Chris C. Mooney Quotes

The Right’s war on science also spreads a massive amount of misinformation, and sometimes even fosters outright ignorance. Consider the creationist quest to thwart the teaching of the theory of evolution to public school children. Science has managed to answer one of the most profound questions around—where does the human species come from?—but religious conservatives don’t want anyone to know about it. And with the spread of ignorance and pseudoscience comes a decline in critical thinking—a lapse in our collective capacity to cut through all the lies and distortions and determine which ideas we should trust.

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.”

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.

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.

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

Such flagrant misrepresentation goes far beyond mere dishonesty. It demonstrates a gross disregard for the welfare of the American public, whom Bush represents, and for the population of the entire globe, whose fate depends in large measure on the behavior of the American behemoth.

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

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.

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.

To be sure, it remains up to policymakers to decide whether the economic costs of such preventative measures outweigh the benefits. But that key question isn’t even being properly debated. Instead, climate change has become an issue on which conservatives have elected to fight over science at least as much as over economics, relying on stunning distortions and a shocking disregard for both expertise and the most reputable sources of scientific assessment and analysis.
If this situation is maddening, it is also tragic. There may be no other issue today where a corruption of the necessary relationship between science and political decision-making has more potentially disastrous consequences. And together, James Inhofe and the Bush administration have made that corruption systematic and complete. Not only do they strive to prevent the public from understanding the gravity of the climate situation, but in sowing confusion and uncertainty, they help prevent us from doing anything about it. And this—this—is what the Right calls “rational, science-based thinking and policy-making.”

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

The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication—anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor. These mechanisms are more or less explicitly designed to counter human self-deception. People always think they’re right, and powerful people will tend to use their authority to bolster their prestige and suppress inconvenient opposition. You try to set up the game of science so that the truth will out despite this ugly side of human nature.

But when they don’t like what science has to tell them, those wielding political power of the have another option besides running away from the truth: suppression.

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

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.