Video:
dr. miller, 63, a political scientist who directs the center for biomedical communications at the medical school, studies how much americans know about science and what they think about it. his findings are not encouraging.
while scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 - 25% of americans are "scientifically savvy and alert." most of the rest "don't have a clue." at a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process.
rolf f. lehming, who directs the science foundation's surveys on understanding of science, calls dr. miller "absolutely authoritative."
it was the nuclear power issue that first got him interested in public knowledge of science, when he was a graduate student in the 1960's. "the issue then was nuclear power," he said. "i used to play tennis with some engineers who were very pro-nuclear, and i was dating a person who was very anti-nuclear. i started doing some reading and discovered that if you don't know a little science it was hard to follow these debates. a lot of journalism would not make sense to you."
fewer than a third can identify dna as a key to heredity. only about 10% know what radiation is. one american in five thinks the sun revolves around the earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.
devising good tests to measure scientific knowledge is not simple. questions about values and attitudes can be asked again and again over the years because they will be understood the same way by everyone who hears them; for example, dr. miller's surveys regularly ask people whether they agree that science and technology make life change too fast (for years, about half of americans have answered yes) or whether americans depend too much on science and not enough on faith.
but assessing actual knowledge, over time, "is something of an art," he said. he varies his questions, as topics come and go in the news, but devises the surveys so overall results can be compared from survey to survey, just as sat scores can be compared even though questions on the test change.
dr. miller attributes much of the nation's collective scientific ignorance to poor education, particularly in high schools. many colleges require every student to take some science, but most americans do not graduate from college. and science education in high school can be spotty, he said.
"our best university graduates are world-class by any definition," he said. "but the second half of our high school population - it's an embarrassment. we have left behind a lot of people."
"this country cannot finance good school systems on property taxes," he said. "we don't get the best people for teaching because we pay so little. for people in the sciences particularly, if you have some skill, the job market is so good that teaching is not competitive."
dr. miller was recruited to northwestern medical school in 1999 by administrators who knew of his work and wanted him to study attitudes and knowledge of science in light of the huge changes expected from the genomic revolution.
the national science foundation is recasting its survey operations, so dr. miller is continuing surveys for other clients. one involves following people over time, tracing their knowledge and beliefs about science from childhood to adulthood, to track the way advantages and disadvantages in education are compounded over time and to test his theory that people don't wait until they are adults to start forming opinions about the world.
lately, people who advocate the teaching of evolution have been citing dr. miller's ideas on what factors are correlated with adherence to creationism and rejection of darwinian theories. in general, he says, these fundamentalist views are most common among people who are not well educated and who "work in jobs that are evaporating fast with competition around the world."
but not everyone is happy when he says things like that. every time he goes on the radio to talk about his findings, he said, "i get people sending me cards saying they will pray for me a lot."
ny times
