What Defines Science Literacy

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Adam Bly, Founder, Seed Magazine

It is the question, I do not know, I think I know and we all know what a Science Literacy in the 20th Century constitute. We live at the time of kind of competitive pressure sputnik, certainly in the West and certainly in the United States. And a lot of how we define being scientifically literate was in terms of boosting competitiveness and ensuring that each nation have the intellectual resources, the human capital to compete in this sort of new military equation which was a lot more symmetric at that time.

And so we defined scientific literacy in terms of certain concepts, certain ideas, certain sentences we memorize, certain things we learned in order to advance and the way we built science literacy test, the way we track science literacy to questions we look that, had a lot to do that with paradigm.

Over the last you know, 30, 40, 50 years, we just celebrated, this year we are celebrating this 50th Anniversary at sputnik.

Over the last 50 years, it is certainly, the world has changed and science changed too and then science is place in the world has changed. And so I think that the other most significant factor are played to sort of define science literacy today is what are the forces acting against science? What are the disrupters that could throw off this 21st Century scientific renaissance this new science culture? And what is it that is motivating those disruptive forces?

And so, in order for scientific literacy to be the tool that come backs those kind of disruptive forces, we need to better understand those disruptive forces and I think we are still at the beginning stages of understanding that.

For example, science is buttressed by its instability. It is in fact the ability for science to be constantly over turned and constantly prove wrong and for theories that only last as good as they are until someone comes along and over turns them, it gives one of its greatest sources of instability.

But, that means living with unknown and being very comfortable with the unknown, and being comfortable with change, and not being fearful of it. And politically, many have been able to successfully leverage that instability on issues like evolutions, on issues like climate in to incredibly powerful political positions in the world, and certainly in United States.

And flip flopping has becoming a negative attribute as supposed to be one which is one of the highest virtues. Being able to change what is mind with new evidence.

And so, really trying to understand what motivates those disruptive forces and expressing to people what science in fact is. What the scientific method actually is. Why science survives?

As a tool that we built to understand things, to ask them totally view towards truth. It is something that will certainly constitute scientific literacy today.

I think that the other factor in science literacy today is one of the other factor is certainly a transformation from something that is very Western, something that we see us, you know, sort of a western enterprise. Although you know, the Chinese historically have contributed much to world by way of science in navigation, in gunpowder and printmaking and so fort.

But you know for centuries, science has been allure to western pursuit and when you look at who went to Novel Prizes, it is the Americans.

Science is clearly changing in sort of the landscape of science is changing the world today and the emphasis that China is placing on science, I think suggests both the amount of money they are spending on science and also just the emphasis that the leaders in China are now placing on scientific literacy as the corner stone of economic development in China and of political reform in fact.

Suggest that we need to start thinking about science less as strictly western enterprise that is defined by western values and western ways of thinking, but becomes a more global enterprise. And I think part of that is that my understanding of the way many Chinese people view the way many American people view science is as this far m