How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet,
and Threatens Our Lives
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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