No time to falter

Saturday, Jan. 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

A new report by the National Science Board says the United States leads the world in science and technology.

But the nation’s reliance on foreign-born workers for jobs in those fields, and the fact that Americans’ scientific knowledge isn’t improving, could imperil the nation’s global lead as other countries advance economically.

The board oversees the National Science Foundation, which is a major source of funding for scientific research. Its biennial report on science and engineering includes data from surveys of science and mathematics education trends among U.S. students and trends regarding scientific knowledge and attitudes among Americans in general.

Some of the results are surprising. For example, only 66 percent of men and 46 percent of women gave the correct answers when asked whether the Earth orbits the Sun and how long it takes the Earth to do so.

Americans’ answers to such questions were not comparatively worse than those of residents in other developed countries, the report says. But Americans were more ignorant than people of other nations when it came to evolution and the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe two theories that provide the foundation for modern biology and physics. Only 47 percent of U.S. men and 40 percent of women polled in 2006 correctly asserted that modern humans “developed from earlier species of animals.”

The large number of Americans “who favor coverage of nonscientific material about human origins in public school science classes” is among the factors that science and technology proponents consider “disquieting,” the report says.

Other trends are those showing that significant numbers of Americans think that technological advances happen too fast and that scientific research “doesn’t pay enough attention” to morality.

With one of the globe’s highest standards of living and access to education, Americans may take scientific and technological advances for granted we’ve typically made most of them.

But as developing nations catch up economically, that may not continue to be the case. We cannot allow the teaching of scientific foundations to founder in our public schools if the United States is to lead the next generation of scientists.