This will come as a shock to most Kansans: The United States is losing its competitive edge in science. A panel of 20 experts assembled by the National Academies — the nation’s leading science advisory group — is calling for an urgent effort to combat the United States’ slipping status.
The group’s report — which was requested by a bipartisan group in Congress — listed 20 steps that the United States should take to maintain its global lead. Funny, I don’t think attacking the long-established scientific theory of evolution made the list. But as our conservative State Board of Education members would say: What do experts know, anyway?
Posted by Melissa Cooley
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40 Comments
Well isn’t that amazing? with republicans in charge and the religious right on the rampage, we’ll be back in the dark ages before we know it.
The good ship US science has been listing for a long time now. I think there are lots of reasons. First off, there is a noticeable anti-intellectualism in many parts of the country. Second, there has been a tendency among childhood development specialists and early education theorists away from competition and winning/losing towards a “everyone is special and a winner for trying” attitude. Learning how to lose and learning that there are people better at things than you is an important part of growing up.
I see these kids coming into class completely unprepared for the fact that learning science is hard. They seem to think that sitting through a lecture (if they attend) is enough – they don’t open a book, don’t look at the notes, don’t study real hard for tests. They also seem to have a much higher opinion of themselves and their abilities than is warranted. As soon as they start seeing their crummy grades on tests and homework and they run into the well-educated, go-get-em foreign science and engineering students, they drop out immediately.
As XXX has pointed out above, the anti-intellecyual, anti-science attitude has accelerated over the last 15-20 years. Luckily, we’ve been able to treat our science deficit just like our fiscal one. We “borrow” well-trained scientists and engineers from other countries.
Even though the US has never scored particularly high in math and science training relative to other countries, US universities have been the envy of the world because US researchers have been pretty well-funded and have been extremely innovative. We’re even losing this edge as funding is pared back and as US trained students return to their own countries to implement US style R&D at home.
The attack on science is a natural occurence. When the goal is to bring creationism into the class room you have to tear down all science. For fear that some science will creep into the one that you wish to change.
Sad to say, perhaps as long as this country is violating long standing core values. It has become apparent that evangelical Christians should be ban from public offices. Yes in some incidents it is warented to use ones religious believes as a reason to bar them from politics.If their views are so extreme that they will distroy this country.It is not just the Moslem extremists that are a danger to the United States.
It’s very simple folks–you can’t have “faith-based” science.
Ever since the Reagan-cult of the 1980’s we’ve seen the rise of superstition (”end time” theology, natural disasters linked to “morality” etc.) with its full flower in Bush’s Dept. of Faith-based funding.
What we have now is a country run by people who start with the conclusions first (”Iraq has WMD’s,” “the free market can improve schools,” “deficits don’t matter”) and hold them on faith.
Of course science is going to suffer. It suffered under the religious repression of the Dark Ages too. This is the New Dark Age.
Oh, yeah, and if you have MS or Parkinsons or spinal cord trauma, forget about stem cell research.
We’d rather throw that fetal tissue away than let it save your pagan life, because that what GOD WANTS and we can read God’s mind . . .
That’s because the vast majority of American’s youth are more concern on who Brad Pitt is dating, who is going to be voted off American Idol, and how to dress to get the opposite sex gawking at you, than worrying about the Future and Science.
Joe, Pop culture has always dominated the minds of teenagers. None of this stuff is new, including the war on science.
John Adams once said “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
“Liberals” have been trying to keep religious views out of government and education since the beginning of this country. Even though it has been written into the constitution…the war of religion vs. science and government has never been won…we are still fighting it.Don’t let the little battles fool anyone into thinking the war has been won by one side or the other.
I don’t really think the problem here is creationism or religion in the classroom. The problem appears to me to be a lack of self-discipline, desire, interest in learning, and poor preparation. Life has become too apparently easy. I heard somewhere that it’s the butterfly’s struggle out of the coccoon that makes its wing muscles strong. If you help a butterfly out by peeling off the coccoon you actually end up making it flightless (and ultimately dead).
So, Brian, kids are just dumber and lazier than they used to be?
People do things for reasons. If they’re less interested in science, there must be an underlying societal reason for it.
It use to be that parents wanted their kids to be better off than they were. They wanted their kids to be better educated and wealthier.Nowaday’s, I think parents hold their kids back because they don’t want their kids to be smarter than they are. A lot of parents are holding their kids back because of purely selfish reasons. You see this in many socio-economic groups these days.It has become socially acceptable and cool to be “ghetto”. You see white kids, asian kids, latino kids and black kids all acting “stupid”. (I know that means stoned these days – but it still means dumb also).There doesn’t seem to be any value anymore in an education.BUT, this generation will be getting a huge wake-up call very soon. It is a lot harder to find blue collar jobs that need little or no education anymore.It is becoming more and more evident that we need to promote education to the whole country and not just tell kids how important it is.We have a generation of parents who missed out and we have a generation of wealthy single people without children who don’t want to pay for public education.
Galahad,
I never said thety were dumber. I did say they were lazier and less well-prepared. I think if you’d ask any kids who went through the great depression they were more appreciative of the little things – like food, clothing, and the oppotunity to go to school.
I believe that they also, as a group, said “we won’t allow our children to be denied as we were”. So, with the best of intentions, depression era kids gave their kids lots..and these kids gave their kids even more…no struggle, no effort, no knowledge of what it’s like to be denied.
Look at kids from countries with successful education and science curricula. Almost without exception education and science give these students the opportunity to escape from oppressive lives of desperation they witness in the lives of their parents and grandparents.
I read here all sorts of comments about how teachers need to better motivate students so they remain interested. If that’s so, how is it that the generations who grew up with the strict RRRs were the generations that developed the A bomb and all of the technology in the 50s and 60s..like that associated with the space program. And why is it that now the US must rely increasingly on foreign born and educated professionals from great schools like the Indian Institute of Technology? You ask these guys and they think US classes and work ethics are a joke.
Go to the WSU library on any evening…even Friday, Saturday and Sunday…almost every face is an Indian. They study anytime they aren’t at work or in class.
The major difference is that they do not own or watch TV. They do like to find entertaining stuff from India on the internet, but only after they feel prepared for class.
Brian,I’m old enough to have known quite a few people who lived through the great depression. Many had some, if not all the symptoms of PTSD. And yes, some of them had a great appreciation of the little things- a few to the point where they were unable to throw anything away, and just lived in a pile of accumulating junk! I wouldn’t recommend another depression as a cure for our present generation’s woes.The A bomb, space race and computer technology were accomplished by a relatively small and elite group of scientists, Who took technology way beyond what the culture of the depression could bear; one reason were having this discussion. Cultures change very slowly. That’s their function; to keep our feet firmly anchored in past experience. When technology runs so much faster than the culture can move, people get stressed. Some can adapt; others retreat to their culture and preach against change. Many cut their cultural roots and try to make technology their pop culture. These are heady times, maybe to an extent not seen since the beginnings of the neolithic age. And we wonder why we’re having trouble?
Jed,
I certainly wasn’t recommending another depression! If you take a look at the link attached to Melissa’s blog, some stark data are presented. China will produce 600,000 engineers, India 350,000, and the US 70,000. Population differences do not account for the the total difference. The US should be producing equal or greater numbers of scientists and engineers per capita, and maybe even on an absolute basis, given our lead in scientific endeavors and the relative generosity of public and private funding. We don’t, sadly.
With regard to your comment about the elite group of scientists involved in the efforts cited, I must beg to differ. The Manhattan project was the largest outlay of money for an R&D project in US history up to that time…200,000+ people – many scientific types- were employed. Ditto the space program and associated industries like aerospace.
Today, drug companies are looking to open major R&D centers in China and India because of the quality of the scientists, the number available, and the relative costs there. US centers are playing smaller roles or are even being closed. The same is happening for other industries too.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know the US has become more and more anti-intellectual, especially in the Midwest and US university students aren’t prepared to compete with their international peers.
Right, Brian. That’s where we agree, and the point I was trying to make.
The US has become more anti-intellectual. Absolutely, yes!
And why? Because the old time populists with their suspicions of the educated “elite,” have now become the ditto heads, the religious fundies, and the “gov’t can’t do anything right” proponents.
Reagan co-opted the justifiable middle class rage at their political impotence and directed it at welfare queens, environmentalists, and big gov’t liberals.
It also doesn’t help that 95 percent of the jobs in science are working for big corporations helping to pollute the environment or extract unsustainable resources out of it, again thanks to Republicans.
What is the plan then Galahad. What should we do?
Since it is known that the Education system is ran by unions, liberals, and Democrats, why are things not improving?
Some of us think the problem lies with the students and their parents.
Joe W.
The first thing we can do is elect a President who respects education by not disparging science (global warming, pollution, evolution, etc).
BTW, you’re wrong about unions running education. Kansas is a “right to work” state (meaning a right to get fired for anything state).
It’s illegal for unions to force teachers or anyone else to join, thanks to the Repukes.
One night I came to work think I had a fun fact to ask. I had seen on PBS a show about the Popes that control the church during the Renaissance. When the family that had been Pope finally lost the office. The new Pope the first time he toured the Sisteen chapel.Was upset at the amount of nudes on the ceiling. He commissioned a artist to censor the paintings.Through out histroy no one remembers that artist’s name. He is only known by the phrase in Italian for “Big underpants”.
I did not expect anyone to know that arstist name. But to my shock only four out of eight know who had painted the ceiling of the sisteen chapel. Two of eight had not heard of Michanglo.****When I was in High school I was told that even though most would not attend a college. The goal of education from kindergarden to the 12th grade was to prepare the student for college. But now the goal has change to preparing the student for life. Life being that most will not need a college education for the jobs they will have.
Since this country has moved from manufacturing to a service economy. You have no need of a higher education to say “How may I help you”. Knewledge is like grains of sand in a pail. You do not know which grain you will need in twenty years. So you should have as many grains as your pail will hold.
But the move of education from teaching as much as they could to only that which is necessary. Has turned this country into a depended child. The need for education is still there, but we must depend on others for our needs.
Too much beer today RD? You’re slurring your typing.
Brian,The point that I was making was that while 200,000+ people were involved in the Manhattan Project, That’s still only about .001% of the population at that time, and only a fraction of those were scientists, and only a fraction of them were actually in on what was being done.A fair percentage of drivers have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how the cars they drive actually work. Very few computer users do, and the numbers drop much further for the people who actually know all the ins and outs of computer design. The same goes for aerospace technology, genetic research and all the other fields driving our current tech leap.The rest of us simply have to take it on faith (interesting word) that these few know what they’re doing. Note all the hocus pocus surrounding radiation back in the ’50’s and ’60’s, and more recently, about Y2K and the Milleneum Bug, and Frankenfood. What people don’t understand, they mythologize!This is what I’m talking about when I say that an elite group has taken us beyond the ability of culture to adapt.I don’t see technology slowing down, and have doubts about culture catching up. Is the Butlerian Jihad approaching? I don’t know.
It’s the parents. Unless they enforce disciplined study habits, students can’t hack the math and technical courses needed for science and engineering.
It’s our culture and high standard of living. We are too comfortable, compared to China and India, where real poverty is still widespread and highly visible. The absolute will to excel is strongest in those who have little more than hope and opportunity. The education to become a doctor or engineer is revered in China and India, and competition for entry into universities there is intense.
It’s the employers – especially the big ones. A friend of mine with a PhD. in enginering and a long, succesful career in aerospace design and technology has often said that he has never been asked to do anything that required a shred of his technical education beyond high school trigonometry. He sees the same waste of most engineering talents. Companies hire graduates, plunk them down in front of a computer, and tell them to draw parts or punch mountains of numbers into the company’s analysis software. What a waste.
Just a side note: The United States leads the world in stem cell research, having more varied stem cells than any other country. California alone has promised over 3 billion dollars to the research. New jersey, and many other states have promised, or started research totalling over 11 billion. The most any other country has to work with is less than 1 billion.The problem with the sciences is not faith-bases bs, but a lack of teaching the skills necessary to expand the science base in high school. That’s where it needs to start. This touchy-feely nonsense has no place in the real world. Hard knowledge does.
Andy,
You got that right. I have a degree in engineering. Not to be a braggart, but I made some pretty interesting breakthroughs for a couple of my employers. They never recognized the worth and pretty much told me to stop wasting their dollar doing that development stuff and just work on what I was told. Sheesh!
Jed, I hear ya. But the general population is probably not a good comparison. Let’s assume that during the 40s and 50s, the US was producing about 50,000 engineers as is reported today. Let’s further assume that the average engineer stays in engineering (doesn’t change careers or move into management) for 25 years. That means 25*50,000=1.25 million engineers would be produced in those 25 years. The Manhattan project employed 200,000…perhaps half of which were scientists and engineers. That means the equivalent of 8% of the total number of engineers produced in 25 years were employed by the Manhattan project. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
Your comments about the speed of change and its relation to culture is interesting. However, India, China, and Japan have far older, more entrenched cultures, but they seem to be embracing the technological revolution by producing scads of the world’s top scientists and engineers.
Brian,One advantage(?) those countries have is that their cultures were, for all practical purposes, destroyed by colonialism, revolution and war. They were forced to start over pretty much from scratch, in the 20th century, and so are more able to adapt- at least for the moment.Ours, while suffering some trauma, has remained largely rooted in the 19th, while our tech base is accelerating to nearly relativistic speeds. Consider that just over 200 years ago, one man, Diderot, wrote an encyclopedia that more or less credibly encompassed the entire of human knowledge. Can you imagine the response to someone attempting that today? The sheer volume of available knowledge has doubled in just the last 30 years! Western culture just isn’t equipped to handle that, and so descends into blind faith and conventional wisdom myth. There really isn’t any way the average citizen can keep up with it all, and often as not falls for whatever line some self serving prophet of doom is peddling.Science has had a few good pitchmen of it’s own (Carl Sagan did a fair job) but it needs more and better ways to stay in touch with people.Schools need classes in “Bullshit I- how to smell it,” and “BS II, how to counter it.” I know schools are already overloaded, but given the times, such courses may be the most valuable resource they can offer!
It seems that anyone believing in creation is instantly labeled anti-science. Is it wrong to look for another reason for the same evidence around us? An evolutionist says there is a T-rex bone that is 70 million years old with red blood cells inside. I don’t doubt it’s a T-rex bone, or debate it’s red blood cells. Can I be free to honestly doubt it’s 70 million years old? It just seems more likely to me. Secondly, without creation, there is no basis for Christianity. If there was not Adam and Eve who willingly chose to sin and caused death to enter into the world, there is no need for a Jesus to remove sin and death. If Genesis is made up or alegorical, what makes the rest of the Bible true? Christians do not have to believe “blindly”. We do have answers for our faith, – even in regards to science. You either have to believe a flood laid down the sedementary layers all over the earth, or that millions of years caused this. BOTH views require faith. No one was there to see it happen. The way fish are burried in the layers, I believe a rapid, catostrophic flood caused it. Dead fish bloat and float, not sink and fossilize! Check out AnswersinGenesis.org – they have phd’s there that will respond honestly to your most scathing questions. We do have answers!
Ashley,
The methods used for dating bones are used in one form or another in lot of different devices and methods that work. If you doubt the ages of bones then you also doubt nuclear bombs..and I guarantee you these are real. You can’t pick where and when you want the laws of physics to apply.
Your comments about Christianity are true. In fact there is a very large segment of Christianity that doesn’t accept the whole blood atonement theory of Jesus’ death. It’s equivalent to saying that your parents gor so made at you for lying to them that they required you to go buy an innocent hamster and sacrifice it to them. You might try looking at the Westar Institute website and the Jesus Seminar associated with it. These scholars have been trying to reinterpret the meaning of Jesus and thety make far more sense to a lot of us than the 2,000 year old Pauline doctrine that God required the bloody sacrifice of an innocent victim to appease his anger.
And Ashley,
Since I work in an engineering department at a university here in the state I have access to people who can do dating. You’re welcome to contact me with any very old item for which you know the date and we’ll nail it..guaranteed.
Boy this thread is stunning….The usuaual librals are on here attacking the vast republican conspiriacy to keep every one poor so vehemently they have not once addressed the topic of this thread.
janabanana and brian point out a GLARING problem that is not tied to politics AT ALL. And the usual leftists refuse to address the fact that a walk through a college campus will tell you alot why america is falling behind.
Nations don’t compete with 12th grade educated people. They compete with highly educated engineers, scientists, doctors…etc
What we really need to be asking is why that indian student is going back to india after graduating from an American university? Why are they choosing India over America? That is why we are falling behind.
Americans are graduating with essentially worthless arts degrees meanwhile forgeiners are packing the engineering and science fields, going back to their home countries and building the infrastructure to compete with us. Econonically AND Militarily
Brian,That’s the problem with scholars… too many believe that they are smarter than God. God used simple things to confound the “wise”.
Kansassam,
And that’s the problem with fundamentalists…they deny the evidence put before their senses by the very God they claim to believe in.
You know, Cordoba in Spain had street lighting and sewer facilities when London was just a dung heap. The fundamentalists took control of Islam back then and that was the end of the flowering of Muslim civilization.
Whenever you put unproven and unprovable digma ahead of empirical fact you slap the God you claim to believe in right across the chops.
Lemme quote something for you:
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons,sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky,people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitivestories, and you say that WE are the ones that need help?”
You’ll forgive me for saying it Sam, but you and those like you are the ones this blog story was directed at.
Brian,I believe in the miracle of life and in the God that created it! I believe in the power of God, and yes, all those things are possible for a sovereign God.. no magic needed.Those who cannot even entertain the possibility are the ones that are narrow minded.. not to mention without hope.
Kansassam,In fact some of the most profound statements about the nature of the divine have come from scientists. Unfortunately, you have put dogma ahead of the wonders of nature. Who’s narrow minded depends on your point of view.
That aside, i’d rather enjoy the benefits of an advanced industrial society while seeking thedivine rather than doing it in a mud hut. therefore, i support science and what it teaches us about who we are and where we came from.
Wow! Lets just get rid of science and subject everything to the “Ashley Test”. We can base every theory on whether something seems likely or not to her.
Kansassam,”That’s the problem with scholars… too many believe that they are smarter than God.”
Nobody’s claiming to be “smarter than God,” just smarter than you! Please don’t continue to confuse the two.
To all you creationists out there; hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe you’re fighting the wrong battle? You want so much to prove science is wrong, because you think science leaves no room for God. You’re mistaken!If you read the physics closely, you will find at the moment of creation, an infinitesimal fraction of a second that science will probably never be able to account for. If your God is everything you say he is, that’s more than enough time to set into motion all the initial conditions from which everything in the universe would logically unfold; an infinitely more elegant solution than six days of doing it one thing at a time!Now there, you’ve got your creation. How about leaving it to science to explain the rest!
I know, Jed. It’s so easy to reconcile, it’s laughable.
Science can only go back to the big bang, and then it becomes a “singularity.” That’s fancy physics talk for “we don’t know what the hell happened and can’t begin to account for it.”
So if one were to believe in a Christian God, as I do and a lot of good scientists do, you could say, “there’s the moment of creation–everything else followed from it over 14 billion years.”
The religious fundementalists ask the Bible to do what it was not intended to do–to be a scientific manual or a history book or a family tree going back to Adam.
It’s a religious book to (as Milton said so famously about his poem) justify the ways of God to men.
When fundamentalists make the Bible infalliable on all subjects, they cease worshipping God and instead begin worshipping the Bible. They idolize the Bible, instead of respecting the Word. Their false faith becomes the “letter of the law” that killeth, instead of the spirit that giveth life.
Mere Musings –
It is interesting to consider how the fossil record shows modern man to have come on the scene roughly 100,000 years ago. Yet, moving forward about 90 millennia from that time, we have little more than a few tools and cave paintings to indicate an intellect.
We have evidence of several civilizations dating some 13 millennia ago; yet, somehow, writing was not developed until about 5200 – 5500 years ago.
We can also look backward from current times, going back several thousand years and find discoveries and writings that indicate a level of intelligence not much different from ours.
It appears, from this, that our intelligence may be somewhat “static.” It seems that the development of intelligence has been a consistently slow process, maybe even stupendously slow.
Yet, sometime between 6000 and 13000 years ago, the level of human intelligence apparently took an uncharactristic leap, at least in terms of its productivity.
It doesn’t seem likely that this is the result of the human brain finally reaching a “critical” configuration or size, but it is possible. Maybe the stability provided by the emergence of civilizations allowed knowledge to persist and leverage itself for the first time, maybe gains in nutrition raised the effective intelligence levels of populations significantly.
Maybe all of these things. Still, the question sticks. Are these the necessary and sufficient conditions to propel mankind forward from tribal packs to the modern era in such a short blink of the anthropological eye?
Or was there higher intervention?
I don’t have any idea; but it seems a lovely question to ponder.Exploring the mysteries of both science and religion is great fun.
Jed..I was referring to the Jesus Seminar… but if you are smarter than me.. I got no problem with that.
Brian..I have no problem with the wonders of nature.. God created an amazing, wonderful world. What has happened since that point is history. I, personally don’t want Creation taught in public school by science teachers that have no idea what they are talking about. But I do also believe that scientists need to just admit when they can’t explain something. Jed has it right… there is room for science AND God… after all, God created science!!
Sam,
Now that is a reasonable viewpoint. No one I know has ever said science explains everything. This is either a mistaken or perhaps purposeful misrepresentation of what science is about. However…
science DOES have an impact on theology. If a theology makes claims that are in violation of observation, then it is the theology that is in error, not the observations or the science.
Too many religious people are of the attitude, “If there is a conflict between what my pastor and religion tell me and what I can observe with my senses, then so much the worse for what I can observe with my senses”. This is a denial of God’s true nature in favor of a theology about God, plain and simple.