Those who know science are less likely to accept it if it’s controversial (2017)
When it comes to controversial science, a little knowledge is a problem

          
          
Partly overlapping effects were seen when religious fundamentalism was considered, the exception being climate change, where opinion wasn't polarized along religious lines. Stem cell research, the Big Bang, and human evolution were, however.
Education vs. science
Overall, Drummond and Fishchoff found that education doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to accepting science. "Participants’ general educational attainment and science education were at best weakly related to their acceptance of the scientific consensus," they conclude. Scientific literacy helped a bit overall, as "those with higher scientific literacy scores were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus on three issues: the Big Bang, human evolution, and nanotechnology."
But that was largely due to the large effect it had among political and religious liberals. In other ways, it hurt, as those with a strong science education or who demonstrated scientific literacy showed higher polarization when it came to stem cells, evolution, and the climate, primarily because conservatives become less likely to accept the scientific consensus.
Ultimately, the thing that matters most is trust. "On all six topics," the authors write, "people who trust the scientific enterprise more are also more likely to accept its findings." The politicization of scientific issues may, in part, be the result of a long-term decline in trust in the scientific enterprise among conservatives.
As always, there are some caveats when it comes to the questions asked in the survey. For example, it's tough to get a firm grasp on scientific literacy from a few survey questions, and the percentages seen in many surveys depend on how various questions are phrased. For example, an individual may answer a question on dinosaurs in a way that acknowledges that they lived millions of years ago while answering a question on human origins by saying they didn't evolve. And the climate question asked how much participants were "concerned" about climate change. It's entirely possible for someone to accept the science of human-driven climate change while rejecting scientists' conclusions of what a 4-degrees-Celsius-warmer world would look like.

          
                  