Nonsense Multiplied is Still Nonsense.

Students of rhetorical fallacy learn about the argumentum ad populum.  Democracies are often practitoners of it. Sometimes it is important to take a step back and remember that opinion polls are often an aggregation of error, not the stenography of truth.  In 1993, the NORC asked Americans five questions about science. The results ranged from bad to worse. About a quarter did not believe that antibiotics kill bacteria or do not kill viruses.  About a third believed that humans make all radioactivity.  More than half believed that astrology has some scientific basis, that humans did not develop from some earlier sort of animal, and that all man made chemicals cause cancer in sufficient quantity. 

20 countries took the test, which included these questions in additon to seven others. 13 other countires scored worse.