We’ve now posted the Table of Contents and pages 1, 2, 3, and 4 of our forthcoming book Unscientific America. Here’s the final peek we’ll feature at The Intersection:

in politics, the news media, the entertainment industry, and the religious community.

In the political arena from 2001 through 2008, the United States was governed by an administration widely denounced for a disdain of science unprecedented in modern American history.  Judged next to this staggering low, President Barack Obama’s administration gives us great reason for hope. But science continues to occupy a ghettoized space in the political arena, and few elected officials really understand or appreciate its centrality to decision-making and governance. Too many politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, fail to see the underlying role of science in most of the issues they address, even though it is nearly always present. In fact, politicians tend to be leery of seeming too scientifically savvy: There’s the danger of being seen as an Adlai Stevenson egghead.

We’re still struggling with the problem that historian Richard Hofstadter outlined in his classic 1962 work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,  which documented how the disdain of intellect became such a powerful fixture of American culture. The problem is particularly acute when it comes to scientists, and this has been the case to varying degrees since our nation’s inception. We’ve even rewritten the biography of one of our most cherished founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, recasting him as a tinkering everyman when in fact he was a deep-thinking scientist of the first rank.  After visiting the country in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville similarly remarked upon Americans’ interest in the practical rather than the theoretical side of science, observing a people more intrigued with the goods delivered at the end than the intellectual challenges and questioning encountered along the way.  For a very long time, American scientists have found themselves pitted against both our businesslike, can-do attitudes and our piety. When John McCain and Sarah Palin ridiculed research on fruit flies and grizzly bears on the 2008 campaign trail, they were appealing to precisely this anti-intellectual strand in the American character. They thought they’d score points that way, and they probably did.

And if you think politicians are bad, let’s turn to the traditional news media, where attention to science is in steep decline. A 2008 analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that if you tune in for five hours worth of cable news, you will probably catch only one minute’s coverage of science and technology—compared with ten minutes of “celebrity and entertainment,” twelve minutes of “accidents and disasters,” and “26 minutes or more of crime.”  As for newspapers….

Of course, that’s only the beginning.  Unscientific America hits in a few weeks and you can preorder here.

We’ve now posted the Table of Contents and pages 1, 2, and 3 of the book. This weekend we’ll continue with 4 & 5–and so here is 4:

If we allow that final lapse to occur, surely part of the reason will be that most of our citizens have had only fleeting encounters with a world of science that can appear baffling, intimidating, and even downright unfriendly. Just 18 percent of Americans know a scientist personally, according to survey data, and even fewer can name the government’s top scientific agencies: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). When polled in late 2007 and asked to name scientific role models, 44 percent of respondents didn’t have a clue. They simply couldn’t give an answer. And among those polled who did respond, the top selections were Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Albert Einstein, people who are either not scientists or not alive.

It’s no wonder, then, that even as our scientists get up each morning and resume the task of remaking the world, the American public all too rarely follows along. This alienation leads to recurrent flare-ups like the Pluto episode, in which people suddenly catch wind of what scientists have been doing and react with anger, alarm, or worse.

The snubbing of Pluto won’t have dire consequences back here on Earth, but other consequences of the science-society divide may prove far more damaging. We live in a time of climatic change and energy crisis, of widespread ecological despoilment and controversial biomedical research. We have great cause to fear global pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and attacks by tech-savvy terrorists. We stand on the verge of pathbreaking new discoveries in genetics and neuroscience (to name just a few fields) that could redefine who we are and even upend our society. This is a time when science is pivotal to our political lives, our prosperity, and even our lifestyles and habits. And yet again and again, we encounter disturbing disconnects between the state of scientific understanding and the way we live our lives, set our policies, define our identities, and inform and entertain ourselves.

The problem isn’t merely the dramatic cultural gap between scientists and the broader American public. It’s the way this disconnect becomes self-reinforcing, even magnified, when it resurfaces in key sectors of society that powerfully shape the way we think, and where science ought to have far more influence than it actually does…..

Tomorrow will come our final teaser page–5. Meanwhile, to look back, pages 1, 2, and 3 are all online. And to preorder Unscientific America, click here.