On television, a former beauty queen speaks of “quantum constellations”; there are advertisements for facial creams: one treats “gravitational wrinkles”, another rejuvenates the skin with plant stem cells and there is one that eliminates spots, pimples and acne, which has been enriched with 24-karat gold particles.

Horoscopes are constantly being published. The head of the tarot-horoscope that is published full-page on Sundays in a major newspaper gives the energy a hitherto unknown property: “The energy of August asks you to remove your masks…”. Although, to be fair, the paper does maintain a weekly section devoted to science news.

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Nor do representatives of the highest echelons of power escape this irrationality: for the Vice President of the previous government, basic science is a matter of vanity, a Minister of Science promoted a concoction to treat different types of cancer, and the current President belittled the knowledge of geology when he stated that “to get out of the earth does not require much work or knowledge”.

The false start merited that the members of the Colombian Association of Geologists and Energy Geophysicists sent him a letter clarifying the importance of his work for the economic development of the country.

Ignorance of science is alienating, it leads the individual to accept as true any “narrative” alternative to rational knowledge: human beings come from a hole under the earth, in flying saucers extraterrestrial civilizations visit us regularly, the planet is not round but flat, in a Scottish lake hides a shy prehistoric animal and “ancestral aliens” helped build the pyramids of Egypt.

While all this pseudo-scientific garbage survives without any problem, at the beginning of this year Investigación y Ciencia, the best popular science magazine in Latin America, disappeared after decades of existence; years ago Mundo Científico also ceased to reach the country and for some time now books such as those of the Biblioteca Científica Salvat or those of the Muy Interesante collection have not circulated in these parts.

Although it is true that texts written by leading scientists are available in the country’s bookstores, their cost makes them unaffordable for a large sector of the population.

There are efforts made by entities such as the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, the Colombian Association for the Advancement of Science, planetariums and private organizations such as the Colombian Association of Amateur Astronomers (ACDA) that program informative events on different topics.

The speakers replace complex scientific language with “ordinary language to explain the basic concepts and, above all, to make accessible to anyone the new vision of the world that science is producing”, says Italian physicist Guido Tonelli.

It would be wonderful if, when people get together, they could have a proper discussion, for example, about the damage that the construction of a military base will have on the flora and fauna of Gorgona Island, the geopolitical interests that the United States has in that territory, and whether it is true that Colombia is the world’s power of life, or about the latest discoveries on the origin of the human being, or about the impact of Free Trade Agreements on the national economy, or compare their perceptions of the work of García Márquez, or exchange concepts about the differences and similarities between the piqueria, the contrapunteo and the trova. In short, to learn about the contributions made by scientists and artists from here and other parts of the world.

If this dream becomes a reality, we would have well-informed citizens with the capacity to make decisions where rationality prevails over emotionality. Surely, under these conditions people could, for example, choose taking into account a true analysis of the government program proposed by a candidate and not end up selling their vote.

In the task of bringing science to the people of the country, the first responsible is the State, which to this day – and despite the wisdom of elevating education to the rank of a fundamental right for citizens – has not solved the main problem: adequate funding to make this right a reality.

Quality education at all levels and with an appropriate budget is a basic condition for the scientific development of the country and a way to have a citizenry that knows science, so that superstition does not displace reason, that knows that “gravitational wrinkle” is a metaphor to describe the wave that is generated in the space-time fabric in the presence of the mass of a body and not the loss of elasticity that time imposes on the skin as we age.

Are evolutionism and Darwinism the same thing?