your instinctual thoughts after viewing the short video?
2. How important do you think it is for our electorate and our leaders to be scientifically literate?
please respond to these two students’ posts
Haylee
1. I fully agree. If I am being honest, it seems that people believe their opinions to be facts and that their opinions are the only ones that can be true. In reality, it is almost impossible to prove something as fact, and for something to get even remotely close, it has to go through test after test and be reviewed so many times that it becomes an emergent truth, but still no fact. Science is powerful, and you can’t just believe it to be untrue when it has been tested and proven to be a truth by years and years of research. I think that science and politics are tied together, not two separate things that are against each other.
2. Because science and politics are tied so close together in my opinion, it is essential that our electors and leaders are scientifically literate. If someone is going to run our country or help to run our country, they need to be well versed in many things so that they can make decisions that are just and well educated, so they can make decisions that are in the best interest for many people and our environment.
AND
alexa
1. What are your instinctual thoughts after viewing the short video?
After vieweing this short video one thought that immediately stucked with me was when he said, “When you have an established scientific emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe it.” It is important to educate and let people know of scientific facts that will affect everyone and from then on if people choose to believe it or not, it is still happening and these issues should be taken care of instead of builiding ideas that people want to believe in in order to gain popularity.2. How important do you think it is for our electorate and our leaders to be scientifically literate?
I think it is very important for our electorate and our leaders to be scientifically literate because I believe that with knowledgable leaders, society would be able to progress more especially when it comes laws and rules to be able to take care of ourselves and the planet. I think that, like Mr. Tyson said, I believe that if we had more leaders that are scientifically literate they’d be able to encourage we’d be able to make this a human right issue to act on instead of politicizing it and buidling debates on it.
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