 I'm going to start this video off with a quiz. I'm going to ask you three questions about science topics, and I want you to remember your answers or write them down if you prefer. These are short answer questions, no multiple choice. Question one, why is it hotter in the summer than the winter? Question two, about how long does it take the moon to orbit the earth? What subunits are proteins made up of? Do you have your answers? Good, let's see how you did. Question one, it's hotter in the summer because that part of the earth is tilted towards the sun. The earth has an axial tilt around 23 degrees with respect to its plane of rotation, which increases the period of solar exposure. Question two, it takes the moon about 27.3 days to rotate around the earth, but give yourself credit for 28 days or 29. Four weeks or a month would also be fine. The orbital period is 27.3 days, but the cyanotic period, which causes the phases of the moon is based on earth, sun, and moon geometries, and it's about 29.5 days. Question three, proteins are made of amino acids, or you could get credit for polypeptides, which is another level of organization below proteins but above amino acids. Give yourself a pat on the back if you got all three right. Don't be too down on yourself if you missed one or two. And if you missed all three, well, it's never too late to pick up a book at the library. So why the quiz game? There's a growing divide in the US and in other places as well between those who understand science and technology and those who do not. Two camps have formed, and I think the consequences are going to be negative for both. Let me share with you the results of a biannual study done by the US National Science Foundation. The poll is conducted by telephone by an independent agency among around 2,000 adults 18 and over selected semi-randomly. There are 10 questions on a variety of topics, all true, false. Keep that in mind. A random guess would give a right answer 50% of the time. In 2006, 80% of the respondents knew that the center of the earth was very hot. 70% knew that not all radioactivity is man-made. 45% answered correctly that lasers are not focused sound. 53% correctly answered that electrons are smaller than atoms. Only 33% answered correctly that the universe began with a huge explosion. 80% answered the question about continental drift correctly. 76% got that the earth orbits the sun. 55% answered correctly how long it takes for the earth to orbit the sun. 64% answered that the male determines the sex of the child. 56% answered that antibiotics don't kill viruses. And 43% answered correctly the basic evolution question. This is staggering when you really ponder it. I understand the religious motivation about the two questions on origins. But the number of people who think lasers are sound energy. Almost half the people didn't know that an electron is smaller than an atom. Or worse, the number of correct answers was not significantly higher than everyone taking a wild guess. That's 2,000 people with no clue about basic technology and earth science. People don't understand our solar system, our basic genetics, how antibiotics work, or where radioactivity comes from. These are people for whom science and technology are strange and frightening. In a 1998 survey that asked questions not about facts or theories, but about the process of science itself. Only 7% of respondents from the general US population could explain concepts like controls, placebos, or experimental design. When the study was limited to only college graduates, the numbers went up, but only to 22%. When limited to those with graduate degrees, the number climbed just a little more to 26%. An informal poll conducted at a Harvard commencement ceremony showed that fewer than 10% of recent Harvard grads could explain why it was hotter in summer than winter. This study showed that only 50% of college seniors could identify the difference between an atom and a molecule. Some of you out there from outside the US are laughing at the stupid Americans, but you might want to take a closer look at this international data. The only questions Americans scored lower on consistently are the religiously charged origins questions. There, we only managed to outscore the country of Turkey, although Russia was just ahead of us. The Chinese scored worse than the US when asked about the Big Bang. There were a few clear outliers, although the EU and US seemed to be the frontrunners for most questions. To determine how much of the answers were religiously motivated, a rewording of the questions to say, according to the theory of evolution, brings the US up to 74% from 42% when asked whether it occurred this way or not. Similarly, the Big Bang results go from 33% to 62% in the US when prefaced by, according to the Big Bang theory. So some people know the basics of these theories, but don't accept them. We're facing a divide here. It's existed for decades, but I think it's widening. There are becoming two societies, those who value scientific knowledge and those who do not. Let me give you the bad news, folks. There are a lot more of them than there are of us, and they wield more political power, more economic power, more popular power, and they control the media. Everyone loves science in the abstract. They just don't want to be bothered with it. Fewer people worldwide know who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2009 than know who won Dancing with the Stars. But these people who reject scientific knowledge don't live in a vacuum. They have filled the gap in their understanding with pseudoscience. Here are the results of a Gallup poll in 2005. Over 40% of people believed in ESP, 38% believe in hauntings, 33% believe in talking to ghosts, 31% believe in telepathy, 26 in clairvoyance, 25 in astrology, 21 believe in witches of all things, 20% believe in reincarnation, and 9% believe in ghost possession. I reported 34% of polled respondents say they believe that UFOs are currently visiting the earth, up sharply from a few years ago. An unscientific survey by British newspaper The Daily Mail reported that of 1,000 British people, 58% believe in a supernatural world that included paranormal phenomena such as ghosts and ESP. In place of science, these people have pseudoscience to provide explanations for the natural world. I want to draw the lines out using two terms in a very specific way. On one side is science. I'm not talking about colored liquids and test tubes here, I'm talking about an evidenced based methodology that has mechanisms for self-correction that is constantly self-critical, that demands proof based on reproducible observations. This includes technologies that can be demonstrated to work and evidence-based approaches to problems. Microchips, space travel, and biotech, yes, but also academic historians, serious scholars of literature, law or government, any logical approach to the natural world or social sciences. This does not exclude all religious belief, but it does not include fundamentalism of any sort because of its absolute reliance on Scripture. On the other side is what I will call lore. I'm using a very specific definition here pertaining to the body of knowledge passed down as legend and folk traditions. The lore of a people are beliefs and stories that are not known to be true, but generally believed nonetheless. Common law, natural medicine, folk remedies, creation myths, anecdotal recollections, holy scriptures, popular rumors, and superstition. These are things that are no longer based on facts, but on intuition, oral tradition, or a sort of folk philosophy. There's nothing wrong in lore by itself, it helps to bind the culture together. It's when it substitutes for actual evidence, it out-competes or interferes with a scientific approach that we run into problems.