Twenty-five percent is awfully close to the 27% “crazification factor”.
To make or break Blake’s point, it would be interesting to know if this particular 25% shared other non-scientific or even anti-scientific ideas.
Why don’t you want to travel to Rio for your Christmas vacation? Yankees travel to Florida in winter because we get warm winters here; Rio is warmer still, because it’s actually summer there in December.
That shit again?! Look, he has a valid work permit under the Crab Nebula Treaty, and he really was hatched in Honolulu.
Hilarious. 
Anyway, as to the OP:
Yeah, it matters. First off, it would be interesting to see how many who were asked REALLY didn’t know and how many were basically fucking with the poll (as John said, sometimes I’m tempted to mess with peoples heads in things like this…and I’m pretty sure that the temptation is too great for some, especially in these cases). But taking it at face value, 25% of Americans don’t know basic science. That’s not a stretch (the amazing thing is that presumably 75% did know the correct answer). Science as taught in my own day was boring, dry and had little connection to ‘real life’, and thus was snored through by most students (those who couldn’t get out of it by taking something else). It was a lot of rote memorization, and in the kinds of schools I went too as a kid most of the students were militantly uninterested in it. Which is sad, since a basic understanding of science is absolutely essential in being a good citizen and making good choices about a wide range of topics (for example as Blake mentioned there is the whole global warming/climate change question…without a basic grounding in science how can you even have a reasonable opinion or even understand the core questions?).
N.B., though: In either reference frame, the Earth and the Sun are orbiting around a common center of gravity that happens to be inside the Sun, though not at its exact center, AIUI, someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
It’s like the Twin Paradox: One twin travels in the stars and comes home to Earth younger than the other twin, because the “relative” motion of the two has not been the same or symmetrical – only one of them went through accelerated motion at relativistic speeds.
What is this 27% crazification factor?
From your favorite source.
BTW, the same poll results say:
But, it says nothing about the size of the Boolean intersection between the 26% ignorant of Copernican theory and the 52% ignorant (or in denial) of evolution. I would hazard a guess that the latter set entirely or almost entirely contains the first . . .
But, N.B., the two ignorances are not really quite comparable – the theory of biological evolution is controversial for purely religious reasons; as noted above, (practically) nobody has any religious imperative to deny Copernican astronomy, and there are no (significant) organizations dedicated to denying it or offering alternative theories.
I don’t trust surveys, but this is a lot of extrapolation. The same sort of extrapolation that says “The earth has been cooling since 2002, ergo no climate change.”
You assume that someone who didn’t pay attention in high school earth science is unable to understand non-mathematical versions of concepts like inertia? Or that they work to explain though twisted models of the universe how the earth and sun relationship work? You are giving the ignorant too much credit and treating them like they are willfully ignorant.
Assuming that these answers are genuine (which I don’t buy): It’s that they never cared to learn, and they haven’t been brought up in their daily life in any meaningful way. They haven’t given any thought to it.
It’s as if you ask someone “What’s your thoughts on the paperclip?” and when they go “I don’t know.” you go “What? You don’t know how it’s made? You don’t know what steel alloy is used to create it? You obviously are too ignorant to understand how to fasten a paperclip to the papers.” It is simply that they have never thought on the paper clip longer than it took to stick pieces of paper together.
First, that’s even more extrapolation based on a single data point. You can fully understand how the seasons work. Humanity did for thousands of years before we discovered how the solar system worked.
As for the reverse of the seasons in the southern hemisphere, how many Americans do you know that actually GO to the southern hemisphere?
It is hard for people to evaluate climate change for multiple reasons, not the least of which is the politicization of the science. But even if you understand the basic physics because it hasn’t been that long since you aced High School physics, a lot of explanations outside of “CO2 = killing us all!” can be taken for granted without being neck deep into the current scholarly articles into the subject.
…Wouldn’t you WANT to be in Rio over Christmas? Or were you meaning Summer vacation to us northerners?
Most people have a basic knowledge of science. The trivia is what escapes them. You fail to integrate basic human intelligence into your condemnation of everyone: We learn by doing and seeing. We can see the seasons. We can see the sun moving while feeling like we aren’t moving at all. All of this everyone can see and can understand.
The same way that you can ride your bike down a hill and bank at the right spot to turn and be where you want to be on a cross street at the bottom without actually knowing a lick of geometry.
Except that it’s a survey. They shouldn’t be relied upon to be indicators of anything but needing filler. We see it all the time in medical surveys: They think they find a correlation between, say, eating glue and cancer. Only to find out after applying glue to everything and everyone that self reporting surveys are useless, even to point the general direction of future research.
Then again, it might have something to do with this . . .
I’m surprised that many knew. As noted above, that figure is below the crazification factor.
Whether you like it or not, there are a lot of intellectually incurious and uneducated people in the world. As a society, we have decided that they should have the same rights as you do–to live, to vote, to bear children, to get a job, to get paid if they can’t do any job, to receive medical care when they’re sick. You can call them names and make fun of them, but they can’t hear you. And they don’t care what anyone outside their community thinks of them, anyway.
The best thing you can do for yourself is to just *accept this. Adjust your worldview. *It’s hard to hear at first, but what else can you do that isn’t monstrous? Education is a noble goal, and I support providing that opportunity to everyone as equally as possible. But let’s be realistic: humanity survived for millions of years like idiot animals–by following instinct, by following herd mentality, by ejecting people that didn’t adhere to it, by ignoring things that didn’t apply to them, by ascribing thunderstorms to the anger of invisible sky-beings. And that’s okay.
It’s simply **not possible **to rid humanity of its baser elements, at least not on purpose. Evolution may change this eventually, but that’s not something we have *any control over. You can try to minimize their impact, but realistically they’re not going to go away unless we implement detestable policies–like eugenics, indoctrination, disenfranchisement, and euthanization. If you want to advocate those things, I’m not going to try to stop you. But it’s a fool’s errand, because you’ll never get the majority of us to agree with you. And frankly, I’d rather live in a world of incurious idiots than a world of holier-than-thou, controlling, rational bastards.
So yeah, I’ve pretty much come to terms with this. I understand that lots of people are ignorant or crazy or both, whether by accident of birth or by the people who influenced them. It doesn’t bother me greatly. I just choose not to spend time around those people. I choose not to be bothered by the fact that they exist. You should try it sometime, it’s great for your blood pressure. But if you don’t, I choose not to be bothered by that. 
*people who are just generally stupid, welfare queens who squirt out half a dozen kids, tea partiers, conspiracy theorists, religious nutjobs, etc
I agree with everything you wrote except this. Even the very worst of science education teaches that the Earth goes around the Sun. There are also plenty of exposures to this fact in the world after school. This shows that a large number of Americans (and Europeans) classify this as a “science fact” which is in the arena of geekdom and unimportant to the sports and movie-loving mainstream.
I don’t actually believe that Holmes wouldn’t have known this. he placed information in a connected web, and would have placed the Solar System in a web, much as he knew various types of tobacco.
This isn’t a random fact that better education can teach. This is the keystone to the entire universe. Pull it out, and everything else is a set of random and unconnected facts - and people can’t see the consequences of their actions on the world.
– George Carlin
I think 1 in 4 americans is probably pretty close to what we’d call functionally retarded, so them not knowing or remembering that the earth orbits the sun isn’t exactly shocking.
Doesn’t matter. I’d be worried if 25% of Americans thought driving while on the phone is A-OK, or that mixing ammonia and bleach means 2x the cleaning.
Whoa…you think that one quarter of the population of the US (roughly 100 million people) are functionally retarded?? Seriously? Do you have a cite for this incredible claim, assuming you weren’t talking tongue in cheek or this is some sort of whoosh.
I’d probably be tempted to ignore the question altogether and start ranting about the conspiracy to deny planet status to Pluto.
Your use of “almost certainly” reminds me of a TV interview during the Apollo moon missions, so long ago that I don’t recall which trip it was.
The anchor (it wasn’t Cronkite, because I lived in Winnipeg and the CBC didn’t plug into CBS; I think it plugged into ABC, so maybe Jules Bergman — and no cable TV at that time) interviewed a mathematician or astronomer who said NASA, without error, could have sent a space vehicle to the moon by using Ptolemaic-system math because it’s accurate to the nth degree, despite the Ptolemaic model being so absurdly wrong.
I remember the interviewer’s surprise, but the person being interviewed assured him that though the math would be more complicated (and I’m in no position to know), the moon shot would have been no less achievable.
Even so, anyone with half a brain and not knowing the Earth circles the sun should not be allowed to vote.