Unscientific America
Review by Clive Cookson
Published: August 24 2009 04:57 | Last updated: August 24 2009 04:57
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future
By Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books £15.99, 224 pages
Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science, a bestseller in 2005, was one of the most powerful political books of George W. Bush’s presidency. His account of a right-wing strategy to twist scientific evidence in favour of political ideology resonated with liberal and intellectual opinion in the US.
But the author has not been sitting around complacently following the election of a science-friendly Obama administration. Mooney, a journalist, has teamed up with Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine biologist, to write a polemic about scientific illiteracy and the dangerous gulf between science and American culture/politics. If the war is over, they say, urgent “nation building” is needed so that extreme anti-science forces can never return to power.
Unscientific America pays homage to novelist CP Snow, whose “Two Cultures” lecture ignited a similar debate in Britain 50 years ago. “Snow knew what really matters,” the authors write. “You might say our book is merely here to provide half a century of transatlantic updating.”
Yet, for Mooney and Kirshenbaum, the Snow era was the heyday of American science. In the late 1950s and 1960s, a scientific elite had the ear of Republican and Democrat administrations, which poured billions into research and education. After around 1970 many factors, from the rise of the religious right to growing environmentalism, undermined science’s role in public policy and esteem.
The main targets of Unscientific America are scientists themselves. On the whole they have hidden away from the public, avoided political engagement and got on quietly with their research, communicating only with their peers through specialist journals and conferences.
To make matters worse, the authors say, scientists have tended to react with jealousy and scorn to those colleagues who have made an effort to communicate through the mass media. The most glaring example is late astronomer Carl Sagan, America’s greatest scientific communicator of the late 20th century, who received as much jealousy and scorn as thanks from his fellow scientists.
But Mooney and Kirshenbaum go too far in claiming that Sagan, the hero of Unscientific America, was “persecuted” by the scientific establishment for his enthusiastic popularising. For example, they make much of the National Academy of Sciences denying him membership but ignore the award to Sagan of the academy’s top honour, the Public Welfare Medal.
More generally, my own experience suggests that the authors underestimate the improvement since the 1970s in scientists’ ability and willingness to communicate with the outside world. Researchers in the US and UK have become more prepared to answer questions, and proactive in offering information to the media. The result is a distinct improvement in the quality of science reporting.
It is a matter of debate to what extent better science coverage by the media has affected general levels of scientific literacy. Polls suggest little change over the past 30 years – most notoriously, 45 per cent or so of Americans agree that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years. But other social and educational factors are at work, too. Increased scientific activity in the media may have counteracted what would otherwise have been a decline in scientific literacy.
For the future, the authors are right to call on scientists to engage more with the outside world. Science-based issues have never been more important for human civilisation.
Ultimately, however, Unscientific America is patchy. It will interest anyone engaged in science communications – but it does not have the originality or urgency to win a readership on the scale of The Republican War on Science.
Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor
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