The other day I read in the newspapers that a visiting professor had said that there are more and more science-illiterates these days. People want to know about science and technology but only to a certain level. After that people don’t really know how anything works.
I suppose most of us take many things for granted. We use our mobile phones constantly but have no idea how messages and pictures travel through the air from one phone to another. If our kids ask us how the TV or Internet works, would we know how to explain these? Never mind the electronic stuff, what about the natural world? The other day my five-year-old asked me what ants were for. I can’t say I provided an answer that satisfied me, let alone her.
Despite our academic concern for science, I sometimes wonder how much we really value it. We all want to get into the science stream at school because we think it’s better, more prestigious and makes us seem smarter. But how much science do we absorb in the end?
Despite my more arts-oriented inclinations, I was a science student. I can’t say I was a great student but funnily enough, the subjects I liked were Mathematics and Physics. Mostly this was because, once you learnt certain principles, everything else was logical. And I happen to like logic.
In adulthood I have come to realise that most people aren’t logical, and they are deeply suspicious of science, unless it agrees with what they already think. In other words, if science proves them wrong, they will refuse to believe it until it proves them right.
Take one of my favourite examples: the people who believe in sexual abstinence like to point out that condoms tend to fail in 10% of cases of use. This is the reason, they say, that we shouldn’t use condoms because they aren’t 100% safe. The fact that they successfully prevent both pregnancy and HIV infection in 90% of the cases is dismissed. This makes no sense at all, at least scientifically. It does however make perfect sense if you are hellbent on preventing the use of condoms. (By the way, the 40 million people currently living with HIV do not represent the 10% of condom-users whose condoms failed; they are the people who never used condoms at all. So if these 40 million had used condoms, with a 10% failure rate, that would mean 4 million infections instead. Logical?)
Even worse are the people who think that science works differently in different places. If an individual who eats nothing but fast-food in the United States is compared with an individual who also eats nothing but the same fast-food in Malaysia, the effects on both are likely to be the same, not different. They are likely to both be fat and have high cholesterol levels. Being of different races is not going to make that much difference.
But there are people who insist that we Asians are different and so we will react to everything differently from anyone else. So medicines are supposed to work differently on us or we will always react differently to the same circumstances. This would be feasible if there is scientific evidence to prove it but often there isn’t. Yet people insist on the “right” answers while being reluctant to prove it. For instance, while there have been hundreds of studies that show the effectiveness of methadone in treating drug users, there are still people who insist that we have to study it locally to see if it works on our drug users, as if ours are somehow different.
Basically, however, if you don’t believe in the premise, then you are not going to believe in any studies that prove the premise right.
We are not the only people who dislike science. The Bush government has proven over and over again that it prefers ideology to science. Hence its opposition to condoms in favour of abstinence has more to do with its conservative ideology than it has with science. Which is fine if thousands of people aren’t dying all round the world. And its refusal to fund any agency that even provides information about abortion has meant that poor women in developing countries have lost all access to health services as clinics are closed down due to lack of money. Ideology over science can kill and often does.
It would be refreshing if, when we talk about the importance of science and technology, we extend it not just to school subjects but to our way of thinking as well. That is, thinking that is grounded in evidence and facts rather than myths picked out of the air. Perhaps it might mean the end of believers in magic stones, blessed water and the like?
The Star Online, November 03, 2004
