Download or read book Anti scientific Americans written by Matt Motta and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anti-Scientific Americans offers new theoretical and data-driven insights into the prevalence, origins, and policy consequences of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. Building on recent theoretical advances, the book begins by conceptualizing anti-intellectualism as the dislike and distrust of scientists, academics, and other experts. It then brings together "micro-level" survey data from cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys spanning six decades, and aggregated "macro-level" data from hundreds of opinion polls dating back to the 1940s, to show that anti-intellectualism is both a pervasive and pernicious presence in American public life. One third of Americans can be thought about as holding anti-intellectual attitudes at any given time, which have become increasingly politicized following the rise of the Tea Party in the early 2010s. Reviving often-overlooked insights from Richard Hofstadter's pioneering (1963) work on the subject, the book also shows that anti-intellectualism both shapes and is shaped by Americans' resentment of the role that experts play in the policymaking process. Correspondingly, anti-intellectualism motivates opposition to evidence-based policies in several areas, including on issues related to climate change, economic policy, and resistance to the advice of public health experts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The book also shows that elected officials respond to increases in public ("macro-level") anti-intellectualism by curtailing experts' influence in the policymaking process. Still, Anti-Scientific Americans concludes on an optimistic note by discussing how what we might learn from this book can help reduce the prevalence and pernicious impact of anti-intellectualism in American political life, and restore Americans' faith in experts"--

Download or read book Anti Scientific Americans written by Matthew Motta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Anti-Scientific Americans, Matthew Motta offers new theoretical and data-driven insights into the prevalence, origins, and policy consequences of anti-intellectualism in the US. He brings together "micro-level" survey data from cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys spanning six decades, and aggregated "macro-level" data from hundreds of opinion polls dating back to the 1940s, to show that anti-intellectualism is both a pervasive and pernicious presence in American public life. A methodologically rigorous and empirically powerful account of one the most profound forces in American politics, this book will be of interest to scholars and students throughout the social sciences interested in why experts generate such resentment.

Download or read book Science Left Behind written by Alex Berezow and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2012-09-12 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning -- and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Yet those on the left have numerous fallacies of their own. Aversion to clean energy programs, basic biological research, and even life-saving vaccines come naturally to many progressives. These are positions supported by little more than junk-science and paranoid thinking. Now for the first time, science writers Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell have drawn open the curtain on the left's fear of science. As Science Left Behind reveals, vague inclinations about the wholesomeness of all things natural, the unhealthiness of the unnatural, and many other seductive fallacies have led to an epidemic of misinformation. The results: public health crises, damaging and misguided policies, and worst of all, a new culture war over basic scientific facts -- in which the left is just as culpable as the right.

Download or read book Science under Fire written by Andrew Jewett and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture. Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that “tenured radicals” have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science’s celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation’s bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s. Looking at today’s battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists’ claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

Download or read book The Republican War on Science written by Chris Mooney and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2007-03-16 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since the Eisenhower administration. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, missile defense, abstinence education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies, once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents, are increasingly staffed by political appointees and fringe theorists who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science. This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science , Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

Download or read book The War on Science written by Shawn Otto and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “insightful” and in-depth look at anti-science politics and its deadly results (Maria Konnikova, New York Times–bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff). Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” But what happens when they aren’t? From climate change to vaccinations, transportation to technology, health care to defense, we are in the midst of an unprecedented expansion of scientific progress—and a simultaneous expansion of danger. At the very time we need them most, scientists and the very idea of objective knowledge are being bombarded by a vast, well-funded war on science, and the results are deadly. Whether it’s driven by identity politics, ideology, or industry, the result is an unprecedented erosion of thought in Western democracies as voters, policymakers, and justices actively ignore scientific evidence, leaving major policy decisions to be based more on the demands of the most strident voices. This compelling book investigates the historical, social, philosophical, political, and emotional reasons why evidence-based politics are in decline and authoritarian politics are once again on the rise on both left and right—and provides some compelling solutions to bring us to our collective senses, before it's too late. “If you care about attacks on climate science and the rise of authoritarianism, if you care about biased media coverage and shake-your-head political tomfoolery, this book is for you.”—The Guardian

Download or read book Science and Anti science written by Gerald James Holton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is good science? What goal--if any--is the proper end of scientific activity? Is there a legitimating authority that scientists mayclaim? Howserious athreat are the anti-science movements? These questions have long been debated but, as Gerald Holton points out, every era must offer its own responses. This book examines these questions not in the abstract but shows their historic roots and the answers emerging from the scientific and political controversies of this century. Employing the case-study method and the concept of scientific thematathat he has pioneered, Holton displays the broad scope of his insight into the workings of science: from the influence of Ernst Mach on twentiethcentury physicists, biologists, psychologists, and other thinkers to the rhetorical strategies used in the work of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and others; from the bickering between Thomas Jefferson and the U.S. Congress over the proper form of federal sponsorship of scientific research to philosophical debates since Oswald Spengier over whether our scientific knowledge will ever be "complete." In a masterful final chapter, Holton scrutinizes the "anti-science phenomenon," the increasingly common opposition to science as practiced today. He approaches this contentious issue by examining the world views and political ambitions of the proponents of science as well as those of its opponents-the critics of "establishment science" (including even those who fear that science threatens to overwhelm the individual in the postmodern world) and the adherents of "alternative science" (Creationists, New Age "healers," astrologers). Through it all runs the thread of the author's deep historical knowledge and his humanistic understanding of science in modern culture. Science and Anti-Science will be of great interest not only to scientists and scholars in the field of science studies but also to educators, policymalcers, and all those who wish to gain a fuller understanding of challenges to and doubts about the role of science in our lives today.

Download or read book Doing the Right Thing written by Scientific American Editors and published by Scientific American. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doing the Right Thing: Ethics in Science by the Editors of Scientific American Most of us have probably had those discussions, either in a classroom setting or otherwise, where a hypothetical situation is given and you're asked to choose between two or more unsatisfying options. If you follow option A, five people die; if you follow option B, one person dies. What do you do? Option B looks like the lesser of the evils, but then there's a wrinkle. Option B requires you to actively murder the one person to save five. Now what do you do? Making ethical decisions involves more than listening to an inner moral compass, a feeling in the gut of what's right and wrong; and questions of ethics in science are becoming increasingly complex, especially as technology encroaches upon even our most private cellular spaces. In this eBook, Doing the Right Thing: Ethics in Science, we cover a wide range of areas in science and medicine where complicated ethical questions come to bear, beginning with the first section, "Genomics." In "Are Personal Genome Scans Medically Useless," Sally Lehrman examines the value, or lack thereof, in the information obtained from direct-to-consumer genotyping tests, a field that exploded in the '00s. The middle sections are devoted to ethics in research, where informed—and ethically sound—choices are the basis of many scientific studies. Sections 2, 3 and 4 analyze the challenges unique to three areas, respectively: medical, pharmaceutical and basic research. Medical studies often reveal more information than researchers are looking for, and two articles, "The Ethics of Scan and Tell" and "Reporting Unrelated Findings in Study Subjects," examine questions of responsibility toward study subjects. Later, Charles Seife ferrets out doctors' financial ties to pharmaceutical companies in "Is Drug Research Trustworthy?" and Katherine Harmon calculates "The Cost of Misconduct" to the taxpayer. Finally Section 6, "Ethics and the Mind," analyzes the process of how we resolve moral conflicts when we make decisions. The interaction between reasoning and emotion is poorly understood, as seen in both "Anguish and Ethics" and "When Morality Is Hard to Like," but studies show that the emotional and memory regions of the brain are more active when confronted with difficult moral questions. These decisions are usually made after great inner struggle – think again of option B. What would you do?

Download or read book Anti Gravity written by Steve Mirsky and published by Globe Pequot. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fast-reading, funny prose on science, pop culture, politics, and life.

Download or read book Unscientific America written by Chris Mooney and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-07-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University, the scientifically-trained novelist C.P. Snow described science and the humanities as "two cultures," separated by a "gulf of mutual incomprehension." And the humanists had all the cultural power -- the low prestige of science, Snow argued, left Western leaders too little educated in scientific subjects that were increasingly central to world problems: the elementary physics behind nuclear weapons, for instance, or the basics of plant science needed to feed the world's growing population. Now, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a journalist-scientist team, offer an updated "two cultures" polemic for America in the 21st century. Just as in Snow's time, some of our gravest challenges -- climate change, the energy crisis, national economic competitiveness -- and gravest threats -- global pandemics, nuclear proliferation -- have fundamentally scientific underpinnings. Yet we still live in a culture that rarely takes science seriously or has it on the radar. For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans reject evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old; the number of newspapers with weekly science sections has shrunken by two-thirds over the past several decades. The public is polarized over climate change -- an issue where political party affiliation determines one's view of reality -- and in dangerous retreat from childhood vaccinations. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of Americans have even met a scientist to begin with; more than half can't name a living scientist role model. For this dismaying situation, Mooney and Kirshenbaum don't let anyone off the hook. They highlight the anti-intellectual tendencies of the American public (and particularly the politicians and journalists who are supposed to serve it), but also challenge the scientists themselves, who despite the best of intentions have often failed to communicate about their work effectively to a broad public -- and so have ceded their critical place in the public sphere to religious and commercial propagandists. A plea for enhanced scientific literacy, Unscientific America urges those who care about the place of science in our society to take unprecedented action. We must begin to train a small army of ambassadors who can translate science's message and make it relevant to the media, to politicians, and to the public in the broadest sense. An impassioned call to arms worthy of Snow's original manifesto, this book lays the groundwork for reintegrating science into the public discourse -- before it's too late.

Download or read book Preventing the Next Pandemic written by Peter J. Hotez and published by er. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touching on a range of disease, from leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) to COVID-19, Preventing the Next Pandemic has always been a timely goal, but it will be even more important in a COVID and post-COVID world.

Download or read book Higher Superstition written by Paul R. Gross and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1997-12-03 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The widely acclaimed response to the postmodernists attacks on science, with a new afterword. With the emergence of "cultural studies" and the blurring of once-clear academic boundaries, scholars are turning to subjects far outside their traditional disciplines and areas of expertise. In Higher Superstition scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt raise serious questions about the growing criticism of science by humanists and social scientists on the "academic left." This edition of Higher Superstition includes a new afterword by the authors.

Download or read book Unscientific Americans written by Roz Chast and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 1982 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cartoons use puns and the author's offbeat sense of humor to poke fun at human nature and modern life in the United States

Download or read book Evolution vs Creationism written by Scientific American Editors and published by Scientific American. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Robert Darwin’s 1859 landmark book, "On the Origin of Species," introduced the theory of biological evolution to the masses and kicked off a controversy of ideas that persists to this day. Darwin knew he would face religious opposition to a theory of creation that differed from the story in Genesis, but he probably didn’t imagine how long that opposition would last. More than 150 years after "Origin," the fight over teaching evolution rages on. Creationists, or those who hold the belief that the universe and all life was made by divine creator, have tried to use a myriad of tactics either to ban the teaching of evolution entirely or to have creationism and/or intelligent design taught alongside it in public schools. In this eBook, "Evolution vs. Creationism: Inside the Controversy," we take a close look at the rise of Darwinism, the arguments and opposition by the creationist movement, whether faith and science can coexist and what could happen if the U.S. continues on an anti-science trajectory. In “The Origin of Darwinism,” author C.D. Darlington provides historical context by looking at how the work of other scientific pioneers laid the foundation for "Origin" and how Darwin’s own ideas “evolved” over time. “A Witness at the Scopes Trial” is a fascinating first-hand account of the 1925 court case where Tennessee biology teacher John Thomas Scopes was tried for teaching evolution. John Rennie’s “15 Answers to Creationists Nonsense” is a thoughtful, concise refutation of the main arguments against evolution, such as “Evolution is just a theory.” On the flip side, in “Should Science Speak to Faith?” scientists Laurence M. Krauss and Richard Dawkins discuss whether science and faith can coexist. With this eBook, we went from deep in our archives to current events to examine the revolutionary impact of Darwin’s theory and the controversy that continues today.

Download or read book Quantum Steampunk written by Nicole Yunger Halpern and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The science-fiction genre known as steampunk juxtaposes futuristic technologies with Victorian settings. This fantasy is becoming reality at the intersection of two scientific fields-twenty-first-century quantum physics and nineteenth-century thermodynamics, or the study of energy-in a discipline known as quantum steampunk"--

Download or read book Anti Intellectualism in American Life written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-01-04 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." —Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor

Download or read book Ask the Experts Physics and Math written by Scientific American Editors and published by Scientific American. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For going on two decades, Scientific American's "Ask the Experts" column has been answering reader questions on all fields of science. We've taken your questions from the basic to the esoteric and reached out to top scientists, professors and researchers to find out why the sky is blue or whether we really only use 10% of our brains. Now, we've combed through our archives and have compiled some of the most interesting questions (and answers) into a series of eBooks. Organized by subject, each eBook provides short, easily digestible answers to questions on that particular branch of the sciences. The first eBook in our series – Physics and Math – explains a wide range of natural phenomena and mathematical concepts. Have you ever wondered what exactly antimatter is? How about game theory, quantum mechanics and the origin of pi? Mathematicians and professors from universities across the country tackle these topics, drawing on their extensive expertise to give answers that are at once accurate and comprehensible by those who haven't studied physics or math since high school.