What is the profile of a scientifically knowledgeable person?

Scientific progress is crucial for the problems we humans face, but what types of people know science the best?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asked respondents 12 basic science questions. A random example is, does the father determine the sex of the child? One problem with the list of questions is that they are a bit too easy; the mean number correct is 9.5.

Shown below are OLS standardized coefficient for a number of factors I thought might predict scores on this science quiz (sample size = 203):

Standardized OLS regression coefficients

Male  .09
Age   .01
Black   -.19**
Other race   .00
Years of education   .32***
Believe in God   -.19**
Church attendance   -.07
Political conservatism  -.06

**p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test

According to the results, basic scientific knowledge is predicted significantly by being white; having more education; and being skeptical about the existence of God. The other variables are not predictive.

But you might be thinking, hey, this is a HBD blog--where's IQ?  Well, I wanted to throw it in last to see how it changes things:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients--IQ added to model

IQ   .35***
Male  .20
Age   -.10
Black   .08
Other race   .04
Years of education   .08
Believe in God   -.33**
Church attendance   -.04
Political conservatism   -.01

**p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test


Education and being black drop to non-significance when IQ is added to the equation.  In other words, the reason why more education people know more science is because they are smarter, not because they were exposed to more information than less educated people, and blacks score lower because they are, on average, less intelligent.

By contrast, skepticism about God strongly predicts scientific knowledge even after taking IQ into account. This suggests that, at least under current conditions, skeptics take to science more than believers, even after controlling for differences in IQ.

UPDATE:  I discovered that fewer people were asked the last science question, so I dropped it to get the sample size up to 1,039--much bigger. Here are results for the final model:

Standardized OLS regression coefficients--IQ added to model

IQ   .29***
Male  .14**
Age   -.02
Black   -.12***
Other race   -.03
Years of education   .22***
Believe in God   -.16***
Church attendance   -.12***
Political conservatism   -.07*

*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001, two-tail test

We now have the statistical power to see smaller effects.  IQ still dominates the model, but now we see that the following traits predict knowledge: male, white, more education, disbelief, not attending church, and liberal political orientation.

After IQ, education is most important, followed by skepticism, gender, race, attendance, and political orientation. Keep in mind that these factors matter even after taking IQ into account. For example, and man whose IQ is the same as a woman's is likely to know more science than she does.

Data: Which ethnic groups know the most science?

You might assume that a person's knowledge of basic science is merely the result of education or IQ.  But when I calculate Pearson correlations with a 10 question quiz on basic science (e.g., "Who determines the sex of the child -- the mother or the father?") the education/science and IQ/science correlations are of moderate size (.37 and .41, respectively).  Some people simply take to science better than others. I like to call this Sci-Q.

I was curious about how this knowledge differs by race and ethnicity. The numbers displayed below are the mean for any group with 10 or more respondents (GSS data, total sample size = 3,737):

Mean Scientific Knowledge Score

Yugoslav  8.20
Scottish  7.82
Swedish  7.87
Japanese  7.77
Russian  7.55
English/Welsh  7.54
Swiss  7.48
Chinese   7.45
Norwegian  7.42
Polish  7.42
Hungarian  7.41
Austrian  7.40
Lithuanian  7.40
Jewish  7.38
Danish  7.30
French  7.25
Czech  7.22
Irish  7.22
French Canadian  7.17
Greek  7.15
Asian  Indian  7.14
Netherlands  7.11
German  7.10
Italian  7.10
Finnish  7.08

US Total  6.92

Spanish  6.89
Arab  6.88
Portuguese 6.71
American Indian  6.49
Filipino  6.12
Mexican  5.88
Puerto Rican  5.88
Black  5.86
West Indian  5.77

GSS data has the old category of one's family coming from Yugoslavia.  These people are in first place with a very high mean of 8.20.  We can see that Eastern Europeans, in general, tend to do well, as do Northern Europeans and Northeast Asians. 

On the low end, you see blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Arabs.

The gap between the highest and lowest groups is almost 1.4 standard deviations -- a huge difference. 

America's future depends on having lots of people who "take to science."  We need high-scoring groups to grow--through their having larger families and/or moving to the United States.

Data: What predicts skepticism about God best--scientific knowledge, IQ, or education?

Many 19th century thinkers believed that religion would gradually wither away as industrialization and scientific knowledge spread.  Religious belief has proven to be more stubborn than they thought, perhaps because they didn't realize that it has a genetic component, but how much of an antagonism do we see nowadays between science and belief?

The General Social Survey (GSS) asks people how much confidence they have in the existence of God with answers ranging from "don't believe" to "know there is a God."  The survey also asked ten questions that tap scientific knowledge.  I added up the correct answers and estimated the relationship between the this and belief with OLS regression (N = 4,542), and the unstandardied coefficient is -.195.  Standardized is -.265.  In plain English, scientific knowledge predicts skepticism with some accuracy.

Is this link due simply to IQ?  In other words, do smart people seek out scientific knowledge and at the same time come to look on the existence of God with skepticism?  The answer is, not really. When I add IQ to the model, it does significantly predict skepticism, but the effect is weak (beta = -.051) and the coefficient for scientific knowledge only drops a little from -.195 to -.187. 

How about education? People learn more science as they get educated, and perhaps school teaches skepticism about God. When I add years of education to the model, it is related to more skepticism only weakly (beta = -.052), and the science coefficient only drops from -.187 to -.178.  By the way, the effect of IQ on skepticism falls to non-significance with the addition of education to the model.  In other words, IQ is unrelated to skepticism when you take educational level into account. 

So, when you consider knowledge of science, IQ, and education, the factor that really seems to matter for belief is science.  (Of course, causal direction is not clear here. Religious people may tend to stay away from science since they sense it is antagonistic to their beliefs.)