The Intersection » History of Science

Galileo and the Tea Party

Chris Mooney — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:41:28 +0000

I’ve done my latest DeSmogBlog piece on the Rick Perry Galileo flap. I say a lot, but I particularly liked this part of it:

The misuse and abuse of Galileo’s story, in other words, is a case study in how people reason about history—just as they do with science—in a biased, motivated way, seeking to cast themselves as the good guys, the victors, and their foes as the opposite.

And once you see things in this way, you realize there’s a very close analogy in our politics to the Perry-Galileo flap. Climate “skeptics” invoking Galileo is really quite a lot like right wingers calling themselves the “Tea Party.”

The great architects of the United States—Jefferson, Franklin, Madison—were men of reason and the Enlightenment, just as Galileo was a man of the Scientific Revolution. They were freethinkers and, in Jefferson’s and Franklin’s case, scientists and inventors. And they didn’t want religion shoved down anybody’s throat.

And yet we now find a movement in America that wants more religion in politics, and that rejects science on climate change and evolution alike, trying to claim the mantle of the country’s founding.

Rick Perry’s invocation of Galileo, then, ...

Ancient Echoes from the Mediterranean Resonate with Modern Climate Fight

The Intersection — Mon, 09 May 2011 16:21:41 +0000

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

Well, today Chris is somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. For those who aren’t aware, he is on the Center for Inquiry Travel Club Cruise with the likes of Joyce Salisbury, Lawrence Krauss and Phil Plait. I can only imagine the discussions they are having as they travel across seas that were once the battlegrounds for control of ideas and thought in the world. Most often those conflicts occurred between religious and scientific views, which in many cases is not very different from what is occurring today.

The cruise will be visiting ports of call in Italy and the Greek Islands, places where no man or woman can visit without reflecting on the scientific history that began there.

Will Phil Plait take a late night stroll on the upper deck to catch a glimpse of our galaxy as it passes overhead? If so, will he think about the fact that our galaxy, ...

Why Pursue Science and Technology Studies?

Chris Mooney — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:19:26 +0000

This week, Harvard’s Science, Technology, and Society program, headed by Sheila Jasanoff, is hosting a provocative conference:

This meeting is the product of a year of conversations across several continents and dozens of institutions. It weaves together the hopes, aspirations, and—yes—frustrations of STS scholars from around the world who have committed their careers to studying the central role of science and technology in our social, political, and moral lives.

The meeting is in part a stock-taking. After two decades of increased public funding for STS, what can we say about our achievements as a “thought collective”? What have we learned from speaking the truths of our field to the power of established disciplines? Which areas of work do we recognize as displaying the greatest theoretical depth and creativity? What do we impart to STS scholars-in-the-making, and what can we do to ensure that their ideas are heard more widely and that they find appropriate academic homes? The three-day program addresses these questions: first, STS and the disciplines; second, STS and its theories; third, STS’s institutional challenges and opportunities.

In part, too, the meeting is a provocation: an invitation to reflect on the conditions needed for this field to thrive and grow—in ...

The Kiss in History

Sheril Kirshenbaum — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 17:52:41 +0000

I have a guest post up at Wonders and Marvels:

Classicists and anthropologists have traced kissing history over millennium. The earliest and best literary evidence we have dates to around 1500 B.C. from India’s Vedic Sanskrit texts. While there were no words for “kissing,” there are intriguing lines such as the “young lord of the house repeatedly licks the young woman.” Later, the Vatsyayana Kamasutra (better known as the “Kama Sutra”) composed sometime around the third century A.D. includes an entire chapter devoted to kissing a lover.

Clearly, people in India were kissing thousands of years ago, but it’s doubtful they were the only ones doing so… Read on

How the Printing Press Ensures Eternal Enlightenment (Or So They Thought in the 18th Century)

Chris Mooney — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:40:27 +0000

For the Heinz science communication workshop out here at UC Davis, there’s a reading I assigned from the Marquis de Condorcet‘s magnificent 1794 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. I assign Chapter 8, in which Condorcet, the greatest of enlightenment optimists, explains how the arrival of the printing press basically ensures that reasoned arguments would become widely disseminated, leading to the downfall of irrationality and superstition.

Some choice quotations:

A new sort of tribunal had come into existence in which less lively but deeper impressions were communicated; which no longer allowed the same tyrannical empire to be exercised over men’s passions but ensured a more certain and more durable power over their minds; a situation in which the advantages are all on the side of truth, since what the art of communication loses in its power to seduce, it gains in the power to enlighten….In a word, we now have a tribunal, independent of all human coercion, which favours reason and justice, a tribunal whose scrutiny it is difficult to elude, and whose verdict it is impossible to evade.

Ah, the printing press. You just can’t deceive any more:

Any new ...

New Point of Inquiry With Naomi Oreskes, Co-Author of Merchants of Doubt

Chris Mooney — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:37:08 +0000

The latest episode of Point of Inquiry has just gone up. My guest this week is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and author (with Eric Conway) of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

You can stream the eposide here, and download/subscribe here. Here’s part of the write up:

Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.”

Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.

Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain.

Once again, you ...

Francisco Ayala Wins Templeton Prize

Chris Mooney — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:56:09 +0000

News here. It’s great to see such a staunch champion of the teaching of evolution, and of embryonic stem cell research, winning this award. There is no better demonstration, I think, that science and religion don’t have to be at war all the time–for after all, Ayala is also a former priest and has been exceedingly prominent in making the argument against the problematic “conflict thesis.”

Meanwhile, those who embrace that thesis, and dislike the Templeton Foundation, will still have a hard time saying anything bad about Ayala, I would imagine.

In addition to fighting doggedly in defense of evolution, his scientific credentials include winning the National Medal of Science and serving as president and chairman of the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In congratulating Ayala, the National Center for Science Education adds:

Among his contributions to the defense of the integrity of science education was his testimony for the plaintiffs in McLean v. Arkansas and his coordination of support for evolution education at the National Academy of Sciences, including his lead authorship of the publication Science, Evolution, ...

One Of The Greatest Stories Ever Told

Sheril Kirshenbaum — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:06:26 +0000

Last fall, I described a book I was highly anticipating called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. And unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’ve no doubt already read excerpts and phenomenal reviews, seen it covered on television, heard Rebecca on air, and watched it climb the New York Times bestseller list during these first weeks since publication. All of the praise is more than deserved, and I would add that the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, the immortal HeLa cell line, and the many dimensions to the story that Rebecca does such an extraordinary job of reporting, may just be one of the greatest true stories ever told.

Henrietta’s life wasn’t easy. She lost her parents by the age of four and worked hard alongside her cousins on a tobacco farm while facing the challenge of growing up as an African American woman in the south. After marrying young and having five children, Henrietta died at age 31 from cervical cancer. But around the time of her diagnosis, cancer cells from her cervix—famously known ...

You, Sir, Are No Galileo

Chris Mooney — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:07:34 +0000

Over at the rightwing Wall Street Journal editorial page, Daniel Henninger is invoking Galileo and painting the Swifthack episode as an “epochal event”:

The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims—plotting to shut them up and shut down their ability to publish—evokes the attempt to silence Galileo. The exchanges between Penn State’s Michael Mann and East Anglia CRU director Phil Jones sound like Father Firenzuola, the Commissary-General of the Inquisition.

Alas, there are quite a few things Henninger is forgetting about Galileo. Among other matters, the Tuscan sage doesn’t merely symbolize “dissent in science,” as Henninger puts it. The people who dissented in the history of science, but were overwhelmingly wrong, tend to be forgotten. Galileo dissented and he happened to be overwhelmingly right (about the whole Earth-sun thing, anyway–let’s, er, forget that theory of the tides).

All of which kinda makes for a huge difference between Galileo and the climate skeptics.

Darwin film ‘too controversial for religious America’?

Sheril Kirshenbaum — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:40:51 +0000

Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

I sincerely hope The Telegraph is mistaken. The trailer looks intriguing and over at Panda’s Thumb Eugenie Scott calls it “a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public – for the good.” Not all reviews have been as favorable, but Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly tend to give solid performances. I’m interested to see this movie and hope it finds its way to a theater in the Research Triangle.

Would you buy tickets to Creation?