You might expect that newly minted science graduates - who presumably think of themselves as scientists, and who I'd thought of as scientists - would have a well-developed sense of what science is. So it's pretty shocking to discover that a large proportion of them don't have a clue. At least that's the case in the UK, going on the evidence of our Opinion author James Williams ("What Makes Science 'Science'?"). He found that a sizeable proportion of science graduates entering teacher training couldn't define what is a scientific fact, law or hypothesis. One young innocent, for instance, defined scientific theory as "an idea about something, not necessarily true." If that isn't playing into the hands of creationists, then I don't know what is!
Williams' findings demand a thorough assessment of what's being taught to science students. If, as seems likely, university science departments are churning out technically sophisticated but ...
