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

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.

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

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