A great article from the LA Times can he found here.
Chris Mooney, author of the 2005 bestseller "The Republican War on Science," and his coauthor Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University, seek to explain how Americans have come to minimize science in a time when, they assert, we will need it most -- as global warming, advances in genetics and the possibility of large-scale engineering of the Earth's climate loom in our future.
Pointing to what they see as a deep-seated streak of anti-intellectualism in this country, the authors write: "Americans built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles."
This deep seated anti-intellectualism is very obvious in the pseudo-science we read in the area of autism, where the arguments of a "mom" is held to be equal to those of a research doctor with twenty years of experience. Further, we tend to sprinkle on a goof dose of paranoia and conspiracy theory to top things off. This is a good read for anyone interested in the social-political-cultural aspects of this ongoing debate.
Chris Mooney, author of the 2005 bestseller "The Republican War on Science," and his coauthor Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University, seek to explain how Americans have come to minimize science in a time when, they assert, we will need it most -- as global warming, advances in genetics and the possibility of large-scale engineering of the Earth's climate loom in our future.
Pointing to what they see as a deep-seated streak of anti-intellectualism in this country, the authors write: "Americans built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles."
This deep seated anti-intellectualism is very obvious in the pseudo-science we read in the area of autism, where the arguments of a "mom" is held to be equal to those of a research doctor with twenty years of experience. Further, we tend to sprinkle on a goof dose of paranoia and conspiracy theory to top things off. This is a good read for anyone interested in the social-political-cultural aspects of this ongoing debate.