White Americans, anyway. That seems to be the result from this poll at Daily Kos (via Tom Levenson’s Twitter feed).
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. Likely voters. MoE 2% (No trend lines)
Do you believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent?
Yes No Not Sure
All 42 26 32
Dem 51 16 33
Rep 24 47 29
Ind 44 23 33Northeast 50 18 32
South 32 37 31
Midwest 46 22 32
West 43 24 33White 35 30 35
Black 63 13 24
Latino 55 19 26
Other 56 19 25
Probably readers of this blog are not a representative sample of Americans, and most or you — even the white people! — know that Pangaea was the supercontinent that existed about 250 million years ago, before plate tectonics worked its magic and broke it apart.
Now, some of my best friends are white folks, so I don’t want to make any grand generalizations about their intelligence or education. But this is a good illustration of a point made by Jerry Coyne — the problem of scientific illiteracy is not a simple one, and in particular it’s not just a matter of better outreach and more Carl Sagans. Which is not to say that more and better outreach and science journalism isn’t important or useful — it clearly is, and I’m in favor of making structural changes to provide much better incentives for making sure that it happens. But there are also factors at work for which outreach isn’t the answer — political and social forces that push people away from science. Those have to be confronted if we want to really address the problem.
(I don’t know who was the mischievous person who thought of asking this poll question in the first place, but it was an inspired idea.)
Update: Aaron Golas in comments points to a post by Devilstower laying out that the question was worded in an intentionally provocative way, to illustrate how bad questions can fail to correctly gauge scientific understanding. Which is completely true, and a point worth making. But I argue that the poll does reveal something, namely the extent to which underlying cultural attitudes can influence one’s stance toward purportedly scientific questions. Thus, “White People Have Trouble Accepting Pangaea,” not “White People Don’t Know About Pangaea.” As a measure of what percentage of Americans truly understand continental drift, the poll is pretty useless; as an indication of how culture affects that understanding, it’s very illuminating.
Well… If we had a good science communicator like Sagan, someone who became part of the zeitgeist, then social norms might shift. After all, media has played a huge role over the past few decades in shining a light on embarrassing societal mores… and has been an enormous boon in decreasing racism and other forms of prejudice. They are still out there, to be sure, but I suspect that having more and better communication is playing a big role in this change.
Although something like Pangaea is within reason, I have no reason to believe or disbelieve in it.
I know enough about geology to understand and believe in plate tectonics, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to accept (obviously from authority since I don’t know all that much about geology) this idea, and this is probably true of most people.
Whatever happened to withholding a belief until presented with the appropriate evidence?
I haven’t been presented with that evidence yet, and before accepting such a theory I’d need the answers to many other questions like: is the total landmass not currently under the ocean the same amount, more or less, than when Pangaea existed?
The Republican numbers are no big surprise for me, but the Democrat ones are shocking.
For one, how many of these don’t believe it due to religious convictions or how many don’t believe it due to a simple lack of information?
How much is a racial irritation? For instance if the question had asked the same, except if it was connected to Europe instead?
My first reaction was simultaneous shock and the urge to punch a wall. I still remember my geography teacher telling me this, and thinking how interesting a one continent world would have been….
No wonder so many people turn to supernatural/pseudo-science nonsense.
@ Prem – I believe it’s been proven both by studying the Earth’s Crust and Fossil Records.
I saw this poll back when it was posted and it made me wonder how much the wording of the poll played here. “America” and “Africa” are certainly more loaded terms than Pangaea or another descriptive term. It made me wonder if this caused some racial bias (to what degree, we’d need another poll to tell).
I think that we have to keep in mind the specific knowledge that people have about plate tectonics. People who may understand that the continents have shifted around and were all part of larger continents at sometime may not be be sure that this particular continent was unified in a super-continent with that particular continent.
Before drawing conclusions about general knowledge, we also need to know more about the specifics of the survey – the other questions asked, length of the survey, number of people questioned, where this question fell in relation to other questions, etc. If the question before this one was “Do all Republicans hate science?”, then pissed off Republicans may have just checked no to all of the other questions.
I would like to see if the people who answered “no” to the poll could point out America and Africa on a world map. I suspect the answer to that is also “no”!
Phil, my point was that beliefs about science do not exist in isolation; they are embedded in, and heavily influenced by, a matrix of other cultural and political attitudes. Therefore (if that’s correct), simply doing a better job at explaining scientific concepts is not going to really solve the problem (although it obviously doesn’t hurt). Good communication may very well be part of the solution, but it will have to go far beyond simple scientific pedagogy.
No, no, no. Kos has it all wrong, and appears not to be reading his own site. Devilstower reported on this poll on DK last week. He explained that the poll question was “intentionally idiotic” and “written to press emotional hot buttons,” to illustrate the problems with a Gallup poll about evolution.
Since whites have the highest “unsure” rating and are about evenly split otherwise, I think that indicates that whites are the most open-minded about the subject.
Aaron, I agree that the question was (perhaps intentionally) not worded in a sensible way if the goal was to survey the understanding of certain basic scientific facts. Nevertheless, there certainly is something that the results teach us: that non-scientific attitudes influence the answers people will give to what should be a scientific question. Which was exactly my point. There is a lesson here for opinion pollsters, but also an important lesson for those of us who care about attitudes toward science.
Those results show two import things:
First, the answers people give to a poll are biased by the way the question are formulated, this bias depending on the socio-cultural and politic alignment of the public.
Second: due to this bias, the results of the poll appear different from what we would expect in an honest analysis and enable one to manipulate the public opinion by showing results that are not obtained in bona fide.
We should be aware of that, but it is hard to convince people about the “truth” when it implies that they are not superior to other people or animals (like in immigration and racial problems, Darwin’s evolution) or that they need to pay for something (like in the green house gases question or the financial crisis).
Souther, white, republicans, of course they don’t, they don’t believe in evolution, why would they believe any other field of science?
Rata, that kind of generalization demonstrates your own cultural bias and does nothing to help solve the problem. Examine your own dismissive attitude.
Yet the title of your post is “White People Have Trouble Accepting Pangaea,” which claim is unsupported by this poll. What we CAN say is that white Americans appear to tend to have cognitive difficulty associating America with Africa.
Clearly this poll is evidence that emotional attitudes influence how people respond to poll questions. However, less clear is the extent to which emotional attitudes influence people’s understanding of science. If we really want to contribute to science communication, we need to honestly address the latter without the interfering sensationalism of poorly-designed surveys.
I think “have trouble accepting” is exactly what is supported by this poll. Otherwise I would have written “don’t know about.”
As much fun: Were Adam & Eve black?
@ Prem: In my opinion, this is mainly the fault of our educational system. There is good and clear evidence (as CW said), but it isn’t frequently shared. People are just given the concept of Pangaea and tectonic activity and expected to accept it.
Essentially, we can see the path of stationary volcanic hot-spots on the Earth’s crust where plates moved OVER lava vents. The Deccan Steppes in India is one, and Yellowstone is another, as are the Hawaiian islands. We can also see the rifts and faults where the plates grind against one another or pull apart, such as the Great Rift of Africa (visible from space!). In other words, it’s like watching someone mush and pull clay in slow motion. You can see the effects of the motion left on the surface. Also, fossil evidence… but the geological stuff is my fave part!
I learned this information on my own and through my parents, but I didn’t encounter it in school until I took a college-level, optional geology course. The maps are simple enough (and fun enough, in my opinion) that elementary school students could understand them. We make kids color in the states… why aren’t we making them color in tectonic plates and their paths? Who knows. There is a massive problem with the way America teaches science, for the most part. It is left so esoteric and portrayed as being “too much to understand if you aren’t really, really smart” and I just don’t think that’s true.
@Aaron – “What we CAN say is that white Americans appear to tend to have cognitive difficulty associating America with Africa.” – exactly. More cultural/racial/historical than rejection of science or lack of education. Their racial understanding of the world (America=Good/Africa=Bad) interferes with their understanding. This seems more like a racial question rather than a scientific one, based on the way the question was framed.
Clearly from the polling data you can see a political bias. Republicans more than any other category don’t like to be associated with Africans in the now, future or even 6000 years ago.
#17 Nope, they were transparent. Before they put on a leaf (somehow) only a special kind of snake could sense them in the IR.
Hm… perhaps. But in my mind, the poll doesn’t really address acceptance of Pangaea per se. Many respondents may have gotten hung up on America + Africa and never even got to the point of thinking about the supercontinent from which the association is derived. It says a lot about communication and cognitive dissonance, but not as much about actual science understanding.
(Sorry if I’m coming across as overly critical, by the way. I’m a fan of the blog, I just sometimes have a bad habit of lurking until I find something I disagree with.)
Yes, Minister has something to say about such poll questions.
Aaron, nothing wrong with being critical. I completely agree that if the purpose of the poll were to measure scientific knowledge, the wording of the question would be ridiculous. But it measures something, and not just the fickleness of polls. My point is that “communication and cognitive dissonance” are part of scientific understanding, not separate from it, and that’s a crucial point to keep in mind if we want to improve scientific understanding. You can’t really understand and accept the idea of Pangaea if you don’t believe that America and Africa were once part of the same continent.
When it comes to education, people remember what’s important to them and what’s relevant to their lives. Let’s face it, the fact that NA and Africa were physically connected 250M years ago is not a fact that most people find either interesting or useful. I don’t think improvements in science education will alter the basic psychological fact that people forget stuff they don’t use or aren’t interested in. Heck, I took years of English and I’ll be darned if I remember what a gerund is (OK, I do remember).
I find amazing that you guys are attributing so much importance to an informal study with such a small sample. Clusters that small are easily explained by a single person of low education or religiously guided beliefs passing a survey around to their buddies.
Please stop engaging in such melodrama. It isn’t journalism.