‘Resistance to science’ has early roots - USATODAY.com
‘Resistance to science’ has early roots - USATODAY.com
Resistance to science is nothing new, of course. The Catholic Church condemned the astronomer (a poor one by all accounts) Giordano Bruno to death in 1600. Galileo famously received home imprisonment in the same era. In the U.S., the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial,” a battle over a Tennessee law that forbid the teaching of human origins, was the “Trial of the Century” long before O.J. Simpson ever took the stand.
Today, we don’t toss scientists on bonfires, of course. We have congressional hearings. Last year, climate scientists Ray Bradley, Michael Mann and Malcolm Hughes, answered questions about their research funding from a congressional committee. Fights over evolution led to 2005’s redo of Scopes Trial issues in a court case involving the Dover, Pa., school system. And stem-cell research has fueled prolonged political fights, figuring in the last three national elections and a recent vote by Congress to expand the number of human embryonic stem cell lines available for federal research funding, which faces a veto threat from President Bush.
“Scientists, educators and policymakers have long been concerned about American adults’ resistance to certain scientific ideas,” note Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg in the review published in the current Science magazine. In 2005 for example, the Pew Trust found that 42% of poll respondents think people and animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a view that is tough to reconcile with evidence from fossils. Many people believe in ghosts, fairies and astrology. “This resistance to science has important social implications because a scientifically ignorant public is unprepared to evaluate policies about global warming, vaccination, genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, and cloning,” the psychologists say.
