Just don't get all proud about well informed Americans.
The newspaper article is about the ignorance of Americans and the relationship to anti-government feeling, religion, and voting patterns.
FEW Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But they have more scepticism than confidence in global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and have the most trouble believing a Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago
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Rather than quizzing scientific knowledge, the survey asked people to rate their confidence in several statements about science and medicine.
On some, there's broad acceptance. Just four per cent doubt that smoking causes cancer, six per cent question whether mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain and eight per cent are sceptical there's a genetic code inside our cells. More - 15 per cent - have doubts about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines.
About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the Earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority - 51 per cent - questions the Big Bang theory.
