Whoops!HugeFanOfBadReligion wrote:Oh no Fat Man, a jock would never believe in that. They would believe that it is 6000 years old, 7000 years old is blasphemy to them. The Lenski experiments are also blasphemy to them, not just because it contradicts what they think, but also because our fellow nerds conducted those experiments. Both sports and fundamentalism have corrupted our educational system, I've only been taught evolution once in school, and it was only half a page about it (I have searced repeatedly in the index of science textbooks for words such as evolution, natural selection, Charles Darwin, and you just can't find them). And with sports teams that are funded by the school, we lose money for real education that doesn't support super-masculinity and a gang mentality of competition. It's sad that in a world with all this amazing technology, we don't use it for good reasons, when we could use technology to advance the educational system to a much better standard. But no, we have to waste our money on sports equipment.Fat Man wrote:As all good religious sports-loving American citizens know, the universe was created in 6 days and is only 7,000 years old and evolution did not occur, but that animals magically popped up out of the ground, therefore, all the nerds and geeks who study science are jerks and deserve to get beaten and bullied around.
I guess I stand corrected. Yeah, they believe it's 6000 years and not 7000 years.
They also think the earth is flat and that the sun revolves around the earth.
It's a fact! About 20% percent, one fifth of all Americans believe that the sun revolves around the earth!
I kid you not!!!
These must all be sports fans!Embarrassingly Stupid Americans -- One in
Five Believes Sun Revolves Around Earth
Posted by Dr. Mercola March 11 2008
The title of this article, that an embarrassingly high number of Americans believe that the sun revolves around the Earth, is only one point argued by the Washington Postâ??s Susan Jacoby, in her attempt to prove that Americans are in serious intellectual trouble, facing a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.
What else is signaling that Americans are becoming increasingly dumbed-down as a society?
* Reading -- of books, newspapers and magazines -- is on the decline. A 2007 study even found that 80 percent of American families did not buy or read a book in 2006.
* Attention spans are declining; Jacoby suggests this is due to television and videos. For instance, between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to a Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.
* General knowledge is eroding. This is evidenced not only by the fact that one in five U.S. adults believe the sun revolves around the Earth, but also many others.
Yet, itâ??s not bad enough that knowledge is quickly declining in the United States. On top of that, there is an arrogance about this lack of knowledge, almost as if a good portion of the population is saying, â??We know weâ??re ignorant, but we donâ??t care!â?
Consider, for instance, that a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper found that nearly half of young Americans did not think it was necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news was being made. And another one-third felt it was â??not at all importantâ? to know a foreign language.
Why is this so concerning? Because â?¦
Fear and Ignorance Go Hand in Hand