book. Pulls no punches on how we got here, Scientists, society, culture, religionall play a role, At times it was so anger inducing I had to put it down, The truth hurts. Not only does the author systematically break down how we've reached this point, he explains what needs to be done to move away from it.
So it is not just one long complaint, The chapters and detailed explanations on evolution, climate change deniers, and vaccines are particularly noteworthy, Antiscience comes from the left and the right, If you choose one nonfiction book to read this year to educate yourself, this is the one, This is an excellent book about the attitude toward science in America, Both Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin strongly believed that science and knowledge are important to democracy, and Timothy Ferris, in his book sitelinkThe Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature showed how important democracy is to the development of science.
However, more and more in our society, science is either ignored or even assaulted on many fronts,
The media do not do a good job in presenting the facts, Journalists believe that their job is to "present both sides of a story", even when there really is but one side.
Any dissenter, it is believed, no matter how small a minority he represents, must get his share of time arguing "his side".
This is particularly true for sciencerelated issues, The reason is that science is generally inductive, and therefore it doesn't "prove" anything, it just points the way toward probable explanations.
Shawn Otto does a good job at explaining the socalled "climategate" email scandal in the UK, The relevant email is perfectly innocuous, People have taken the socalled data "trick" that actually helps to make the findings more objective, in light of the poor correlation sincebetween treering data and temperature and made it into a subversive hiding of the truth.
The book covers many of the contemporary political issues that are informed by science, Global warming is a big issue, discussed at length in the book, He shows that when it comes to this issue, the popular book by Levitt and Dubner, sitelinkSuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, is pure drivel.
And their purported solution for global warminginjecting the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide aerosolis a disaster waiting to happen,
The book would be helped if the author included some graphics at times, Otto describes things in words that a diagram would have made clearer.
The last several chapters of the book become somewhat preachy, but this may be a good thing, We need more voices like Otto's, to show how we ignore science at our own risk, Imagine if you will, a United States of America in which the Republican Party was extolling the virtues of scientific knowledge and its implications for American public policy, while the Democratic Party was seen as the one acting contrary to our best interests, woefully ignorant in current understanding of science a most unlikely historical "fact" stolen from the pages of some vividly imagined, ornately written, steampunk science fiction novel.
Impossible, you, the intrepid reader might say, or was it once, a most inconceivable truth Surprisingly, many will be stunned to read that it was indeed the truth, in Shawn Otto's wellwritten polemical history on American public policy with respect to science "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America".
A book that I, as a scienceeducated Conservative Republican, regard as the best book I have read with regards to American public understanding and appreciation of science, especially with regards to shaping public policy.
Shawn Otto, one of the founders of Science Debate, regarded by many as the "largest political initiative in the history of science", has written a book that should be required reading by all politicians, by the scienceliterate public, and especially by those most interested in the current dismal state of affairs that exists with regards to using science in making well informed public policy decisions by local, state and Federal governments within the United States.
A book worth reading since its prescriptions may offer us the best hope of preserving our democratic republic via a science and technologicallyliterate political leadership.
Otto opens with a succinct introduction to the philosophy of science, and asks the rhetorical question of whether science is political via a succinct memoir recounting the birth of his organization Science Debate Chapters One and Two, that he cofounded with several journalists and scientists, most notably, physicist Lawrence Krauss and film maker Matthew Chapman greatgreatgrandson of eminent British biologist and geologist Charles Darwin.
He demonstrates the substantial degree of interest shown by the Republican Party toward the natural sciences and technology by Presidents and senior political leadership for almost a century from the Civil War until thes Chapters Three to Five an interest which was reflected in the party's popularity amongst American scientists such as the eminent astronomer Edwin Hubble, still remembered for demonstrating the universe's current expansion.
A substantial expansion in American science and technology, driven by the atomic arms race between the United States, and first, Nazi Germany, later, the Soviet Union, and then, a decade later, the "space race" culminating in the Apollo Moon program, led to American science taking "a walk" from the American body public via the need to produce results in other words, to publish or to perish without any regard for public outreach, especially towards politicians.
However, I think Otto points too much of the blame on scientists themselves, and in advocating Carl Sagan's importance as a science popularizer in many respects, I believe Sagan's friend, Stephen Jay Gould was far more important offering faint rhetorical echoes of two themes superficially treated by his Science Debate colleagues, the journalists Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, in their book "Unscientific America: How Science Illiteracy Threatens Our Future".
One of the most memorable sections of "Fool Me Twice" discusses the role of postmodernist thought, especially its emphasis on "relativism", in accounting for increasing American antipathy toward science, despite technological successes like Apollo and the emergence of scientific "superstars" like astrophysicist Carl Sagan and Sagan's popular "COSMOS" television series Chapters Seven and Eight.
While others, including scientists like biologists Paul Gross whom Otto notes as an important early Conservative critic of postmodernist thought's antiscience bias and, most recently, Ken Miller "Only A Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul", have recognized this problem, only Otto has written here, in "Fool Me Twice", an extensive examination of its baleful influence on the American public's attitudes toward science, not only with regards to accepting biological evolution, but also, on issues like microwave radiation and the ongoing antivaccination movement the latter especially prevalent within a substantial minority of selfdescribed Liberal households with children ranging in age from infancy to early adolescence.
Otto argues persuasively how postmodernist thought has crept into the Religious Right's objections to biological evolution especially in the version of "scientific creationism" known as Intelligent Design and in its opposition to global warming "Chapter Ten", and yet, as I have noted, Otto has spared no expense in condemning such thought as the philosophical rationale behind Leftist antiscientific responses to vaccination.
Some Conservatives may ignore Otto's book, given its substantial antiscientific orientation againstst Century Conservatives and Republicans, but that orientation is quite sound, due to their embrace of Intelligent Design creationism and rejection of anthropogenic global warming.
However, much to my amazement, Otto hasn't cited from the likes of Charles Krauthamer, George Will and John Derbyshire, their harsh condemnations of Intelligent Design creationism and ongoing efforts by Intelligent Design advocates to have "teach the controversy" laws passed in state legislatures.
Nor the eloquent arguments made by Conservatives like Larry Arnhart, and especially, the well known skeptic Michael Shermer "Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design", why it makes ample sense for Conservatives and Republicans to accept Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection, since Darwin was inspired by Adam Smith's free market economics to envision his "economy of nature".
Otto could have also emphasized some interest within the Religious Right in hearing proscience messages from physicist Lawrence Krauss and biologist E.
O. Wilson however, instead, Otto offers the reader only the future prospect of ecological doom as a credible possibility ignored by some intransigent, quite zealous, Conservative clerics and scholars, such as Fundamentalist Protestant Christian evangelist Charles Colson and Orthodox Jewish religious studies professor Jacob Neusner "Chapter Eleven".
Nor do I agree with his wholesale condemnation of Conservative talk radio, especially when there are programs like the John Batchelor Show, that try their best to be both informative and objective, as well as the mainstream media's reluctance in emphasizing the reality of our ongoing war against Islamofascism, or in investigating the "spontaneous" origin of the Occupy Wall Street movement and its ties to the Radical Left.
And yet, these omissions do not detract from the overall excellence of Otto's book and of its dire warnings with regards to current and future American public and especially, political interaction with science,
since our failure to heed them may mean the end of our two and a quarter centuriesold democratic republic.
Americans, both Liberals and Conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, need to become conversant with science "Fool Me Twice" is merely a most auspicious beginning in demonstrating how.
Reposted from myAmazon review,