Reading Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, lacks the writing skills and content that would most likely inspire the intelligentsia and general population to explore the impact of science and our future well being. I scanned the book in less than five minutes, and made the prompt decision that the writing was a vacuous attempt to explain the same paradigm shifts that continue to interest pop culture (the Copernican Revolution, global warming, evolution, and the accepted age of the earth), not real scientists or the general public, those more interested in the past and present impact of true science. The book could have been written in less than a week, and require literate Americans less than an hour to read.

Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions more adequately places the current shift, biology and DNA science, in proper perspective. Although Snow was a physicist, government worker, and novelist, he seems to be known for his novels, not accomplishments in the science of physics. His basic premise in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution was that practitioners of science and literature know little about the other and that communication between the two is difficult, perhaps impossible. The authors of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens America, argue that our illiterate society is in denial of urgent scientific problems. I disagree. I believe that most people have a true fascination and desire to understand science. The problem is that too many students in K-12 will never fully understand and appreciate science until experienced or research scientists are hired as teachers and until those teachers are free from having to comply with professional learning communities (PLC) while letting their extensive knowledge go unused in the classroom. Science is becoming more and more generalized to the extent that understanding is being compromised. First year teachers from Teach for America, who teach while waiting to enter graduate school, or lateral entry teachers, who simply need a job, cannot advance knowledge in science. Our schools need science teachers who know and love the content and importance of science and the pedagogy of science.

I believe that how a question is asked is often more important than the question. Most literate people understand science and the role science has played and continues to play in the world in which we live. However, most literate people tend to be more interested in the present shift to the age of biology in possibly curing diseases than in astronomy, agronomy, chemistry, and physics. Currently, the most fascinating new knowledge being explored in the area of science involves DNA, which will ultimately explain the cause of many illnesses that have plagued man through the ages, including the causes of autism and lung cancer. Much fascinating information has already been published in the past several years, such as that the location of the DNA of the telomeres, usually the ends of chromosomes, may explain the difference as to why the 46 chromosomes of human cells and the 48 chromosomes of the cells of less advanced members of the Hominidae family in mammalian classification, that a person whose mother had German measles during pregnancy may develop cataracts, and that mitochondrial DNA is more similar to bacterial DNA than to human DNA. Several recently published best sellers that are well-researched contain much of the current fascinating knowledge in science to enhance one’s scientific literacy.

My premise is that most reasonably educated people have an appreciation for both science and literature, for history and mathematics, as well as for art and music. All knowledge is related, and understanding the parts contributes to understanding the impact of the whole. We cannot understand the present without knowing the influence of the past.

(By the way, does the book have 132 pages or 209 pages? I’ll have to check in a book store. Regardless, the problem of science literacy cannot be explained in such a generalized and brief writing.)