Thanks for posting this. I had thought of writing up a big Page going over this story, what it means but more importantly what it probably doesn’t mean.

Looking at the original paper I was struck by the nature of the survey. There is a cultural blindness about science, not just by the religious atavists but also many of the self-declared progressives who express concern over this issue.

Difficult to summarize my own thoughts on this in a brief format, but we ought to distinguish between:
1) knowledge of discoveries in the science enterprise; and
2) acceptance of the socialized norm regarding what others claim.

Too often, as in this case in the survey of OK students, what is being evaluated is how well students accept what somebody wants to assert as the required norm, as far as accepting what “science” tells us. This is different than evaluating whether students can understand or conduct the work of science itself.