Based on my frequent reading of poor-quality literature written by science professors and science journalists, I had the strong suspicion that a large fraction of the general public have a poor understanding about basic facts of science and fundamental theories of science. I tried to get some data confirming this suspicion, but this turned out to be very hard work, "like pulling teeth." It seems that our science educators are very bad about polling the general public to determine how well average people understand basic facts of science. I could not find a single paper or article involving a poll in which the general public was asked something like 100 multiple-choice questions to determine how well they understand basic facts of science.
But after spending hours looking for information, I was able to find a few revealing indications of just how poor a job our science educators have done. One was a Pew Research poll which asked people whether electrons are smaller than atoms. One of the most basic facts of physics you can learn is that atoms are composed of three types of particles: electrons, neutrons and protons. If our science educators were doing a good job, we would expect that at least a majority of the public would answer "Yes" to the question "Are electrons smaller than atoms?" But according to the Pew Research poll discussed here, only 47% of the US public think electrons are smaller than atoms.
In the poll discussed here, over 700 people were asked questions testing their knowledge of the location of bodily organs. For each organ, they were shown four pictures, each depicting the organ in a very different part of the body. Only 46% of the general public could correctly identify the location of the lungs; only 27% could correctly identify the location of the stomach; and only 40% could correctly identify the location of the ovaries.
In the paper here ("A Study of Common Beliefs and Misconceptions in Physical Science") about 300 people were asked whether this statement was true:
"An astronaut is standing on the moon with a baseball in her/his hand. When the baseball is released, it will fall to the moon’s surface."
- The groundless legend that a biologist of the nineteenth century (Charles Darwin) created a theory that explains the origin of species such as the human species.
- The groundless boast that biologists currently understand how there arose fantastically organized organisms such as birds, mammals and humans.
- The completely fictional claim that scientists have some understanding of how life could have originally started on our planet.
- The untrue claim that DNA or its genes have some blueprint or program for making a human body, and that the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the state of vast organization that is an adult human body occurs because of the reading of such a blueprint or program.
- The unfounded claim that human minds can be explained as being products of the human brain.
- The falsehood that there is little difference between humans and animals, and that humans are a type of animal (the latter claim being one that is "proven" solely by appealing to senseless and arbitrary classification conventions of biologists).
- The unfounded claim that human memory processes such as memory formation, lifelong preservation of memories and instant memory recall can be explained by processes in the brain.
HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS. | Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study. |
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM. | The human skeletal system contains 206 bones. |
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES. | Examples of organ systems include the circulatory system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain. |
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES. | |
TISSUES CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX AND VASTLY ORGANIZED CELLS | There are more than 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization. Cells are so complex they have been compared to factories with many types of manufacturing devices. |
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF ORGANELLES. |
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ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES. | There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of different types of protein molecules that work together as team members to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex. Very many protein complexes have so many parts working together dynamically that such complexes are now being called "molecular machines." |
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE. | Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function. See "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of the post here for quotes stating this. |
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY. | Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ very well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed. |
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS. | A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons. |
Why do our science educators fail to decently educate the public about all these different levels of organization? I suspect because it is such educators may sense that the more you know about the vast amount of complexity and organization in human bodies, the less likely you will be to accept the boast that science educators seem hell-bent on promulgating: the boast that scientists understand how the human species originated. Claims of the accidental origin of something are inversely proportional to the complexity and organization of that thing. The more organized and the more well-arranged something is, and the more well-arranged parts it has, and the more fine-tuned the arrangement of its parts, the less credible is a claim that the thing arose by blind accidental processes. For example, someone throwing a deck of cards into the air many times might produce one or two times a "house of cards" consisting of one card leaning diagonally against the other. But if the whole universe was filled with people throwing decks of cards into the air, doing that half of their lives, it would be vastly improbable that even one of them would ever accidentally produce a triangular house of cards consisting of thirty very well-arranged cards.
We are now in a situation where it is very clear that the wonders of biology are far greater in their hierarchical organization and fine-tuned dynamic complexity than anything that humans have ever constructed. An aircraft carrier is a less impressive work of fine-tuned organization than the human body. Humans know how to make aircraft carriers equipped with all of their aircraft. There is not a corporation in the world or a nation in the world that could construct from lifeless materials a living adult human body. It is notable that humans are completely incapable of creating machines that can reproduce themselves. There is not a robot in the world capable of building from raw materials a robot just like itself. But self-reproduction is something that occurs throughout the world of biology, as does molecular machinery.
What we see in biological organism are massive numbers of engineering effects and endless examples of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. Such a reality makes nineteenth century explanations of biology origins sound like old wives' tales. Ink splashes don't produce long functional essays telling how to perform complex tasks; accidents don't engineer things; and random variations don't create novel astonishing works of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. It is not true that we can explain such wonders of biology by a simple principle of "random variations occur, and nature saves the good stuff," because most of the good stuff we see requires arrangements of atoms so improbable you would never get such good stuff from random variations. The reason that would never happen is pretty much the same as the reason why ink splashes don't produce well-written essays telling how to do complex things.
But our science educators keep senselessly claiming that the wonders of biology are not the product of intelligent agency, but mere accidents of nature, as accidental as mountains. They keep telling us that we must follow opinions of the scientist Darwin, reached around the year 1859. To keep such a legend afloat, our science educators fail over and over again to teach about the reality of the enormous engineering effects in our bodies. As a substitute, they offer the crudest "crayon sketches" of our bodies and our minds.
Below from page 137 of a PhD thesis is a list of biological systems described as if they were very impressive machinery:
Subcellular assembly | Sample of ‘molecular machine’ language | Source reference |
Ribosome | “probably the most sophisticated machine ever made” | Garrett (1999) |
Proteasome | “a molecular machine designed for controlled proteolysis” | Voges et al. (1999) |
Glideosome | “a molecular machine powering motility” | Keeley et al. (2003) |
Spliceosome | “among the most complex macromolecular machines known” | Nilsen (2003) |
Blood clotting system | “a typical example of a molecular machine” | Spronk et al. (2003) |
Photosynthetic system | “the most elaborate nanoscale biological machine in nature” | Imahori (2004) |
Bacterial flagellum | “an exquisitely engineered chemi-osmotic nanomachine” | Pallen et al. (2005) |
Myosin filament | “a complicated machine of many moving parts” | Ohki et al. (2006 |
RNA degradasome | “a supramolecular machine dedicated to RNA processing” | Marcaida et al. (2006) |
RNA Polymerase | “a multifunctional molecular machine” | Haag et al. (2007) |
An article by scientists discusses molecular machines in the human body:
"A molecular machine (or ‘nanomachine’) is a mechanical device that is measured in nanometers (millionths of a millimeter, or units of 10-9 meter; on the scale of a single molecule) and converts chemical, electrical or optical energy to controlled mechanical work [1,2]. The human body can be viewed as a complex ensemble of nanomachines [3,4]. These tiny machines are responsible for the directed transport of macromolecules, membranes or chromosomes within the cytoplasm. They play a critical role in virtually every biological process (e.g., muscle contraction, cell division, intracellular transport, ATP production and genomic transcription)...Myosin, kinesin and their relatives are linear motors that convert the energy of ATP hydrolysis into mechanical work."
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