I have interacted with Pakistanis of all ages and have found that most of them, even graduates, don't know anything about scientific topics. In fact, when they hear me talk about how science has changed the world and what the world will be like a hundred years from now, they look at me as if I should be locked up.
Many years ago, I read about a man who discovered that by lowering the body temperature of an animal by one degree Celsius, its life span can be doubled. When I told this to my business partner, that in a hundred years, humans would live to the age of a hundred and fifty, he was outraged. "This can only be done by God", he yelled. Since he was twenty years older than me, I reminded him that fifty years back, men and women usually died before the age of fifty, but science had managed to increase the life span of humans by more than twenty years. He wasn't convinced that it was science that did it.
There was another old man who sneered when I told him about dinosaurs going extinct sixty five million years ago. "That's what science says, I don't believe it", he said. I pointed out that it was science that had landed a man on the moon just twenty seconds later than originally scheduled. "I don't believe anyone has ever landed on the moon", he said.
But these two were virtually illiterate. An uncle of mine, a chemical engineer looked disbelievingly at me when I told him of the events 253 million years back when almost all living things became extinct. He thought that life on earth began six thousand years back.
I doubt if even the children of today's Pakistan will be taught science the way it should be taught. For this we have to thank Zia, who (like Bhutto) ruined the education system in the country.
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