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.
Do these white americans realize/know they’re not actually from America? I mean, every white person in America is an immigrant from Europe. Or is that too “provoking” and “unproven”. I heard about pangea when I was very young, I had just read the lord of the rings and one of my friends informed me that once there had been pangea and it looked an awful lot like Tolkiens map of middle earth. I though that was cool at the time.
And I agree, “everyone” knows that there was once pangea thus the study doesn’t reflect whether one knows that or not. Instead it reflects amazingly narrow minds. It’s actually kinda shocking.
WAS THE SPLIT OF PANDEA 200 OR 250 MILLION YEARS AGO? SHOULD WE BELIEVE U? AND I DON’T THINK WHITE PEOPLE HAVE APROB WITH IT? WE ALL HAVE TO LEARN IT ANY WAY
I think this poll is a riot and agree fully with what Sean says. And sorry, poll after poll after poll after poll shows a marked lack of basic scientific knowledge a) in the South and b) among self-identified Republicans. This poll is simply re-confirming what many other polls and studies have shown. And as for the racial breakdown, you can either explain it by lots of whites are stupid or lots of whites are racist, or both. There is no other rational explanation for the breakdown.
I was taught continental drift/plate tectonics in 6th grade in 1976 at a public school. And it is not a “theory.” It is one of the most thoroughly proven facts in all of science.