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Quotes from Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future — Chris Mooney

born 1977 United States

← All quotes by Chris Mooney

15 quotes

Media coverage tends to be episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

And then there’s religion, the source of the deepest fissure in the science-society relationship.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Without the Internet, the modern vaccine-skeptic movement probably wouldn’t exist, at least not in it current form.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

In part, the divorce of science and politics can be explained by the very different worldviews that inform each field.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

They didn’t even understand the science they presumed to criticize.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

For a very long time, American scientists have found themselves pitted against both our businesslike, can-do attitudes and our piety.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Many decisions about science policy are made not through decision or analysis but on ideological and political grounds.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

No one in Congress senses the need for science in their daily lives.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

The scientific case for rejecting such bad science (or non-science) is indisputable. But that doesn’t make it persuasive to creationists or other religiously motivated evolution skeptics.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

At the same time (i. e., 1994), the Republican party continued to define itself in adulation of Reagan and in opposition to mainstream science.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

As perhaps the chief public face of American science during this period, Carl Sagan wasn’t merely a popularizer but a fierce advocate for the proper use of science in the real world. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan necessarily became his chief foe, for Reagan brought anti-science into the American political mainstream as never before.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

The emergence of the religious right onto the political stage in the 1970s—motivated in part by its adherents’ resentment of the nation’s intellectual and scientific elites—was also a major factor in curtailing the role of science in public policy.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

A change in administration doesn’t automatically fix the underlying problems, which include the corporate media’s marginalizing of science, ongoing divides over science and religion, and an American culture that all too often questions the value of intellect and even glorifies dumbness.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Chris Mooney (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.