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How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms The Planet, And Threatens Our Lives
Penguin Press
November 2009
On Sale: October 29, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 1594202303
EAN: 9781594202308
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this provocative and headline- making book, Michael
Specter confronts the widespread fear of science and its
terrible toll on individuals and the planet. In Denialism,
New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that
Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially
the institution of science more today than ever before. For
centuries, the general view had been that science is neither
good nor bad-that it merely supplies information and that
new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed
as a political constituency that isn't always in our best
interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African
nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather
than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines
have proven to be the most effective public health measure
in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their
use. In the United States a growing series of studies show
that dietary supplements and "natural" cures have almost no
value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of
dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the
world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded
by platoons of security guards-such is the opposition to any
research that includes experiments with animals. And
pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were
perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance
against disease have increasingly been seen as callous
corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed. As
Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against
progress. The issues may be complex but the choices are not:
Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along
with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we
ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In
Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new
Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical
world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years:
What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment
is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of
mankind's greatest scientific advances-and our greatest need
for them-that deal must be renewed.
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