Sept. 13, 2009 Media Matters
Bob McChesney with Chris Mooney

Bob McChesney: Perhaps no issue so defines our age as technology and scientific revolution and perhaps no public policy issues weigh more heavily than those dealing with the climate, with the environment, with health care, the whole range of issues that revolve around science and technology. Yet are we prepared to handle them? We'll have a guest today with a brand new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, that says we have a real crisis and one that will affect us all. Our guest, Chris Mooney, but before we go to him, let's go to Media Minutes.


Any views or opinions expressed...

Welcome to Media Minutes, a weekly review of news related to media and democracy. I'm Stevie Converse and I'm Candace Clement.
Pentagon officials were forced to admit they hired a PR firm to produce secret background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following an investigation by the Stars and Stripes Newspaper, a daily published for US service members in 48 countries. 

The military now has terminated its contract with the Rendon Group, which prepared the summaries for military public affairs officials. The journalists were rated positive, negative or neutral based on their likelihood of giving the military friendly coverage. Kevin Barron is one of the reporters who broke the story. "And at the bottom of some these reports would then go on to suggest whether or not that reporter would be susceptible to good news coverage if given the right opportunities or if they were the kind of reporter who got a lot of negative ratings, then perhaps they could be neutralized with a different kind of coverage and opportunities. That the pentagon compiles information on journalists is nothing new: a vetting process for any journalist looking to imbed with the military is certainly necessarily. But what the Rendon Group was doing went far beyond the initial vision of the imbed program. It tied the media analysis to the denial or approval of a journalist's request. The analysis wasn't being used as a way to screen whether the applicant was a good reporter in terms of accuracy and writing skill but whether the reporter would write good news about the military. "The only as rules for this imbed system that was created when these wars started had been the previous administration and written right into it says that no way is this system designed to  prevent bad news or embarrassing news about the military to get out. This is supposed to be the military's way of facilitating journalism of the war, of making it happen, getting reporters where they need to be, making sure everybody's safe, all that kind of stuff. It's not supposed to have anything to do with being a way to spin the war, to control reporters, to direct them where to go, anything like that." Yet journalists who want to cover the US military in a war zone can't get access unless they imbed with the troops. "You know there's a lot of new journalists who are trying to get into Afghanistan now, 'cause there's new fighting going on, it's a renewed story, it's getting into the winter, there's going to be more demand for this not less and so the more hiccups in this system that we hear about the more they're going to start to mount up, and we'll see how smoothly things go." Barron says that the Stars and Stripes investigation of the imbedded journalist program will continue. 

Internet marketers gather information from virtually every click we make online: where we go, what we watch, and what we buy. They compile the data for what is called behavioral advertising, ads targeted specifically for you. Privacy watchdogs have long warned that too much of this information is being gathered without our knowledge. Now, Congress might be stepping in. Rich Boucher of Virginia, the chairman of the House commerce committee, is drafting a bill that would impose new rules for how websites and marketers ensure user privacy and safety. Last week a coalition of consumer advocates and privacy groups called on Congress and the Federal Trade Commission to create a system that's transparent, accountable and has meaningful consumer rights, especially when it comes to privacy. Susan Grant is the director of Consumer Protection at the Consumer Federation of America. She wants marketers and websites to stop collecting sensitive information. "Sensitive information like somebody's race, ethnicity, their sexual orientation, their political activity and other very personal information shouldn't be collected and used for behavioral advertising at all. Some in Congress feel that it would be OK to collect that kind of information as long as the consumer opted in, that is affirmatively agreed to it. We're saying that that information should be off limits period because the potential for abuse is just too great." Abuse could be in the form of what is called digital red lining, which could impact obtaining credit, or accessing government benefits, educational opportunities, or insurance. "Information about consumers would be compiled to profile them and then perhaps offer one person goods or services at less advantageous terms or of lower quality than another person based on that profile." And there are other concerns about how information gathered by this type of internet spying can be used. "We're also concerned about the possibility for information to be stolen by identity thieves, for information and profiles to be used by the government, for instance, to try to find people who may fit the profile that they think exists for terrorists or other uses way beyond that of advertising. Grant's first priority for an online behavioral tracking and targeting bill is to make sure marketers and websites can't collect information unless users opt in to the data mining process. She would also like to see the Federal Trade Commission create a do-not-track registry similar to the do-not-call registry. For more information about online tracking go to ConsumerFed.org. 

Bob McChesney:  Okey dokey welcome back to Media Matters.  I'm your host, Bob McChesney, coming to you live today, Sept. 13, 2009. Our guest today is Chris Mooney who's the contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of the New York Times best seller, The Republican War on Science. He's also the co-author of a brand new book along with Sheril Kirshenbaum, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, just out by Basic Books. Chris Mooney, welcome to Media Matters.

Chris Mooney:It's good to be on.

For starters Chris, let's get the basics. Why did you decide to write a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future? 

Well, I'm known for sort of blasting the Bush administration for interfering with science.

Bob McChesney: Well we rarely have that on this show.

Chris Mooney: As the Bush administration roled to a close, I was of the view that while many problems would be solved sort of automatically by throwing them out the door, there were a lot of lingering issues in terms of how American society grapples with scientific problems, scientific topics and that they weren't necessarily going to be completely solved so this book is sort of a sequel and it tries to look at what continues to prevent our citizenry, our politics, our media from reflecting accurate knowledge of science and most importantly putting it to use in public policy. 

Bob McChesney: And a little bit...your co-author for the book is Sheril Kirshenbaum. What's her background and her role in writing the book?

Chris Mooney: She's a young marine biologist and she's is turning into a science journalist even as I'm a journalist who became more and more interested in scientific topics. So we're going in opposite directions. We collaborate on a lot of stuff now including our blog, The Intersection, and this book sort of grew out of conversations we had together. 

Bob McChesney: If people wanted to go to your blogs, where would they go?

Chris Mooney: It's on the Discover Magazine website, blogs.DiscoverMagazine.com/Intersection.

Bob McChesney: A lot of times when people hear about scientific illiteracy, we're all familiar with the surveys that show that I don't know what percentage it is that 20,30, 40% of Americans think that the sun revolves around the earth, or believe in creationism etc. etc. basic scientific numbskullery. Is that what your book is about, how dumb people are and what a problem that's going to be with so many dummies in our country?

Chris Mooney: Well, we mention those surveys and they are very bad, 40% and upwards on some of those things you're mentioning. So clearly, people don't know much and clearly it would be better off if they knew more. It's not cool to have a society that hasn't really undergone the scientific revolution in terms of knowing that the earth goes around the sun and things like that. Or one of the most important parts of the scientific revolution is the Darwinian one. So we shouldn't be rejecting that kind of stuff. But I think the book tries to go farther and say it's not just that people are stupid, it's that people don't have a lot of opportunities and we have a variety of structural disconnects that prevent good scientific information from getting through to the most influential parts of society, where people aren't stupid at all in the political system and the media. Well, maybe some people are stupid there but generally the problem is not ignorance, it's a problem of translation, it's a problem of science not getting through.

Bob McChesney: Your argument is that science is under assault and we're gonna go through that over the next hour, the ways, the institutions, what's happening that is undermining science or making science less valued in our society. Why is that a problem exactly? A lot of Americans probably feel like "I didn't really like science in school. I don't know much about it. There's some experts who are handling all this. I'd just rather do my own thing and read fiction or watch ballgames or go bowling."

Chris Mooney: Well, they're entitled to use their time as they wish. But the problem is two-fold. First of all, the people who say that to themselves, who say "Science is not for me, I'm not really interested," they're selling themselves short and they're also probably disadvantaging themselves because if you really get science then what you do is you're empowering yourself to make better decisions about any number of things, how to choose your health care, how to decide what kind of energy you get, all these kinds of things is scientific way of thinking that will set you up and make your life better I would argue. So there's that, there's the sense of empowerment that comes from scientific knowledge and the scientific way of thinking. And then perhaps even broader 
from a public policy perspective, is the fact that if you don't get the information right then you don't make the decisions right. And that's what we've seen, global warming is an iconical example where we've been fighting over the science and basically people have been attacking the good science for two decades and it's created gridlock and we've been unable to get the policies we need. 

Bob McChesney: Another way that's science is a public policy issue, Chris Mooney, that was really interesting in your book and I don't think many Americans are familiar with it, is the degree to which the very existence of basic scientific research in our society is dependent upon federal subsidies, that this is really a public subsidy that we've even had the emergence of this vast scientific infrastructure.

Chris Mooney: Yeah, it was a brilliant decision made half a century ago in the wake of World War II and in the wake of Sputnik that we were going to be a society that invested vastly and systematically in knowledge, in universities and in research enterprises. So we've done that and we've continued to do it and it put as at the head of the whole world in terms of science innovation. And that's a big public policy issue to keep it going in that way.
BOB MCCHESNEY: And the numbers, as I recall ..., we went from something like just a few million dollars of spending on science by the federal government in 1940 to 12 billion two decades later. 

Chris Mooney: Something like that. I'd have to open the book myself too to get the precise numbers. But the point is definitely correct following World War II and then especially when it got the super umph was following Sputnik, when we wanted to be competitive with the Soviets, Congress and the society decided to invest in science. And we created all these agencies, the National Science Foundation, NASA, which was going to be the home to the space program which 10 years later made it to moon, and all these careers you know there was all this funding of university research positions and college scholarships to be in science. So the amount of investment went up dramatically during that time period and it really built the research enterprise that we have now.

Bob McChesney: Especially and I think this is a distinction that scientists know second hand but the rest of us might not know as well, the money went to support what's called basic research which as I understand it is the sort of research commercial interests aren't going to support because it doesn't have immediate applicability but it's the sort of research that leads to the advances in knowledge that are the basis of all applied research.

Chris Mooney: That's right. A lot of the federal research budget and especially monies coming from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are supporting basic research which is just learning the way things work and it's rare that you have a corporation that's willing to do that much open-ended stuff. The idea is that you get some ideas and they can be seized upon by a company to turn them into technologies. We do invest in a lot of what's called development especially the military. But a lot of US science funding today is not basic it's actually applied or development of technologies. And then corporate America, in terms of the government science budget I forget what the exact figure is per year for research and development is well over a hundred billion but that's only a third of the total research because corporate America makes up the other two-thirds. 

Bob McChesney: Our guest today, Chris Mooney. You're listening to Media Matters, on WILL AM 580. Chris Mooney is the co-author along with Sheril Kirshenbaum, of the brand new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, published, just out, by Basic Books. A terrific read, if I may say so, having had the pleasure, one of the pleasures of my job is I get to read books like this and acquaint myself with issues I wouldn't know as much about otherwise and one that's very important, especially in the realm of media, which is the topic of this show and my own particular interest. Because as this sort of scientific infrastructure built up in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, the key component of it, you argue in the book, was the emergence of science journalists. Explain what that was all about.

Chris Mooney: Well, even as this was happening we had a whole of society that turned towards science in a big way because of cold war reasons, broadly speaking. So it wasn't just that we invested a lot of money in research but at the same time media outlets were investing a lot of money in coverage of the new research endeavours so you know the space race was front page news during that time period, constantly. So a lot of journalists were trained to be particular kind of journalist, which is the science journalist. And it's an important role because the science is technical and so you need this intermediary who breaks it down and makes it useable to everybody in the society theoritically through a general interest kind of publication like a newspaper because even as science magazine you know the readership tended to be the science centered people and the material was often fairly technical and in places like a Scientific America so you needed newspapers and you needed TV news to be breaking it down and making it useable to the citizenry. And so those periods were created then and since then it's been a pretty big decline, unfortunately.

Bob McChesney: Yeah, I mean your argument in the book, a key part of it, is, sort of, we've seen the rise and fall of science journalism over the past five or six decades. And give our readers some sense of the nature of the decline over the past 10 or 15 years or even the last few years because I think you've put it in rather graphic even chilling terms in the book. 

Chris Mooney: Well, yeah, it's sort of an accellerating problem right now. I'm here at MIT. I'm in a science journalism program, which is a great program - the night program for a year. And everybody here in the program with me in the last class too, you know, we're all thinking we've got a year of a fellowship but after that what are we going to do because the career we thought we were in is starting not to exist anymore. And everybody knows the horror stories of science journalists loosing their jobs now. It's partly tied to the demise of the newspaper industry (or it's in incredibly bad straights, it's not dead). So there's just a lot less staff positions in newspapers and when buyouts are happening or when reporters are being laid off, it's often tended to be career science journalists who are deemd (and they're not the only kind of journalists loosing their jobs) but they're often among the first to go. 


Bob McChesney: I mean, if I've read the book, you were counting the, it seemed like two-thirds of all science sections in newspapers have been discontinued in the past decade. Is that right?

Chris Mooney: Yeah, and again, I think it's accelerating. Because what you had was - that was over the past couple of decades - I forget the figure - but you know the figure cut off at 2005 and that was before the real crisis in the newspaper industry. So now what you see is some of the really big important ones that we're holding on, where you would expect science to continue like say the Boston Globe here, because that's where I am, I'm in Boston right now, they just recently cut their science section. 

Bob McChesney: Our guest again, Chris Mooney, co-author of ____, published by Basic Books. If you'd like to call into Media Matters, the phone number at WILL AM 580 is 333-9455. Our toll free number is 1-800-222-9455. And so we loose this media coverage journalism, excuse me the science, the journalism is sort of lacking. How does that effect issues, let's take a very tangible issue that you write about in the book, climate change, what does not having good science journalism when the public considers the policy of climate change?

Chris Mooney:  Oh I think it makes, it might make almost all the difference. So let me preface that by saying that science journalism, bad straights now, but when it comes to the coverage of the climate crisis during the 1990s even then the way the issue was covered was still lackluster. My argument is that it's only going to be worse, not better. So, what happens is you loose specialists in the media and you have a media that's focused on eyeballs entertainment, not as much on informing people on complicated public policy issues like this one, which is very complicate one. So what you're going to get, is you're going to get episodic, episodic, occassional treatment so global warming flits onto the screen and flits away again and you don't hear about it again for three months. So it's unable to be on the agenda and then when it is covered what you'll get is journalists who don't know much about the issue who are prone to various kinds of misinformation of which there is much and much is being put out by special interests specifically to muddy the waters and confuse people. These journalists won't know, because they are not specialized science journalists, how to handle that. And how to handle it is not to fall for it. So you'll have a media that is credulous and susceptible to agenda driven misinformation. So it's a sort of one, two punch where you're not going to get sustained attention and the attention you get is highjacked and misleading.

Bob McChesney: You know, some of the, in the case of climate change and global warming whether it's paid for by the oil companies or some other special interest or whether it's independently produced, comes from people, to the casual observer or the untrained eye seem to have all sorts of academic credentials, their reports have lots of footnotes and endnotes, they seem to know technical jargon, they have graphs and charts, it doesn't seem like hocus pocus, it seems like their producing science making the case against climate change or global warming being a concern. And you're saying good journalists should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to this issue. 

Chris Mooney: Absolutely. It isn't that hard. I've made my whole science journalistic career out of doing this particular thing. And there are a lot of other science journalists that are quite good at it. But it's not something you just automatically know how to do because it turns out that it is quite easy to create scientific sounding nonsense. And there is a whole industry to do it. And the people in the industry who do it, the think tanks, the corporations, there's a lot more money behind that then there is behind us, who are trying to you know with the scientific jobs disappearing we're trying to set the record straight. It's kind of a tough competion to be and you really need the journalists to be attuned to the fact this stuff happens and not to fall for it.

Bob McChesney: A lot of people think, Chris Mooney, that the internet will really solve our problem of the decline of science journalism or the decline of journalism, traditional journalism of newspapers or broadcast networks in general because the internet gives access to this wealth of information, sort of unimaginable wealth of information so it will empower people to really bypass the journalists and really get to the bottom of things and get past the junk, as you've called it. Your book is not that optimistic about the internet as the solution.

Chris Mooney: Yeah,  I mean if that's what's supposed to happen I haven't seen it. And I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who's been in the blogosphere since 2001. I started a political blog with the American Prospect Magazine, which still exists, it's called Tapped, back then in 2001. And then in 2003 I created my science blog, The Intersection, which is one of the first science blogs and so it's been around since 2003 (there weren't that many science blogs back then). Now there's a vast profusion of them. So in one since it's true. there's an incredible wealth of science information online and the figures we get from the National Science Foundation, I believe, show that people are increasingly going online if they wanna find something about a specific scientific topic. And online you can find great debunking of all this kind of nonsense we've been talking about but there's a big problem: the problem is one of audience and one of choice. Who is actually going to do this. My argument is that it is only a small segment of the population that's really going to the science centered information that exists on the web. So it doesn't replace what's being lost in a general interest newspaper where you're really reaching a diversity of people, rather than sort of the people who already care, the information rich, will know where to find the science but I'm not sure everybody else will. And then there's other problems. The anti-global warming people, the anti-evolution people, the anti-vaccine people, they all do just fine on the internet too. They're very popular on their sites, just as popular as the good scientific information is. So, people who are interested in that kind of stuff go to it; people who are interested in good science go to it; and most people don't go to anything at all.

Bob McChesney: You mention, just now, the anti-vaccine movement and the argument that vaccines are the cause or one of the contributing causes of autism. I've only heard a little bit about this, I confess. I guess some Hollywood celebrities are promoting this as well. The little I've seen of it has not been critical. It's sort of been presented as like they were doing fund raisers and stuff. like a legitimate enterprise. This is a completely bogus movement?

Chris Mooney: Yeah, I've done some reporting on this. I did a big feature story in Discover. Let me just run through it. It turns out the original concern about this mercury based preservative called Temerasol in vaccines to me was not crazy, you know. You probably don't want - it was a very small amount of mercury - but you probably don't want its in there all things being equal so it's good that it was taken out of all vaccines. And that happened about 10 years ago, when the concerns were originally raised. So then the question became: OK mercury was in and now mercury's out, was there any harm? So for 10 years scientists have been studying this using epidemiological studies and they're just not finding it. Study after study says, no, you know, and the biological reasons for thinking there probably wasn't any harm is pretty strong because the amount wasn't that much. So there's no evidence suggesting that this has caused some kind of increase of autism. There may be some autism but if that's happening it could be for other reasons, it could be partly an increase in diagnoses, so previously conditions were being missed that are now being called autism. So scientific consensus is forming that temerasol did not cause any increase in autism. 

Bob McChesney: Yet this issue has a half-life despite the scientific consensus. 

Chris Mooney: That's right, yeah, because there's an incredible investment in this. You mentioned celebrities, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, are sort of the top people who've been pushing this idea. McCarthy is proud that she got her scientific information from the "University of Google" as she puts it, which I think epitomizes how rampant misinformation can be on the web. And there's a whole conspiracy theory out there about how the government suppressed information about the dangers of vaccines and there's been a cover-up. You know if that were so you wouldn't be the scientific results to be so unequivocal because it's really hard to enforce a conspiracy across the world's scientific community. There's not that much walking in lock step. There's an incredible incentive in science to prove something wrong, to undercut what seems to be accepted. I think with the amount of studies that have come out now, if there was something to find, you probably would have found it.

Bob McChesney: Our guest you're listening to just now is Chris Mooney the co-author with SK of the brandnew book, Unscientific America...., just published by Basic Books. The phone number here at Media Matters if you'd like to call in with a question or a comment 333-9455. The toll free number: 1-800-222-9455. Let's go to our phone lines now to some callers who've been waiting patiently. Line 1 Urbana, welcome to Media Matters. You're on the air.

Caller 1: Good afternoon Mr. Mooney. Glad to hear from you again. Can you confirm what seems to me like a situation where in perhaps some scientist or knowledgable and one particular scientific area is kind of put on a pedestal that oh yeah, this guy or woman has studied they're involved at a level that someone could really understand. And that separates scientists and the world of science from the quote, unquote "general population".

Chris Mooney: I'm not entirely getting the question. Are you saying the science world creates idols?

Caller 1: No, not idols. Well, I think that actually those covering science who are not uh, who are fairly ignorant themselves, separate those who do know how to communicate science and kind of you know uh elevate scientists and their knowledge, unjustifiably. And put them in a separate category away from the general population.

Chris Mooney: And so maybe we don't subject the science people to enough criticism?

Caller 1: Or to enough coverage. Here is kind of an odd take: Why aren't there more scientists on The View  or something like that to talk to a general audience? 'cause they're not entertaining? I odn't know but um...

Chris Mooney: People who cover science and the media, those remaining, they certainly have their flaws. And in terms of scientists communicating themselves: some of them are great at it and some of them are just terrible at it. And the scientific community doesn't put that high of premium on being a mass media communicator. The premium is on publishing really hot research that gets cited a lot.  So there's a variety of different kinds of communication problems out there and you can sort of pass the ball and it's everybody's fault in a lot of ways but the journalists dropped the ball and the scientists also dropped the ball.

Bob McChesney: You talk about in the book, Chris Mooney, you discuss at some length Carl Sagan and the role he played in the lated 1970s and 80s in popularizing science. What was the importance of his experience? 

Chris Mooney: Sagan is, I think, the greatest popularizer of science of the second half of the twentieth century by far. You know you crunch the data on the kind of audiences that he reached through television, through The Cosmos series, through film, through his bestselling books. So Sagan was you know was very, very good at this, was you know a household name because of it. What we point out in the book was that Sagan drove a lot of people to be interested in science. Sagan did a lot to shoot down a lot of bad science being promoted by the Reagan administration in terms of Star Wars programs and things like that. So Sagan had an incredible impact and Sagan should have been, if anybody should have been put on a pedestal it should have been Sagan, but it turns out some people in science, by no means all,  but some people in science were either jealous of Sagan or did not think it was appropriate for scientists to be popularizing this much or thought he was guilty of oversimplifying and dumbing things down so it turns out people gave Sagan a hard time when I would argue that's the thing they should have been doing. One instance of this was that he was denied tenure at Harvard but another instance of this was that he was also not made a member of the National Academy of Scientists when he came up for a vote, which is sort of the elite society of science.

Bob McChesney: I think you've hit on a very important point that's not just true of scientists but across academia that scholars who are doing public outreach and translating for the general public and sort of reaching out to the non-academic community of their peers, I mean I think there's an assumption that those people then can't have the time or interest to do the hard core serious research the field's based upon.

Chris Mooney: There's also the sense - why are they getting so much attention when they're not really moving the ball forward in terms of fundamental knowledge, and I am. So there's a lot of in-fighting. It turns out with Sagan it's complicated because he did do important, fundamental research in certain areas of planetary science. Maybe not as much as someone who just spent their whole career doing just research but he did have the original science to back him up too.  

Bob McChesney: Our guest, Chris Mooney, co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. I'm Bob McChesney, this is Media Matters on WILL AM 580. This is a live show so call in at 333-9455 if you'd like or 1-800-222-9455. We can talk about anything, we have a lot of ground to cover still. You know one of the issues, Chris, that comes up when you think about this is the way Americans are taught science in K-12 before they get to universities or graduate programs. I can speak from my own personal experience. When I was in school studying science, it was frankly very unexciting. It was a set of received facts that I memorized. None of the excitement of science, of the mystery and the challenge, was really ever made clear in the clear of the study. I remember in biology I really had no sense of the theory of evolution what that really meant, linking humanity and our species to all of life. Instead I was just given a lot of Latin terms to memorize and I did OK simply because I have a good memory but I didn't anything about biology when the class was over and I had no interest in the subject. How much is the way - you know and since then I should add I've got a great interest in evolutionary biology but it's been purely nothing to do with the education I got in the subject. 

Chris Mooney: You know your story sounds exactly like mine and I suspect it's a story that's very common out there. There's a lot of problems with science education. In fact, I've heard probably seven, 10 theories about what the problem with public science education is. First of all, the creationists are out there trying to undermine it constantly so it's under assault. People are even afraid to teach. But then there's, you know, more like the problem you suggest which is that, you know, we have to teach to certian standards so teachers have to make sure students memorize certain facts they know are going to be on the test. Somewhere along the way we forget to get them to realize how powerful this information is and how much meaning it can have for their own lives. Instead it ends up being dull, it ends up being boring, it ends up being a turn off, it ends up being hard and people say this is not for me. I'm not one of those people who does science, I'm one of those people who does something else. And they define their identity that way and then they go through life that way unless something else wakes them up and gets them interested again. So it's a real, real big problem and part of it is also that we don't pay teachers well. This is notorious. So you know, the really talented people who could maybe  engage students, maybe aren't choosing to be teachers in the first place because they know how difficult their career is going to be. So science education is in a dismal state in the United States. I should sort of bracket that and say there are also some schools that do science education great but you know there isn't equal opportunity because it's great or it's awful across the country. So that's an incredibly big part of the problem too.

Bob McChesney: You mentioned just now the religious right and the attack on the theory of evolution and the whole creationist thing. How significant is that? How much of an important factor is this sort of anti-intellectualism that the religious right in many ways exemplifies with regard to science, a factor in sort of the decline of science in America? 

Chris Mooney: I think it's really pretty huge. You've got half the country roughly something like half the country that refuses to accept one of the biggest and most important in science that science ever gave us, maybe the biggest, which is who we are and where we come from. We have an incredibly powerful answer to that question and that is we are part of animal kingdom, we share a common ancestry with the rest of life on earth. We have half the country not just ignorant of that but actively rejecting it, actively resisting its being taught. I think you cannot underestimate the fundamental importance of that. They're constantly fighting over it, starting battles in different school districts over it. And you've got this same part of the population, the Christian right broadly speaking, the very word evolution is a negative word to them. The very word science because it's so synonymous with evolution is a negative word to them to a significant extent. It's a huge part of the problem.

Bob McChesney: There are people like Richard Dawkins and a handful of others, Sam Harris, but Dawkins for our sake of this discussion is the most important since he's such a prominent evolutionary biologist, who've written about you know it's time to basically 'fess up. Atheism is the only, you know, religion is contrary to science and you know it's disproven by science. Dawkins wrote his manifesto a couple of years ago and traveled around the world promoting it. And he's saying if you guys want a war, here's the war. You don't  think that's the right approach to dealing with the religious right, I take it.

Chris Mooney: No, I've explained just how bad the problem is with the resistance to evolution and how much it holds us back. So I think the religious right is a very, very real problem. But I'm not at all convinced that polemical atheism is going to diffuse the religous right. I think, if anything, it's likely to entrench the religious right and give them more enemies to attack. The leaders of the religious right would just love it if Richard Dawkins was broadly seen as the epitome of the scientific community because then they could say that science is just atheism you know and science is out to destroy your faith and tear any vestige of meaning out of your life. And that's the scare tactic they've been using to begin with to keep people away from evolution. I just think that if we really want to make enrodes in this country where everybody's so polarized and where frankly the Christian right is living in, and many of its adherents are living in hermetically sealed environments, where they've got their community, everybody thinks like they do, they have their pastor who repeatedly reiterates the same information that they all share and it's hard to really break through to begin with. I think you cannot go head on to religious faith and expect to make enrodes. I think rather what you need to do is you need to show religion is diverse, religion offers many possibilities, many forms of religion are not anti-evolution and why do you have to stick with this one particular extreme form when there's so many other forms that would let you have an acceptance of modern science and also retain a religious kind of meaning that's important to you. In other words, I don't think we move people all the way from fundamentalism to atheism most of the time.

Bob McChesney: My sense in Dawkins's argument is not that he's specifically just going after the religious right and creationists but basically the whole foundation of religion is anti-science. There's a conflict there that he says we have to be honest about and if we're honest about it, you just have to recognize that religion and science are oil and water.

Chris Mooney: Right, that is part of the argument. So I guessed I discussed it first as a matter of strategy if you want to diffuse American creationism. But Dawkins would disagree my remarks on strategy because to him people in quote the middle ground of religion so people who accept evolution but also retain faith. Perhaps they're Roman Catholics, because Roman Catholics they don't doctrinally have to have any problem with evolution. So Dawkins would say you know what, you're still anti-science because you still believe in unseen, unprovable things, and you accept on faith things that don't have any evidence. And you know there is a certain power to that argument because it's a very absolutist position and it just says if you don't have evidence for something there's no reason to believe it period. That's why I'm an atheist because I don't have any evidence for god. And that's frankly, personally, if I can speak personally for a second I find that very persuasive and that's why I'm personally an atheist. But I don't see why we have to, you know, forego strategic allegiances with all these modern Christians, who, you know, are struggling to reconcile their faith with modern knowledge, and to some extent do a pretty good job with it. I'd rather just let them, you know,sort things out themselves as long as they're not trying to ram it down my throat and they're not opposing evolution, you know. I don't think we need to alienate them and I don't think we need to fight with them. So that's the difference. I see the force of Dawkins argument. But I don't see the use of it. 

Bob McChesney: Our guest you've just been listening to is Chris Mooney the co-author with Sheril Kirshenbaum of the brand new book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Chirs Mooney is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I urge people to take a look at this book if this topic interests you. Our phone number here at Media Matters is 333-9455. Our toll free line, 1-800-222-9455. Let's go to the toll free line right now. Line 4, Columbus, Ohio, welcome to Illinois you're on the air with Chris Mooney.

Line 4: Well, hi. I'm really honored to be on your show, Professor McChesney, especially when you have such a good speaker, interesting topic here. I have a couple of questions and then I'll get off the line. My first question is I've been listening to a podcast from the Dalai Lama and the Dalai Lama and a number of monks from ____ India have been getting together with various scientists in biology and physicis, astrophysics and various disciplines and they've been talking over what the Dalai Lama calls Buddhist science and exploring consciousness and so forth with these people. And I was wondering if you've checked any of that out at all. And second, I was wondering if you have looked into any of these science curriculums that are used either in grade schools or highschools and so forth. There are some like independent curricula, like Jane Goodall has one called Root Shoes and I was just curious to see if any of these curricula have come your way. So thank you very much and I really enjoy the program. 

Bob McChesney: Well, thank you very much caller. Chris Mooney?

Chris Mooney: I'll take the second one first because I have more to say about the first. I'm more familiar with some alternative science curricula. There's Lyon Letterman has proposed physics first. I don't know Jane Goodall's. But physcis first is just, you know, why on earth do we teach high school science with biology first, chemistry then physics when physics is one of the most fundamental units of matter and then you build up chemistry and then biology on top of that. So the logic of the structuring of how science is often taught is precisely backwards. I think, there's a lot to that particular argument. Now, the Dalai Lama and neuroscience, this is an incredibly interesting point to bring up to the whole science and religion conversation. Here you've got a religious leader who doesn't see any reason why scientific understanding has to be in contradiction to his particular faith. And the Dalai Lama has said "I believe if science proves some tenet of Buddhism wrong, Buddhism will have to change." Right now, he's been very interested in what neuroscientists are finding out about the brain and what kind of light it might cast on such things as meditation. So I think this is an example of how science and religion can co-exist. You can't have them co-exist if religion demands and asserts that certain scientific tenets be not adhered to. There really has to be a very tolerant approach on the part of religion. But there also does need to be a tolerant approach on the part of science and just say, you know, there's a lot of people out there who have some kind of religious belief and nevertheless they're able to do research, they're able to make scientific insights, they're not opposed to any knowledge, rather they see the world as a creation of god or whatever it is they believe in and that actually lets them to be appreciative of science in the first place.

Bob McChesney: Our guest, Chris Mooney, author of Unscientific America. I'm Bob McChesney. You're listening to WILL AM 580. Your previous book was The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney, and in this book it's infused with the notion that the Obama administration is much more pro-science, much more respectful of science, much more nurturing of science than was the W. Bush administration. We've had on this program over the past six or nine months several guests who've been, to be blunt, disappointed in the Obama administration across a number of issues, where campaign promises have not been fulfilled and where policies have veered far closer to the Bush administration than to what the campaign rhetoric had promised. What's the score looks like in science?

Chris Mooney: I've gotta tell you that on science that's not really the perception. It's just the Bush approach to science was seen almost universally by the community of research as so bad that when Obama came in and started appointing Nobel Laureats to energy secretary and a leader of the scientific community to science advisor, and unleashing a lot of new funding for science. Just doing those things are so good and such a reversal that I think he's bought quite a lot of tolerance for a while. I'll have to see, you know, what it will take to make the scientific world unhappy with the Obama administration but so far I haven't seen it. I do think that probably more could be done. It's hard with so many issues on the agenda. I'm worried about global warming and whether we're going to get legislation and whether the adminstration is fighting hard enough for it because we need it and we need it quickly. And whether the legislation that we're going to get if we do get it, is going to be strong enough. But still, even there, it's a 100% sea change from Bush that we're going to try to get any legislation. 

Bob McChesney: What are some of the other big issues, Chris Mooney, where science policy issues, huge issues where science plays a central role, and where scientific understanding and knowledge is really lacking among our legislators, amoung our, in our media coverage and among the public.

CM: Well, geez, I guest that the obvious one is stem cells. That's one where Obama has sort of put the issue, I think,  to bed by changing the Bush policy. So that's a pretty huge one. In terms of what I really care about, I'm trying to look as a journalist and as person who cares about science policy I'm always trying to look 10-15 years ahead to what we're going to be fighting over, what we're going to be struggling with. And here, I think there's probably 10 issues that are coming that almost nobody except people who follow science closely know enough about and that we're not going to be prepared for.

Bob McChesney: Give me a few of the ones that listeners might be interested in keeping tabs of. 

Chris Mooney: Well, global warming is not being addressed quickly enough at all, that's not the issue but I'll get to it. And because it's not being addressed quickly, if it's being addressed at all, we're gonna have a huge planetary problem, which we already have, but it might get completely out of our control and when that happens, I think and scientists think, it's on their radar we're going to be tempted to geoengineer the planet. In other words we gonna be tempted to try to remake the earth to not receive so much sunlight, which is probably within our technological means and it may be the only way of cooling things down again if we can't, you know, get our crap together and agree on a global climate treaty which we're continually failing to do. So we have probably the technological capacity to change the earth's temperature in an artificial way. Almost nobody knows this.

Bob McChesney: This is mind boggling. How would something like that take place?

CM: Well you would simply have to blast into the stratosphere or you know, use planes to carry it into the stratosphere various reflective particles that will stay up there. They're called sulphate aerosoles, will stay up there and they're known to have a cooling affect and the problem is you have to keep doing it and there might be some unhappy side affects but you know you would be able to cool things down because not as much solar radiation will be getting through. So it's been said that you know, a crazed billionaire could do it right now without asking anybody. But certainly, it's going to be more and more tempting. Scientists are studying this, publishing papers on this. Very regularly, scientific societies are endorsing statements about the ethics of doings this. I mean this is coming but it's not on anybody's political radar.

Bob McChesney: OK, anything else? That's really interesting, I don't know if you can top it but can you come close.

Chris Mooney: Well there's like 10 of them because science is constantly changing the world and so you look a little bit ahead and you say what's coming and you say ho my god are we going to be ready of that. Let me do another one. Synthetic life. Synthetic minimalm genome life is what it's called. This is Craig Vanter's thing where he's going to create synthesize, small microbes out of nowhere. In other words, in the laboratory he's going to create life by piecing DNA together. And, we're very, very close to achieving this. And the idea, the argument is that this will be great because we'll design these little critters who can do an environmental cleanup so you know there's an oil spill and you put this particular kind of mocrobe that we've synthesized on the oil spill and it chews it up and suddenly you've got clean water again or something like that. That's the ideal but people might be rather uneasy with, you know, this idea. And what else will these things be able to be used for and will we be able to synthesize bad ones and will somebody figure out how to do that and will this become a new threat. So that's another topic that again it garners almost no public discussion but some time these kind of things are going to suddenly be upon us.

Bob McChesney: And these will all be, I assume, public policy issues and will require governments to weigh in on their legitimacy?

Chris Mooney: Yeah, they may well. I think that without a doubt geoengineering will. I think that with synthetic life, it might be that if, you know, something is created and there's no serious concerns then people might just forget about it after a little bit of uneasiness. But anyway, we can run through the list because there's so much potential constantly for new innovations to change the way we live. Another one would be human life extension. We may be getting close to a pill that can let us life 10, 20 years longer. What will that do to our society? So you can just go on and on and find the same thing: nobody's talking about these things except scientists. Scientists think these things might be very likely and might be very soon.

Bob McChesney: Chris Mooney, we've only got about five minutes left. There's a couple of other important issues I do want to take up with you before we wrap up today. In the book, you talk about the importance of Hollywood, it's portrayal of sciencists and how it affects the scientific literacy of the nation. Talk a little bit about that if you would.

Chris Mooney: We have polling data that says only that only 18% of Americans know a scientist personally so that's why Hollywood is important because the other 82% in so far as they get some information about what scientists are like is probably coming from Hollywood because these are the most dominant portrayals of science and scientists. So we look at what those portrayals have been like and we find a number of stereotypes that have been pretty negative and pernicious. The stereotype of the mad scientist who's going to destroy the world maybe through geoengineering. The story of the nerdy, socially dysfunctional scientist who's an oddball and not like you and me. And those have been very, very prominent. There's some evidence to suggest that these stereotypes are not as popular as they used to be, which all pretty good but it's clear that we have sowed some pretty deep stereotypes about what science is and what the people who do it are like and they're pretty negative ones. 

Bob McChesney: I was talking to Bill Moyers a few years ago. I don't know if it was on this show but it was somewhere and he mentioned that he'd given the commencement address at City University of NY a few years back, in 2005 or 2006. And all the PhDs were there from engineering and sciences and he said that virtually all of them were not from the United States. That CUNY's PHds were international but not Americans. So the impression I get from that bit of evidence and from your book is that this crisis of science literacy is, you know, is not a global phenomenon, it's an American phenomenon and other countries are not going through the same thing.

Chris Mooney: Yeah, there's certainly some countries where science isn't doing very well. Fundamentalist, Muslim countries, I don't think science is doing well or evolution is being taught any more than it is, probably less than it is in America. If you look at Asian countries, you look at China, Singapore, you look at South Korea, they know that science is the future and they are putting all their weight behind so we are going to have some incredible competition from other countries and the difference is that America's already acts in some sense like it's already had its heyday, it's sort of the big leader and doesn't have to worry about  it. Whereas they're coming from behind and they're happy to see us falter because they know that they'll just blast on by. So we still are not really awake to the fact that science is becoming something that globally people are aspiring and that we won't always necessarily be the leading country.

Bob McChesney: Let's go to one final caller. Let's go to line 4, Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine?

Line 4: Portland, Oregon.

Bob McChesney: You're on the air with Chris Mooney.

Line 4: There's this NASA review panel that recently published a report stating that NASA is unprepared to extend human space exploration beyond low orbit. I'm curious how you think the current tenor of the media coverage will influence Congressional funding decisions.

Chris Mooney: Of this topic?

Line 4: Yes.

Chris Mooney: Gosh, I'd hate to guess. I don't know that I've seen this topic being covered this much. There are specialized science committees in Congress that do pay a lot of attention to NASA so I think that they'll be on the ball. But I'd hate to say anything more without enough knowledge of the particular area, unfortunately.

Bob McChesney: Well, Chris, if I can add in because of one of the articles you wrote in the Nation with Sherill Kirshenbaum you mentioned in that piece how the Houston daily newspaper had laid off...

Chris Mooney: Oh yes, that's true.

Bob McChesney: But it lead to the point that so much of our space program was built on a really successful use of public relations and developing really positive press coverage, when press coverage basically ends or is reduced to basically just people pick it up on the side, but not full time science correspondents. Is this going to affect the science program? Or the space program, excuse me.

Chris Mooney: Put that way, I would say that yeah, given the size of the space program that we have, the fact that it's not being covered is a real problem because it's a very important public policy topic how much we invest and how the program is doing. And I think in terms of Congress you know if we're not getting enough information out there through the media, they too will probably not have this on the radar as much. I view this as part of the general decline of attention to science in America. The thing is, I guess the reason I was hesitating is because I don't have strong views because I don't have enough background on the particular course the space program should take.

Bob McChesney: Chris Mooney, we've only got a little bit of time left. Real quickly could you tell folks again where to go if they want to follow your blog and learn more about your work and Sheril Kirshenbaum's work.

Chris Mooney: Sure. The blog's The Intersection. Blogs.DiscoverMagazine.com/Intersection. The book's got a website Unscientific America.com. We're on twitter and all the rest.

Bob McChesney: Well, I want to thank you so much for taking time from your busy schedule, Chris Mooney, to join us today here on Media Matters. Good luck with your book.

Chris Mooney: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Bob McChesney: My pleasure.  Chris Mooney, the author of Unscientific America, has been our guest today on Media Matters. The book just out with Basic Books. I'm Bob McChesney. I want to thank Melisse Trentz for doing a terrific job as my producer, Kyle Crowhoff (ph) for working the board. And next week we'll be back, 167 hours from now, with Eric Boehlert talking about the blogosphere and how it's revolutionizing politics. Join us then. Until then, have a great week everyone. See you then. Bye bye.