Product Description

The New York Times bestseller that exposes the conservative agenda to put politics ahead of scientific truth.

Science has never been more crucial to deciding the political issues facing the country. Yet science and scientists have less influence with the federal government than at any time since Richard Nixon fired his science advisors. In the White House and Congress today, findings are reported in a politicized manner; spun or distorted to fit the speaker's agenda; or, when they're too inconvenient, ignored entirely. On a broad array of issues-stem cell research, climate change, evolution, sex education, product safety, environmental regulation, and many others-the Bush administration's positions fly in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus. Federal science agencies-once fiercely independent under both Republican and Democratic presidents-are increasingly staffed by political appointees who know industry lobbyists and evangelical activists far better than they know the science.

This is not unique to the Bush administration, but it is largely a Republican phenomenon, born of a conservative dislike of environmental, health, and safety regulation, and at the extremes, of evolution and legalized abortion. In The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney ties together the disparate strands of the attack on science into a compelling and frightening account of our government's increasing unwillingness to distinguish between legitimate research and ideologically driven pseudoscience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #184346 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780465046768
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Does the Bush administration ignore or deny mainstream research to please its conservative base? Have business groups and certain religious lobbies helped it do so? Does Bush-era treatment of scientists differ from that of Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan? Has a Republican Congress passed laws designed to disable clean air and water efforts, and has it dismantled safeguards, such as the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, meant to give legislators unbiased advice? Mooney's passionate, thoroughly researched volume answers these questions with an urgent "yes." A former American Prospect writer who is making his book debut, Mooney uses interviews and old-fashioned document-digging to explain how, over two decades, right-wing politicians built institutions designed to discredit working scientists; how some energy companies have allied themselves with powerful Republicans (such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma) to block or reverse U.S. steps to curb global warming; and how the present administration defies expert consensus on climate change, on mercury pollution, even on how to read statistics. Mooney tracks Bush White House efforts to spread misinformation about stem cells; the work of religious right regulators like Dr. David Hager (formerly on the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs advisory committee) in restricting access to birth control; and the attempts of the Discovery Institute (and other think tanks linked to the Bush base) to fight the teaching of evolution. In the past five years, Mooney documents, many formerly apolitical physicists, biologists and doctors have come to believe there is a "pattern" of science abuse under Bush, a push back against the methods of science itself. Conservatives may react with indignation; liberals, moderates and working scientists will find few surprises,but Mooney's very readable, and understandably partisan, volume is the first to put the whole story, thoroughly documented, in one place.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American
Thomas Jefferson would be appalled. More than two centuries after he helped to shape a government based on the idea that reason and technological advancement would propel the new United States into a glorious future, the political party that now controls that government has largely turned its back on science. Even as the country and the planet face both scientifically complex threats and remarkable technological opportunities, many Republican officeholders reject the most reliable sources of information and analysis available to guide the nation. As inconceivable as it would have been to Jefferson--and as dismaying as it is to growing legions of today's scientists--large swaths of the government in Washington are now in the hands of people who don't know what science is. More ominously, some of those in power may grasp how research works but nonetheless are willing to subvert science's knowledge and expert opinion for short-term political and economic gains. That is the thesis of The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney, one of the few journalists in the country who specialize in the now dangerous intersection of science and politics. His book is a well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing's assault on science and scientists. Mooney's chronicle of what he calls "science abuse" begins in the 1970s with Richard Nixon and picks up steam with Ronald Reagan. But both pale in comparison to the current Bush administration, which in four years has: * Rejected the scientific consensus on global warming and suppressed an EPA report supporting that consensus.
* Stacked numerous advisory committees with industry representatives and members of the religious Right.
* Begun deploying a missile defense system without evidence that it can work.
* Banned funding for embryonic stem cell research except on a claimed 60 cell lines already in existence, most of which turned out not to exist.
* Forced the National Cancer Institute to say that abortion may cause breast cancer, a claim refuted by good studies.
* Ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove information about condom use and efficacy from its Web site. Mooney explores these and many other examples, including George W. Bush's support for creationism. In almost every instance, Republican leaders have branded the scientific mainstream as purveyors of "junk science" and dubbed an extremist viewpoint--always at the end of the spectrum favoring big business or the religious Right--"sound science." One of the most insidious achievements of the Right, Mooney shows, is the Data Quality Act of 2000--just two sentences, written by an industry lobbyist and quietly inserted into an appropriations bill. It directs the White House's Office of Management and Budget to ensure that all information put out by the federal government is reliable. The law seems sensible, except in practice. It is used mainly by industry and right-wing think tanks to block release of government reports unfavorable to their interests by claiming they do not contain "sound science." For all its hostility to specific scientific findings, the Right never says it opposes science. It understands the cachet in the word. Perhaps Republicans sense what pollsters have known for decades--that the American public is overwhelmingly positive about science and that there is nothing to be gained by opposing a winner. Instead the Right exploits a misconception about science common among nonscientists--a belief that uncertainty in findings indicates fatally flawed research. Because most cutting-edge science--including most research into currently controversial topics--is uncertain, it is dismissed as junk. This naive understanding of science hands the Right a time-tested tactic. It does not claim that business interests or moral values trump the scientific consensus. Rather rightists argue that the consensus itself is flawed. Then they encourage a debate between the consensus and the extremist naysayers, giving the two apparently equal weight. Thus, Mooney argues, it seems reasonable to split the difference or simply to argue that there is too much uncertainty to, say, ban a suspect chemical or fund a controversial form of research. The Republican War on Science details political and regulatory debates that can be arcane and complex, engrossing reading only for dedicated policy wonks. Thankfully, Mooney is both a wonk and a clear writer. He covered many of the battles in real time for publications such as the Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Mother Jones and American Prospect. "When politicians use bad science to justify themselves rather than good science to make up their minds," Mooney writes, "we can safely assume that wrongheaded and even disastrous decisions lie ahead." Thomas Jefferson would, indeed, be appalled. Writing in 1799 to a young student whom he was mentoring, the patriot advised the man to study science and urged him to reject the "doctrine which the present despots of the earth are inculcating," that there is nothing new to be learned. He concluded by saying opposition to "freedom and science would be such a monstrous phenomenon as I cannot place among possible things in this age and this country."

Boyce Rensberger directs the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and teaches in M.I.T.'s Graduate Program in Science Writing. For many years he was a science reporter and editor at the Washington Post.

From The Washington Post
The right's so-called war against science is a hot topic. Consider President Bush's interference with embryonic stem cell research, his remarks about creationism in schools and his aides' editing of scientific studies of global warming and environmental hazards. Naturally, liberals and leftists are furious about such meddling, especially those who rightly worry that global warming endangers civilization, who welcome stem cell research as the royal road to miracle cures, who fear mercury poisoning every time they bite into a tuna sandwich and who dread Jesus's imminent replacement of Darwin in biology classrooms.

Evidence abounds of the Bush administration's ham-handed approach to making science policy. The topic is thus ripe for a quasi-scholarly, quasi-journalistic study -- perhaps one akin to Daniel S. Greenberg's 1967 classic, The Politics of Pure Science , or its excellent 2001 successor, Science, Money, and Politics. Unfortunately, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science is not that study.

That's a shame, for he is a talented and energetic young Washington correspondent for Seed, an excellent and relatively new popular-science magazine. In writing a book about science-policy-making in America today, Mooney has bravely tackled a gigantic and complex topic. Unfortunately, the journalist in him won out over the scholar, for he ends up trying to reduce the subject's complexities to the "good guy/bad guy" categories of TV polemicists. The resulting book is ill-formulated, overwrought and surprisingly unconvincing. (Trust me: As a resident of tree-hugging, gay-marrying, marijuana-scented, Bush-bashing San Francisco, I was prepared to be convinced.) At best, the book is a handy summary of familiar stories about the Bush administration's comic-opera style of making science policy. But the stories here seem curiously disconnected; if they're covertly linked by a systematic, subterranean Republican conspiracy against science, Mooney has failed to uncover it.

Historically, debates over U.S. science policy have at least two broad features. First, there are the scientific/technical details of the debates. (How do cirrus clouds affect global warming? Are embryonic stem cells more promising, in terms of potential medical applications, than adult stem cells?) Then there are the broader, quasi-philosophical questions that loom beyond the technical details. (Is the hype over the alleged benefits of stem cell research camouflage for the long-running corporate effort to commercialize, patent and commodify the ingredients of life? Is global warming symptomatic of a deeper problem, namely the inherent dependence of consumer-capitalist societies on massive and perhaps finite sources of cheap energy?) A thoughtful book on U.S. science policy would have explored questions from the first category and, ideally, touched on questions from the second. But Mooney's book deals with neither.

And then there's that title. I know that publishers must "move" books, but The Republican War on Science -- really, now! Could Ann Coulter be any more glib? The book's theme would have been more accurately captured with The Right-Wing Evangelical Republican War on Science, but I suppose that sounded clunky. Hence the present go-for-the-jugular title, which proved unfortunate for Mooney, timing-wise: On July 29, less than two months before the book's publication, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a doctor, split with the Bush administration by supporting legislation for federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. If there really is a sustained Republican war on science, Frist's announcement suggests that some of the rebel generals are starting to wave white flags.

Judging by the book, Mooney isn't interested in scientific research per se. He says almost nothing about the technical details of debates over computer models, observational anomalies, instrumental glitches, data-collection methodologies and the like. To me, such debates are intellectually fascinating; they're a sobering reminder of how selfishly Mother Nature guards her secrets and, thus, of why we must proceed pragmatically but cautiously in basing any irrevocable societal decision on tentative scientific findings. (They're always tentative: Yesterday's paradigm is today's compost.) Even more interesting, the scientific debates dramatize how reasonable, honest people -- including scientists -- can fundamentally disagree when they're looking at exactly the same data. Among philosophers of science, a favorite analogy for this is a Gestalt diagram. To one person, the diagram looks like a duck; to someone else, it's an antelope.

By ignoring such philosophical complexities, Mooney has produced a book without much intellectual gravity. Instead, he offers a kind of conspiracy theory, which might be summarized thus: "If Republicans support a certain science policy, it's bad. If they oppose it, it's good."

In that regard, one of Mooney's covert premises (he never spells it out in much detail, but it's there) is that there are sure-fire, logical criteria for distinguishing between "good science" and "bad science." He isn't alone in believing in these unicorns, of course: So do those Republican apologists and industry flacks who for years have huffed and puffed about the junk science allegedly generated by environmentalists. Reading Mooney's account, you'd never guess that philosophers have quarreled vainly for many decades over how to draw lines of demarcation between good and bad science.

Ironically, when Mooney tries to distinguish between bad (i.e., Republican-backed) and good (anti-Republican) science, he applies these logical criteria in wildly inconsistent ways, according to whether they uphold his political prejudices. For example, early on he praises "peer review" (in which expert reviewers vet manuscripts submitted for publication) as a cornerstone of good science. Yet elsewhere, in discussing those who call for better peer review of government environmental rules, he accuses them of hampering needed regulation. On page 148, he advocates the use of scientific "modeling" as a tool for anticipating ecosystem and biodiversity changes. But on page 8, he approvingly quotes an expert who dismisses the proposed replacement of animal experiments with computer models as "science fiction." Mooney is like a judge who interprets a law one way to convict his enemies and another way to acquit his friends.

I regret writing these words because, as far as I'm concerned, Mooney's political heart is in the right place. Really, though: Can't we progressives develop a sounder basis for science policymaking than this?

Reviewed by Keay Davidson
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Can't Recommend This Book Enough
I've been psyched about the release of this book for months now, and it doesn't disappoint. Far from it: this is an unbelievably thorough, balanced, and well-researched study of a phenomenon that ALL Americans need to be concerned about, no matter what their political stripes are. While the title may mislead you into thinking that this is a partisan book, Mooney's dedication here is to the integrity of the scientific research process, and not at all to politics. Indeed, his argument is that the politicization of the scientific research process is bad no matter which party does it, but that the Bush Administration and the current incarnation of the Republican Party is particularly culpable of abusing science for partisan gain. Indeed, Mooney heaps praise on the Nixon administration science policies, which were much better than what we have under the current president.

Read this book. It's leaps and bounds better than any other political book out today- Coulter AND Franken included.

A Call to Action for People Who Care About Science
[...]
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

That oft-quoted statement from Carl Sagan captures the essence of the scientific approach to knowledge. Before an idea can achieve the revered status of "theory," it must survive round after round of skeptical criticism.

Evolution, for example, has withstood nearly 150 years of challenges. With minor modifications to Darwin's seminal ideas, it has become perhaps the most robust theory in all of science.

Religious fundamentalists, who oppose that theory as well as abortion and embryonic stem cell research, are major combatants in what journalist Chris Mooney describes in his new book as The Republican War on Science. Allied with them is a force of neo-conservative soldiers who resist the conclusions of environmental research, especially about global climate change.

Yet neither religion nor business is fundamentally opposed to science. Probably a majority of American scientists guide their lives by faith in a Creator, but they do not consider their houses of worship as observatories or laboratories in which to test the existence of a deity. And most modern businesses rely on science and technology to make a profit.

Thus most readers of this book, including liberal Democrats, will consider Mr. Mooney's brash thesis extraordinary. Though they may view it an interesting model of what is happening in American politics today, they will demand extraordinary research before declaring it a viable theory.

Indeed, the evidence supporting the existence of a partisan War on Science will never measure up to the Sagan criterion. The most the author can hope for is that open-minded people will consider his ideas compelling. In that, he has succeeded admirably.

By the time readers finish this book they will understand who the opponents of science are and how they have taken control of the Republican Party. The Party's rightist base has adopted positions that are antithetical to science, not because they oppose science per se but because government policies suggested by the scientific consensus threaten their religious beliefs, their economic status, or their societal influence.

Readers will also see the very effective political strategy that this alliance has evolved: to redefine science, to undermine science, and to misconstrue science even to the point of dismissing scientific consensus in favor of increasingly discredited fringe ideas.

The United States may not be embroiled in a war on science, but that phrase describes a useful model for understanding the dangers of the current administration's antiscientific tactics to our nation's future and its character. For that Republicans and Democrats, scientists and people of faith should be grateful to Chris Mooney.
[...]

An important and balanced book
Mooney does a good job at meticulously showing the politicization of science by both sides, but as the title shows, he refuses to make the common journalistic mistake of imposing "false balance" where it is not warranted. Just as you wouldn't say, "people differ on roundness of the Earth", Mooney has the courage and the wherewithall to call a spade a spade - and he doesn't ask you to take his word for it.

The facts are here for anyone with eyes to see. The "perfect storm" of anti-regulatory conservatives and fundamentalist Christians have combined to wage a unified war against science with a vengeance that the disorganized "frankenfood" liberals can only dream of.

Mooney's objective, scientific approach to making his case only makes his partisan conclusions that much more compelling and impossible to deny. In this war of reason vs. ideology, Mooney plants himself firmly on the side of reason, while always being fair. After reading his book, anyone who values science and critical thinking will do the same.