Science powers | Opinion

The report was prepared at the request of the BBVA On the scientific culture of four European countries, Spain among them, dispels some of the most profound prejudices about disdain for or skepticism about science as objective knowledge and trusted by the population. Among the most relevant results The shape is the confidence that scientific knowledge improves the lives of societies and puts aside superstitions and “fears of the past”, with Spain significantly ahead of Germany, France and the United Kingdom by more than half a point. In fact, interest in science has made a huge leap in Spanish cultural practices, going from 15% of the population interested in it in 2012 to 47% just ten years later.

Public discourse on scientific developments and their ability to combat global phenomena such as the climate crisis explains this growing interest in accurate data and objective facts. Beyond speech webs and unconscious suspicion. At the same time, the Spanish population is most critical in terms of the support that science and scientists receive from public authorities, businesses and society itself. Nor is it bad news that compared to eight out of ten Germans, in Spain only five out of ten citizens believe their country has made an outstanding contribution to scientific progress: 7% of Spaniards mention Santiago Ramon y Cajal As a related scholar, he was cited twice Severo Ochoa There is hardly another mention of a woman in the four countries surveyed: Marie Curie. Only one in 11 of those consulted in Spain believes that the human race was created by God, “more or less in its present form”, and as many as 95% of those surveyed believe that neither morality nor religion should set limits to scientific development.

The scientific culture of the Spanish is still not enough, but the best news from the survey is perhaps the realization of the value, rigor and solvency of the scientific method compared to any other illegitimate source of knowledge: the distortion falls on the peddlers of information poisoning and fabulation, and in particular on The strange reservoir of climate denial. The self-fulfilling prophecy of networking tends to pretend post-truth dominance is not. Its (programmed) vulnerability to hoaxes, fake news, shocking but empty headlines, and many other forms of this otherworldly epidemic of alternative facts is at odds with the evidence that the majority of the population understands the power of science to solve problems. the world in which you live. The old disdain for science in Spain had long since worn out hardly any allies.