I recently appeared on this show, and I wasn’t the only one. Here’s the guest list:

Stewart Brand – author of the newly published Whole Earth Discipline
Dr Janet Rowley – human geneticist at the University of Chicago
Chris Mooney – author of The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America
Reverend Robert Sirico – founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty
Professor Jared Diamond – Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel: How Human Societies Fail
Oliver Morton – Energy and Environment Editor for The Economist
Dr Brent Blackwelder – President Emeritus of Friends of the Earth, United States

All in all, I have to say it made for a crowded, but very interesting, debate about science, politics, and society in the U.S., exactly one year after President Obama promised to restore science to its “rightful place,” & c & c.

I found that I agree with Stewart Brand about a lot. I also found that I agree with Robert Sirco about pretty much zero–and the same goes for Brent Blackwelder, at least based on what I heard on the show.

Oliver Morton’s comments on science and the American frontier were either deep or brilliant, I’m not sure which. But they gave me a little chill.

Based on his comments, I think Jared Diamond would like Unscientific America.

Oh, and Janet Rowley: Loved her comments on Leon Kass assigning an anti-science short story, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birth-Mark, at the first meeting of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush…an episode that should never be forgotten.

Listen to the whole program here.

It’s a really thoughtful (if not uncritical) review, and what stood out perhaps most is this great passage:

To combine my own personal view (which I have drifted into here, sorry…) with that of Unscientific America: Regular citizens and scientists are separated by a very narrow but very deep canyon, resting comfortably on either side of this canyon and vaguely aware of the others across the way. When science policy issues arise among the citizenry, the scientists don’t really play a role. When scientists lobby for their funding from the big agencies and other sources, they don’t really account for the people over on the other side of the canyon. This has been the case for years, and over this time, the social and cultural relevance of actual science has pretty much vanished among the [populace], and the ability to understand what motivates or interests the general public… or just even how to talk to them … has disappeared from the culture of science. Not that it was ever there. Looking back, it is clear that the bridges that did exist across this canyon were built by regular people inspired by the occasional super-communicator, such as Carl Sagan. Those bridges were not, in any systematic way, built by the scientists.

Thanks, Greg, for taking the time and giving the thought. Please read his full review here.

See here. Their reviewer calls our book a “tour-de-force statement about the current state of science in America,” continuing:

The writing is engaging and should find an important audience. As opposed to many science-centered books, this book will appeal not only to teachers, but, more importantly, to undergraduates who are slowly becoming aware of political issues. This book should therefore find readership beyond just science students to all students interested, or becoming interested, in current issues important to politics, education, and the general state of our nation.

You can read the full review/recommendation here. We are also of course psyched that our fellow Discover blogger Phil Plait also recently gave Unscientific America an Xmas-time plug, observing,

This book doesn’t complain about how the public doesn’t get science, it actually has advice — good advice — for how people can take up this charge.

You can read Phil’s full take here. We’re very gratified by the new wave of attention the book is receiving this holiday season, and are just about to begin updating it for the paperback due out next summer. So, more soon….

Art Hobson, an Emeritus physicist at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, has reviewed our book for the American Physical Society’s educational forum, and it seems he liked it. A quote:

Summarizing its prescription, the book’s final chapter states “We must fundamentally change the way we think and talk about science education,” and this means rethinking the education of scientists as well as the public school and college education of non-scientists. “We don’t simply need a bigger scientific workforce: We need a more cultured one, capable of bridging the divides that have led to science’s declining influence. …We must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America’s citizenry.” I couldn’t agree more.

You can read Hobson’s full review here.

Foreign Policy magazine has a new “global thinkers” feature in which they’ve identified the 100 top global thinkers, and then found out what they’re reading.

At # 34 on the list come Obama’s science czars, John Holdren and Steven Chu–and guess what. Holdren recommends our book Unscientific America!

We’re honored and humbled that the top science policymaker in America has had a look at our work. Dr. Holdren, we really hope you liked it!

I’ve contributed another post to the Science Progress blog; it’s about how climate skeptics and deniers have been winning the PR battle the past two years, with science defenders and advocates still far too disorganized and ineffective. Here’s a sampling:

The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in the global temperature record, 1998—which happens to have been a powerful El Nino year, hence the record—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.

It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade. (more…)

Unscientific America has been adapted as a feature story for The Nation based on a hybrid of chapters 6 and 9 with new reporting on the decline of science in the media. Our article Unpopular Science will appear in the August 17 issue and is now available online. We begin:

For twenty-three years Sabin Russell worked at the San Francisco Chronicle. A top medical writer specializing in global health and infectious diseases, Russell covered subjects ranging from bioterror threats to the risk of avian flu and traveled throughout Africa to report on the AIDS epidemic. He won numerous accolades, including a 2001 Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers for his reporting on the flaws of the flu vaccine
industry.

Then came March 30, 2009–his last day on the job. Russell was at MIT, on leave from his paper for a fellowship. The struggling Chronicle had been cutting staff and now suddenly forced many older career journalists to either take a buyout or risk a reduced pension. At 56, Russell was at the peak of his game, but for him, as for many of his colleagues, there was really just one option. “We have not left journalism; journalism has left us,” Russell remarked recently from San Francisco, where he is setting up a freelance office and looking for work.

Now the painful irony: Russell was pressured out of his job just as swine flu murmurs began to emerge from Mexico. This was his beat; few reporters are better equipped to tackle such a difficult yet urgent story, one so rife with uncertain but potentially severe risk. Russell even tipped off his old employer that the paper might want to get a jump on what was happening in Mexico City. “If I was covering this story now,” he says, “I’d be all over the Southern Hemisphere. It’s flu season there. How is Australia? How is the infrastructure to respond to a new strain holding up?”

Continue reading the full story at The Nation…

TIME’s Frances Romero has published a great interview with Chris about Unscientific America and how to raise the profile of science in our culture. Here’s an excerpt:

TIME: How do you think the debate over global warming has progressed since you published The Republican War on Science?
Mooney: We’ve come such a long way just because of political change — it’s not like the science changed at all, but the politics changed — and yet it’s still an incredible struggle. The vote in the House [on a bill to combat global warming] was superclose, and the Senate’s going to be probably even closer. The reason that issue is so hard is that we have a gigantic gap between scientists and the public — and by association, the politicians that represent them. Scientists have been quite strong on this for 20 years and still only half of America seems to know what they’re talking about.

In Unscientific America you’ve moved on to a more overarching discussion about “scientific illiteracy” in society that threatens to hinder productivity in the U.S. What are some ways we’ve fallen behind or are in danger of falling behind?
Science drives innovation which drives growth, and the concerns are very serious that we are slipping in that area. There are attempts to address it but they are nothing like what you saw after Sputnik when we really, really decided that we were going to be competitive. We’re not throwing everything into it. People just aren’t in tune to the role of science in the future of the country.

The interview touches on many significant themes of our book. Read the full Q&A online at TIME.

Today we have an ideas piece in The Boston Globe about the disconnect between science and American culture–and the role of scientists in the bridging the gap.

At the outset, lest we are misunderstood or misread, we want to emphasize that this does not mean there aren’t many other forces–such as poor education and scientific illiteracy and the unreliable media–contributing to the gap between science and society. However, scientists can also be a contributing factor, as we explain in the piece:

Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center and the American Association for the Advancement of Science unveiled the latest embarrassing evidence of our nation’s scientific illiteracy. Only 52 percent of Americans in their survey knew why stem cells differ from other kinds of cells; just 46 percent knew that atoms are larger than electrons. On a highly contentious issue like global warming, meanwhile, the gap between scientists and the public was vast: 84 percent of scientists, but just 49 percent of Americans, think human emissions are causing global warming.

Scientists are fond of citing statistics such as these in explaining conflicts between the public and the scientific community. On politicized issues like climate change, embryonic stem cell research, the teaching of evolution, and the safety of vaccines, many Americans not only question scientific expertise but even feel entitled to discard it completely. The reason, many scientists infer, is that the public is just clueless; perhaps we wouldn’t have these problems if the average citizen were better educated, more knowledgeable, better informed.

Yet while scientific illiteracy is nothing to shrug at, the truth is that it’s only part of a broader problem for which scientists themselves must shoulder a significant portion of the responsibility. Decrying ignorance and scientific illiteracy, many scientists treat their fellow citizens as empty vessels waiting for an infusion of knowledge. That is exactly wrong, and exactly why so many people, in turn, see science and scientists as distant, inscrutable, aloof, arrogant. Rather than blaming, scientists ought to be engaging with the public, trying to personally make their knowledge hit home and to instill by example (rather than from a distance) the nature and virtues of the scientific mindset – while also encouraging average Americans to ask their own questions and have their say. Scientists must make it clear that while they don’t have all the answers, science is about searching for the truth, an imperfect process of doing the best one can with the information available, while knowing there is always more to learn – the epitome of humility….

Read our full article available online here.

Over at Newsweek, our latest article is up.  We begin by addressing some of negative reactions to the appointment of Francis Collins as head of NIH:

The critics, though, have it exactly backward: the United States needs more scientists like Collins—researchers who show by their prominence and their example that a good scientist can still retain religious beliefs. The stunning irony in the longstanding tension between science and religion in America is that many scientists who merely claim to be defending rationality from religious fundamentalism may actually be turning Americans off to science, doing more harm to their cause than good.

Science and religion are not mutually exclusive and must not continue to be portrayed as such. Though some very vocal voices in the science community disagree, I assure you they are not representative of the whole. I continue to work day to day with scientists who hold a very broad array of beliefs across fields from molecular biology to physiology to conservation. And when it comes to issues like climate change and ocean acidification, everyone must be be engaged if we’re to get anywhere. The new atheist movement takes an adversarial approach, but only succeeds in alienating the majority of the planet away from science. When it comes to enacting sound policies on what really matters, this will always be a losing strategy.

Americans have serious problems with science, and religion is definitely part of the reason. But that doesn’t mean fighting religion, indiscriminately, is the answer. A far better approach is to work with religious believers to help them separate their personal religion from everybody’s shared science, and move toward a much needed middle ground.

The New Atheists will hardly be pleased by the Collins choice, but that’s unpreventable and perhaps even to the good: science and atheism aren’t the same, and the former must always remain a broader, more inclusive category.

You can read the full piece online here.