"unscientific america" ?

found this review on the New Scientist website.
"Review: Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum"

it is about a book analysing why "science" is so at the margin of the public interest.

"...The question matters because science, as Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum describe in Unscientific America, remains on the margins of US culture and politics. Climate change could sink cities and cause mass extinctions, yet only around half of US voters rated the environment an important issue in last year's elections."

while appreciating the study, the review's author sees it otherwise.

"By looking only at science, 'Unscientific America' misses the big picture. Yes, the latest findings on climate change and other areas of science need to be heard on Capitol Hill and in the media. But so does sound reasoning about America's absurd prison policy or the country's counterproductive efforts to combat drug use."

"worthy" being not the same as "newsworthy" - the author seems to invite science to open more its doors to reformed public debates and find new ways of communication. "The problem here is not with public engagement in science - it is with public engagement."

the source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327202.700-review-unscientific-america-by-chris-mooney-and-sheril-kirshenbaum.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

i found this article interesting, in an european view. from here, we picture the US as a country deeply concerned with science issues. then naturally, national policies on this or that issue may take different ways - but the idea that the US society is "unscientific" comes to me as something really surprising.

just wanted to share.
ciao DUers.

as NO surprise to me whatsoever.

It's as if all regard for science ended with the moon landing - after that it was all 'been there, done that'.

Even then, there was a LOT of talk about the waste of money in the space program - the science was totally unimportant, we could be feeding the poor with it, instead.

Global warming, stem cell research, AIDS research - the government took POLITICAL positions on them instead of scientific positions, and so the best work on them has been done by others.

If there is no military application, we don't do the science.

...in the sense that the article means, i.e. the public is largely disengaged from science, misunderstands it, and to a large degree, mistrusts it, I think. I'm also a university educator, so I see the extent to which even the reasonably well educated misunderstand what science is and how it works.

The average U. S. American is intellectually lazy. That might be true of people everywhere-- I can only speak from my own experience, which is with my compatriots. Science and math are not even particularly difficult-- they simply require some discipline and willingness to take intellectual risks, yet most U.S. Americans seem unwilling or incapable of focusing long and hard enough to become scientifically literate.

I see signs of this general phenomenon everywhere. Our obsession with entertainment, the public fascination with short-term shiny objects, political leadership with little or no long-term perspective, the ease with which media (and others) can pass off outright lies during public discourse, and our national obsession with superstition and religious quackery. For starters.

on edit: see this http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mooney11-2009aug11,0,6581208.story



I mean, what more can anyone say after THAT?

The United States doesn't have, nor did it ever have, the cultural and educational institutions for maintaining a first class scientific establishment.

The majority of first-rate scientists in the United States are either immigrants or the children of immigrants who have preserved the cultural and educational norms of their countries of origin.

The US has a lot of entreprenurial inventors, like Thomas Edison, who made discoveries and created new product through mainly intuition and trial and error. However, the electrical generation and distribution networks owe more to the immigrant Nikolai Tesla than to Edison.

The US had the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. But it took Werner von Braun and the transplanted German rocket scientists to make a go of the space program.

Similarly, if you look at the Manhattan project, you will find many immigrants and first-generation Americans in the key posts.

After WW II, many of the science, technology, engineering, and math professors were Europeans. Today, you find more South Asians and East Asians on the faculty, but I don't think the proportion of second and third generation Americans has gone up.