Don't know much about biology

From a short piece in the Sunday NY Times by Jim Holt:

As for the great ruck of ordinary Americans, they are merely uninterested in, or perhaps bored by, science. Only one in five has bothered to take a physics course. Three out of four haven't heard that the universe is expanding. Nearly half, according to a recent survey, seem to believe that God created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. Less than 10 percent of adult Americans, it is estimated, are in possession of basic scientific literacy.

This ignorance of science, flecked with outright hostility, is worth pondering at a moment when three of the nation's most contentious political issues - global warming, stem-cell research and the teaching of intelligent design - are scientific in character.

And further on, he writes:

...it is often said that science and religious faith are compatible, since the former deals with "how" questions, the latter with "why" questions. As an empirical matter, however, that does not seem to be true. On the whole, around 9 in 10 Americans say they believe in a personal God. When scientists are surveyed, that figure falls to 4 in 10. Among the scientific elite - members of the National Academy of Sciences - fewer than 1 in 10 say they believe in God, with the biologists in particular professing agnosticism or atheism at a rate of 95 percent.

We have come to the start of the 21st century with a determination to substitute faith in miracles, deities, sacred texts, and holy men for the tested rigor of the scientific method.

Preoccupied with ritual and even the most laughably marginal religious symbols, we debate whether a Christmas tree might better be known as a holiday tree, even as suicide bombers invoke their own notional deity to press their side of another, more serious, debate. And in both cases, faith shows its appalling ability to deflect the minds of men from progress and reason.

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