Tonight on the last Walking with Dinosaurs, T-Rex appears. Huge, mythic, a Barney whose cuddle means death. The BBC has always won huge audiences for its science programmes and this was no exception. But it's different this side of the water. Over here, we're not sci-literate, even though many of us claim we want to be.
Yes, we know about T-Rex. You can't get through childhood without meeting him. The summer eclipse fascinated us too. But outside that superficial condition, we are the least sci-literate place in western Europe, or so says the OECD. Illiteracy in Ireland is so bad that 66 per cent of us have hardly a clue about science and its workings, according to a new Forfas survey.
This illiteracy is disabling. In these nascent stages of debate, you read letters on the opposite page about whether there are jobs in science, or why there should be more money available for research.
You read today's science page and enjoy the way you can actually follow what's being said. You might be joining in the consciousness-raising national science party currently underway through the 10-day Science Week.
Apart altogether from developing the economy and raising local skills, there are urgent reasons why sci-literacy must become an educational priority, even for those of us who are long left school.
It's a question of democracy: if we don't shape up, we are going to be excluded.
Like it or not, the new science is destined to affect the way we live. All the big questions are coming from science. What is man? What is God? Can we articulate an underlying "Theory of Everything"? The questions aren't only about how and why we're here, or in what ways we will constitute public life in the future.
At home, they translate rather differently. If I can screen the genetic code for multiple sclerosis, or unsociable levels of aggression, or for such features as cleft palate, freckled skin or intelligence levels in my future children, will I do so? How might I respond to possible genetic influences which allegedly make my children gay? And if I want to, will I have sufficient financial resources to use the technology, or the ethical resources to reason why I should perhaps think again?
By 2003, the Human Genome Project will have completed its quest to identify the three million chemical bases and some 100,000 genes that are one way of describing a human being. This new map will facilitate unimaginable interventions in individual and social development, from psychology and food, to education and criminal justice.
Already, certain genetic sequences have been patented, which means we will have to pay money to access the information they hold. It's a Pandora's Box where good and evil can't as yet be distinguished: a third millennium system of economically-engineered eugenics may be just a few steps away.
We can't expect politicians to bridge this huge gap in understanding. They don't necessarily know enough to ask the right questions, either. In the recent GM food debate, the Government appointed an expert group to look at the issues the rest of us can't articulate.
But the rising tide of new science is spawning so many individual research communities that an "expert" in one area won't necessarily have enough peer group knowledge in another to keep up to speed. And given the absence of a "scientific" method for dealing with questions about moral and aesthetic values, commentaries from those concerns speak so different a language that they may have genuine difficulty in finding a vocabulary within which to participate.
We may have to become our own gatekeepers, even though dealing with so many questions needs better information than a bluffer's guide to evolutionary biology, chaos theory or genetics. We must become more sci-literate. Yet everything is stacked against us being able to.
Schooling, culture, not to mention the fact that stereotypes underline how "hard" science is, means most of us are excluded from these imminent debates. The post-war "two cultures" model promoting the concept of parallel but separate systems between the humanities and the sciences colludes in keeping "us" and "them" apart, and ensuring the two cultures can't cohere. So "we" may be relegated to the level of info-serfs, while "they" begin to form a new priest-like elite with global implications.
And all for the want of some basic literacy. You could read writers like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker and Stephen Jay Gould to learn about the ambitions now bursting through the life sciences - theirs is a growing market. The great adventure of the new science hits maths and physics too: if you can play a good round of poker, you'll be able to come to terms with basic concepts in cosmology and physics.
Science needs to become democratised. Ironically, the arts model offers some lessons in how aspects of that popularisation may be achieved.
Whereas in London alone, children can avail of sleep-overs in the Science Museum, all we have here are some beautiful, but limited, examples of scientific instruments on the upper floors of the National Museum at Collins Barracks. There's no museum or centre in Ireland that can mediate scientific thinking and ideas for the public in the same way that, for example, the Ark children's centre mediates creative activity between professionals and children, or is analogous to the arts education programmes routinely offered by local authorities and arts centres.
Science, like the arts, flourishes in healthy economic conditions. We can expect that even modest investment in local research will yield advances here in the near future. Science is being introduced for the first time to the primary curriculum, which suggests that sci-literacy levels will eventually improve. Slowly. Are the rest of us content to remain dinosaurs, outside today's hottest debates?
It's not only about jobs, it's about enabling as many citizens as possible to access a range of scientific issues. Sci-literacy in Ireland needs the official equivalent of a Big Bang. Time to strip off the white coats and boldly enter the brave new world of global poker.
Medb Ruane can be contacted at: mruane@irish-times.ie