By Christopher Crossley

Scientific literacy is knowledge based on science and the basis on which important decisions can be made by government, business and other organisations based on research and knowledge gained, including, for example, on climate change.

There are nevertheless many individual people in the world who may have received an education over so many years, but whose scientific literacy is very uncertain.

There was one American TV show, for instance, where the person presenting the program – the host, if you will – went out onto the street outside the TV studio to ask people basic questions taken from an elementary school science book. Now, you’d think that adults would know the answers to such basic questions as “Which is bigger? The Sun or the Moon?” The young adults, some of whom said that they were to graduate from college or university, shown in that program didn’t actually know the answer, and they looked really embarrassed when they couldn’t answer. Another question was: “How many planets are there in our Solar System?” Some people shown took completely wild guesses. One asked, “Over a hundred?!” One person was even a graduate in mechanical engineering from a famous American university, and she didn’t even know the correct answer!

In another example of a survey, more than half of people responding to questions about food labelling said that they wanted information on the labels to say if DNA was contained in the food. The problem with this is that DNA is contained in the cells of all animals and plants! Would that mean that people would refuse to eat the food just because the label said it contained DNA? That implies that, somehow, eating food with DNA in it must be bad. If so, where did they get this idea from in the first place? Some individual posting videos on social media warning people that this, that and the other are so bad?

Yet it is a thought, though: why are so many people prepared to trust people who are not scientists with views related to science? Is it because scientists are thought of as people who have their own agenda? Maybe they work for companies which produce goods for the market and are paid not to reveal certain scientific facts which could prove controversial in public just as long as those companies continue to get their profits?

There used to be advertisements in the 1950s for tobacco products like cigarettes which supposedly said that doctors liked to smoke them more than any other brand. This was despite the fact that the dangers of getting lung cancer from smoking were only just starting to be publicized. Nowadays, all doctors would tell people not to smoke tobacco, so why were doctors in 1950s America openly advertising cigarettes?

If you can’t trust doctors to speak scientific truths, whom can you trust?

Thanks to the Internet, there are now plenty of websites produced by many organisations which can help people to develop their scientific literacy so that people can get an informed opinion about important topics like climate change, which, even now, is still a very contentious issue and can have consequences for human society, such as the alleged need to abandon petrol-engine cars and use EVs only instead.