Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 01:11 PM - Edit history (1)

Exceptionally naive, gullible, stupid, ignorant, and willfully uninformed. PROUDLY uninformed. God told them so, I guess.

Not exactly on topic but this just made me think of something: Instead of "cleanliness is next to godliness," with the GOP it's "KLAN-liness is next to godliness."

Willful ignorance combined with arrogance is a terrible combination.

(like the Klan). Or the pre-1970's Mormon Church which believed in the Curse of Ham. The contemporary GOP is in truly vile company, and the worst part is they don't even know or care.

brilliant.

Of Tea Party Republicans, that is.

pretty much the same percentage.

This country is doomed, stupid people are everywhere and they are multiplying!

Republicans are mostly responsible for the lack of support for education which has led to this appalling stupidity.

of those surveyed and those who did not know about the earth orbiting (the earth is always revolving) the sun.

I live 'merica. Everything else is on the weathergirl's map.

resting on a tall stack of turtles.

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"It's turtles all the way down."

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Earth revolving around the sun is definitely tested, and we do teach to that.

Last edited Mon Jul 14, 2014, 08:46 AM - Edit history (1)

I don't think so.

How many of those 74% that got it right merely guessed correctly?

It ought to be shocking but it just isn't any more. We're profoundly anti-intellectual in this country, but it's hardly unique to the US, I fear.

... and I imagine the results equally disturbing.

people and dinosaurs co-existed, a guy named Noah built an ark holding two of each species, and a cold day means global warming is a myth. You can't argue with stupid.

The IQ test is designed around 100 being average. It is the whole point of the the test.

What isn't being told is that over the years Americans are doing better at the IQ test and it has to be re-normalized every decade.

so ignorance isn't confined by borders, nor is "American exceptionalism" simply a measure of our failings. . .

http://time.com/7809/1-in-4-americans-thinks-sun-orbits-earth/

And if you follow the link to the survey's release, you'll find that the results are far more encouraging than the simple extraction of a wrong answer implies.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/msu-sas021314.php

Thanks for actually adding to the discussion!

this I know to be true.

. . . . while at the same time voting for those who control the nukes and money.

Go to a Soccer game in Europe and meet the hooligans.

It's the kind of thing that gets asked every once in a while. Good for shock value. (Our results are higher than most other Western countries. On the other hand, while 10% believing in a geocentric model is better than 25%, it's still not a great boast. "We have fewer village idiots than America!" Big whoop.)

But the blogger didn't just stop by noting that the question had been asked before. He found the results from previous surveys and presented them. (My excellent Google skills didn't turn up the science blog, sorry.)

25% is an improvement over the last time the question was asked a few decades ago. (So when people stop and say, "Ah, the state of modern public education--just imagine, 25% think that the Sun revolves around the Earth!" the appropriate response is, "Yeah, that's not bad considering that just 30 years ago it was over 40%. Public education's gotten a lot better since then, I guess.&quot

The #s were consistent with something like a baseline idiocy rate of perhaps 10% coupled with shoddy science education in previous decades and, at some point before that, less of a need for a high school degree. A lot of the respondents who say "geocentric rules!" were poorly educated or older. Or just very stupid. Of the 75% or so that said "heliocentric," some were clearly correct guesses--and of the 25% or so that said "geocentric" some were transient lapses. In teaching I've slipped up and said it backwards: At some point the mouth keeps running but the brain's moved on to something interesting.

For example, only 74 percent of those queried knew that the Earth revolved around the sun, while fewer than half (48 percent) knew that human beings developed from earlier species of animals:

This is my vagina.
After we master anatomy can we try astronomy?

Internet search engines are replacing brains, at least the part that connects reason to memory. They may have heard it once they just can't use their brain to retrieve it and compute it.


(slight sarcasm)

Lots of woo-woo believers out there

all over again.

A stupid lot under a microscope, indeed.

and I see many on this thread are within that 50%!

My teaching experiences make me suspicious.

Common misunderstanding of words are often revealed at the root of wrong answers.

I'm being serious . . . How many of these people were home schooled under the Gothard method/philosophy?

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2009/09/republican-gomorrah.html

I don't doubt this study at all, there are tons of dumb people in the US, hell I have met two people who have argued with me about Japan being a city in China.

There. I fixed the headline

There are people who just don't care to retain some knowledge. I wonder how many of those people polled would laugh it off and say "oh, yea!". Yes, it's something taught early and you SHOULD know. But to some, these things rate low. People are funny.