By Christopher Crossley

Scientific literacy is knowledge based on science and the basis on which important decisions can be made by government, business and other organisations based on research and knowledge gained, including, for example, on climate change.

There are nevertheless many individual people in the world who may have received an education over so many years, but whose scientific literacy is very uncertain.

There was one American TV show, for instance, where the person presenting the program – the host, if you will – went out onto the street outside the TV studio to ask people basic questions taken from an elementary school science book. Now, you’d think that adults would know the answers to such basic questions as “Which is bigger? The Sun or the Moon?” The young adults, some of whom said that they were to graduate from college or university, shown in that program didn’t actually know the answer, and they looked really embarrassed when they couldn’t answer. Another question was: “How many planets are there in our Solar System?” Some people shown took completely wild guesses. One asked, “Over a hundred? !" One person was even a graduate in mechanical engineering from a famous American university, and she didn’t even know the correct answer!

In another example of a survey, more than half of people responding to questions about food labelling said that they wanted information on the labels to say if DNA was contained in the food. The problem with this is that DNA is contained in the cells of all animals and plants! Would that mean that people would refuse to eat the food just because the label said it contained DNA? That implies that, somehow, eating food with DNA in it must be bad. If so, where did they get this idea from in the first place? Some individual posting videos on social media warning people that this, that and the other are so bad?