Your beliefs vs. the facts Bias and self-deception are fierce
foes of science. That's why evidence-based debate is so vital.
Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I knew precisely what
it meant to be scientifically literate. In fact, I held an
objective measure in the palm of my hand, courtesy of E.D.
Hirsch. His book, "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs
to Know," was a bestselling paperback, and conveniently listed
thousands of names, terms, and phrases with which every educated
person – he informed us – should be familiar.Skip to next
paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor After plodding through
the entire list during the course of an afternoon, I smugly
discovered I could easily define each item of scientific
vocabulary. Fuzziness about literary examples such as
"Aeschylus" caused me no discomfort, but inability to rigorously
describe "aerobic respiration" in the biochemical sense (not the
superficial, then-popular Jane Fonda sense) would have induced
severe nerdish embarrassment. The wrong