Chris C. Mooney Quotes

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

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

When pressed, ideological appropriators of science will rarely relinquish a cherished idea no matter how many times it has been convincingly debunked. They seek to adopt the veneer of science, but not the critical rigor that should accompany it.

You can't prove what's going to happen in the future," explains Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively on the uses of modeling. "But that doesn't mean you don't have a rational basis for action.

We have learned from encounters with such ventures as 'creation science,' which purportedly refutes the theory of evolution, that we must be sceptical when nonscientist advocates offer purported analyses of scientific data to reinforce conclusions that they have already reached on nonscientific grounds.

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.

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

Healthy skepticism is an essential and treasured feature of scientific analysis," Gibbons added. "But willful distortion of evidence has no place at the table of scientific inquiry.

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

From acid rain to global climate change, from “creation science” to “intelligent design,” conservatives had been meddling with science for years, largely on behalf of their pro-industry and religiously conservative supporters.

In 1957, he appointed the first official presidential science advisor, MIT president James Killian, and launched the distinguished President’s Science Advisory Committee. As Eisenhower would later put it, “this bunch of scientists was one of the few groups that I encountered in Washington who seemed to be there to help the country and not to help themselves.”

But it is only half the story. If powerful religious commitments lead to politically driven abuses of science, so does an unswerving commitment to the bottom line.

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

To be sure, the intelligent design movement does not claim an animus against science. Science abusers never do. Rather, the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives.

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.