By Paula Bourges-Waldegg

What does it mean to be scientifically literate?

Sarah suffers from chronic depression. She started having symptoms when she was twelve, just after her father died. Five years later she became pregnant. She knew little about contraception. An abortion was completely out of the question so she got married soon afterwards. She lost her child a few months later due to a complication that could have been prevented with a single visit to the gynecologist. She also became sterile because of that.

After years of feeling sad, Sarah was finally diagnosed with depression. Her doctor put her on Prozac. She followed his instructions to the letter without asking any questions. Even though there was some improvement, she started having problems with her husband due to her lack of sex drive, a common side effect of anti-depressants she knew nothing about. When he left her for another woman, she flushed the pills down the toilet and fell into an even greater depression. She doesn’t know it, but her husband also left her an STD that will later cause her cervical cancer.

Anyway, Sarah believes that God has a special plan for her. That’s how she manages to go to work every morning except, of course, those days when her zodiac forecast is so bleak that she’s afraid to get out of bed. To alleviate her ailments she takes an assortment of herbal remedies and tries all kinds of alternative therapies, from magnetic fields to urine healing. Although none of that seems to work, she is confident that at least “it won’t give her cancer” because it’s “all natural”.

After several suicide attempts Sarah will finally die at age 43 from cervical cancer without even knowing she had it and convinced that she was destined for something great.

Sarah is, of course, just a character that I made up (any similarities to real people are not mere coincidence). But, her fictional life would be a lot better if she had a little bit of scientific literacy. That is, if she knew how to ask questions, search and assess information, interpret it correctly, and test her conclusions against relevant criteria. She is just an example of how scientific illiteracy can affect an individual’s life.

Ignorance of science results in poor decision-making, credulity and vulnerability. It makes people come up with weird correlations and bizarre explanations that can lead to minor or mayor disasters. It makes collective hysteria and conspiracy theories thrive. Panic follows when people see the words food and cancer in the same sentence (even heavy smokers will feel appalled by the imminent danger). Ignorance of science makes people with serious diseases avoid proper medical treatment because they believe prescription drugs will kill them before their illness does.  It makes them less afraid of untested and uncontrolled “natural” remedies than of medicines that have made it through all the phases of clinical studies. They assume that everything that happens to overdosed laboratory rats will happen to them.

But ignorance of science not only affects individual choices, it also impacts society at large and can lead to poverty, famine and war. The rejection of the theory of evolution and the denial of global warming are some current cases that can lead to serious consequences at this scale. And these are symptoms of a disease that appears to be much more than a passing epidemic.

Improving science literacy is, undoubtedly, the proper cure, but things are not that straightforward. On the one hand, science seems to be suffering from a public image crisis that complicates its widespread acceptance. In large portions of the population it is perceived as dull at best, and as a threat at worst. In popular culture scientists are frequently portrayed as arrogant and elitist, or as amoral and irresponsible.

On the other hand, scientists themselves don’t always agree on what scientific literacy means and on what improving science education actually entails. Thus, the problem is not only one of “framing the message”, but also one of deciding what the message should be.

So what does it mean to be scientifically literate? Some people think it’s about having a sort of “structured” common sense. But that cannot be it. Science is an unnatural, counter-intuitive and difficult subject. One has to abandon common sense to understand many of its basic concepts.

Others seem to believe that scientific literacy is just about these basic concepts. But what’s the use of knowing the second law of thermodynamics, the age of the universe or the parts of a cell if one doesn’t understand what this knowledge means?

That’s why scientific literacy should be more about the nature of science than about the content of science. Science as a way of explaining the world that strives to ensure that its explanations are true.

As Richard Carrier puts it:

“It does no good to know all the products of science and yet not understand science itself. For it is the nature of science that sets it apart from all other sources of authority, and which is most helpful in instructing our own lives and our own personal pursuit of the truth. To the scientific illiterate, scientific facts can be little more than the oracular pronouncements of a priestly caste of prophets whom we call scientists...”

In this sense, it is more important to understand the difference between theory and fact, induction and falsification, or how the peer-reviewed process works, than to know the age of the universe or the parts of a cell. If you know the former you will be able to value the latter, but not the other way around.

However, understanding the nature of science is not enough. Even if you are aware of where its authority comes from, the real benefit to an individual life comes from learning to think scientifically. Thus, scientific literacy should also be about knowing how to know. I’m not referring here to the scientific method (whatever that means) but to learning how to use resources to figure things out and settle questions; to solving problems based on data and evidence but also on creativity; to knowing where to look and how to assess sources; to understanding what information means in particular contexts and; to putting conclusions to the test.

The good news is that you don’t need to have a big I.Q. to do all these. You just need the right frame of mind. There are many tools to enhance human processing and memory skills, but there are no substitutes for scientific curiosity and critical thinking, both, capacities that most people can develop.

If Sarah knew all this she would, of course, still make many mistakes. But her problems and the way in which she would deal with them would be very different.  She would probably realize what an improbable arrangement of imaginary matter she is, and appreciate every little moment of her fictional life, one that, almost certainly, would be much longer and perhaps much happier. If she knew all these things, she would be the master of her own plan instead of a piece in God’s master plan.