Top 15 Chris C. Mooney Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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