Science Rules

As I've stated a whole bunch of times previous, in the end, I want to write about science, not do it, for a living. An acquaintance of mine runs this ongoing thing on her blog about three times a year where any of her numerous readers can ask her a science question, and you would not believe some of the questions she gets. She's a chemist by profession, in case you're curious.

Science is one area in our education where our culture finds it perfectly okay to be completely ignorant. Part of this is our focus on faith, and part is our complete and total reluctance to teach "what science is" in classrooms. But that's not all, and I am tempted to call the other part sheer laziness, though I know that's cynical.

Part of the problem is that science is intimidating, and you need to keep up with it in order not to look like a total asshat. And science is hard. It involves math, usually, and not the kind of math you can easily master. The kind of math that someone can look at and say "well, you neglected this effect, so what appears to be a simple addition problem is now a twelfth-order differential equation." That's scary!

In our classrooms, we don't teach science. Not at the elementary and high school level. It wasn't till I got to college that I learned--indirectly--how to evaluate claims and determine if data is significant. The logical skepticism needed to throw out claims that pills will increase your penis/breast size or that "secret Swiss herbs" will help you lose weight is missing from our educational system.

So here's a poll. What do you, as educated and intelligent people, feel are some of the most misunderstood scientific issues today? Evolution is not a ladder, obviously. Organically derived medicines are not actually chemically different from synthetic ones? How does one go about explaining that paranormal phenomena are psychological in nature without tromping on people's toes?