This may explain some of the rhetoric we've been hearing in GOP stump speeches of late: The number of conservatives who say they have a "great deal" of trust in science has fallen to 35 percent, down 28 points from the mid-1970s, according to a new academic paper.

The study, which was published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, found that liberal and moderate attitudes toward the topic have remained mostly unchanged since national pollsters first began posing the question in 1974, back when roughly half of all liberals and conservatives expressed significant trust in science.
The peer-reviewed research paper explains: "These results are quite profound because they imply that conservative discontent with science was not attributable to the uneducated but to rising distrust among educated conservatives."